Edward B. Lewis
| Edward Lewis | |
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Edward B. Lewis
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| Born | Edward Butts Lewis May 20, 1918 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania |
| Died | July 21, 2004 (aged 86) Pasadena, California |
| Nationality | American |
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| Alma mater |
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| Thesis | A genetic and cytological analysis of a tandem duplication and its included loci in Drosophila melanogaster (1942) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alfred Sturtevant |
| Doctoral students | Mark M. Davis |
| Known for | Research into genetics of the common fruit fly |
| Notable awards |
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Edward Butts Lewis (May 20, 1918 – July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis (née Histed) and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but the parents forgot to fill out his birth certificate.
Lewis graduated from E. L. Meyers High School. He received a BA in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota in 1939, where he worked on Drosophila melanogaster in the lab of C.P. Oliver. In 1942 Lewis received a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working under the guidance of Alfred Sturtevant.
After serving as a meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force in World War II, Lewis joined the Caltech faculty in 1946 as an instructor. In 1956 he was appointed Professor of Biology, and in 1966 the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology.
His Nobel Prize–winning studies with Drosophila, (including the discovery of the Drosophila Bithorax complex of homeotic genes, and elucidation of its function), founded the field of evolutionary developmental biology and laid the groundwork for our current understanding of the universal, evolutionarily conserved strategies controlling animal development. He is credited with development of the complementation test. His key publications in the fields of genetics, developmental biology, radiation and cancer are presented in the book Genes, Development and Cancer, which was released in 2004.
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