Eric H. Davidson

Eric Harris Davidson (April 13, 1937 – September 1, 2015) was an American developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology. Davidson was best known for his pioneering work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, on embryonic specification and for spearheading the effort to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. He devoted a large part of his professional career to developing an understanding of embryogenesis at the genetic level. He wrote many academic works describing his work, including a textbook on early animal development.

Davidson began conducting research as a teenager at The Marine Biological Laboratory. After graduating from high school, he matriculated to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a B.A. in biology in 1958. Davidson's Ph.D. work entailed studying RNA synthesis and gene expression in early development of the anuran Xenopus laevis in the lab of Alfred Mirsky at Rockefeller University.

After obtaining his Ph.D., Davidson stayed on at Rockefeller first as a research associate and then as an assistant professor. In 1971, he moved to the California Institute of Technology as an associate professor. There, Davidson took an interest in development of marine invertebrates, especially of the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, and in investigating the function of genomic repetitive DNA elements, both interests of which would lead to a long line of investigation that eventually led to his contemporary interest in gene regulatory networks.

Davidson has spent the majority of his scientific career investigating the molecular and mechanistic basis of animal development, i.e. how animals are built by reading the instructions encoded in the egg and, ultimately, in the genome. While at Rockefeller and very early in his career, he and Roy Britten, then at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, speculated on how the products of transcription, e.g. various RNAs or other downstream products, would need to in principle interact in order for cellular differentiation and gene regulation to occur in multicellular organisms. This research program eventually led him to investigations regarding the role of gene regulation in cell lineage and embryonic territory specification, both endeavors of which contributed substantially to many biological disciplines, including developmental biology, systems biology and evolutionary developmental biology. In 2011, he was awarded the International Prize for Biology in recognition for his pioneering work on developmental gene regulatory networks.