Edward B Lewis

Edward B. Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on May 20, 1918. He was the second son of Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker and jeweler, and Laura Mary Lewis (née Histed). His brother, James Histed Lewis, was five and a half years older; a sister, Mary Louise Lewis, died of a fever at age two the night before James was born. Following high school, Ed spent a year at Bucknell College on a music scholarship. In 1937, he transferred to the University of Minnesota to continue his under- graduate education in biostatistics and genetics, although he continued his flute playing as a member of the university orchestra. In 1939, Ed began his graduate research at Caltech under Alfred H. Sturtevant, a renowned Drosophila geneticist. Completing his Ph.D. in 1942, Ed enrolled as a cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps training program in meteorology at Caltech. He was awarded an M.S. degree in meteorology in 1943. In 1946 Ed was appointed an instructor in the Biology Division at Caltech, having been recruited to that position in 1943 by the university president, Robert A. Millikan, before he left for military service. Ed spent his entire independent career at Caltech, was appointed the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology in 1966 and attained emeritus status in 1988. He remained active in research until his death. Ed met and married Pamela Harrah, a Stanford graduate, in 1946. Ed and Pam had three sons: Hugh, Glenn, and Keith. Working almost alone over a thirty-year period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, Ed invented genetic strategies of unprecedented ingenuity and sophistication. By the late 1950’s, Ed’s focus had shiftedfrom the function and evolution of genes to how they control development. During the 1960s, Ed also identified genes that act as ‘regulators of the regulators.’ It was this extension and generalization of four decades of Ed’s genetic analyses that led to the award, in 1995, of a share of the Nobel Prize for “discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.”