Home > Edward B. Lewis

Lewis, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1942. After serving as a meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force in World War II, Lewis joined the Caltech faculty as an instructor in 1946. In 1956 he was appointed Professor of Biology, and in 1966 the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology. Among his many awards were the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (1983), the Gairdner Foundation International award (1987), the Wolf Foundation prize in medicine (1989), the Rosenstiel award (1990), the National Medal of Science (1990), the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1991), and the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize (1992).

His Nobel Prize winning studies founded the field of developmental genetics and laid the groundwork for our current understanding of the universal, evolutionarily conserved strategies controlling animal development. His key publications in the fields of geneticsGenetics is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. Humans began applying knowledge of genetics in prehistory with the domestication and breeding of plants and animals. In modern research, genetics provides important tools in the i, developmental biologyEmbryology Developmental biology is the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop. Originating in embryology, today developmental biology studies the genetic control of cell growth, differentiation and " morphogenesis," which is the process, radiationRadiation generally means the transmission of objects or information from a source into a surrounding medium or destination. Within physics, related concepts are: Ionizing radiation is a stream of particles (photons or other particles) with sufficient ene and cancerFor other meanings of Cancer: see Cancer (disambiguation . apoptosis; cancer cells, however, avoid apoptosis. Cancer is a group of related diseases characterized by uncontrolled cell division. Currently, it is believed that cancers arise from both genetic are presented in the book Genes, Development and Cancer, released in 2004.