Edmund Beecher Wilson

Edmund Beecher Wilson (October 19, 1856 – March 3, 1939) was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist. Wilson was born in Geneva, Illinois, and graduated from Yale in 1878. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1881. He was a lecturer at Williams College in 1883-84 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884-85. He served as professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1891. He spent the balance of his career at Columbia University where he was successively adjunct professor of biology (1891-94), professor of invertebrate zoology (1894 - 1897), and professor of zoology (from 1897). Wilson is credited as America's first cell biologist. In 1898 he used the similarity in embryo to describe phylogenetic relationships. By observing spiral cleavage in mollusc, flatworm and annelid he concluded that the same organs came from the same group of cells and concluded that all these organisms must have a common ancestor. He also discovered the chromosomal... full article at wikipedia