George Wells Beadle was born inWahoo, Nebraska. He was the son of Chauncey Elmer Beadle and Hattie Albro, who owned and operated a 40-acre (160,000 m2) farm nearby.[9] George was educated at the Wahoo High School and might himself have become a farmer if one of his teachers at school had not directed his mind towards science and persuaded him to go to the College of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1926 he earned hisBachelor of Science degree at theUniversity of Nebraska and subsequently worked for a year with ProfessorF.D. Keim, who was studying hybrid wheat. In 1927 he earned hisMaster of Science degree, and Professor Keim secured for him a post as Teaching Assistant atCornell University, where he worked, until 1931, with ProfessorsR.A. Emerson andL.W. Sharp on Mendelian asynapsis inZea mays.[10] For this work he obtained, in 1931, hisDoctor of Philosophy degree.[10]
In 1935 Beadle visitedParis for six months to work with ProfessorBoris Ephrussi at theInstitut de Biologie physico-chimique. Together they began the study of the development of eye pigment in Drosophila which later led to the work on the biochemistry of the genetics of the fungus Neurospora for which Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum were together awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
In 1936 Beadle left the California Institute of Technology to become Assistant Professor of Genetics atHarvard University. A year later he was appointed Professor of Biology (Genetics) atStanford University and there he remained for nine years, working for most of this period in collaboration with Tatum. This work of Beadle and Tatum led to an important generalization. This was that most mutants unable to grow on minimal medium, but able to grow on “complete” medium, each require addition of only one particular supplement for growth on minimal medium. If the synthesis of a particular nutrient (such as anamino acid orvitamin) was disrupted bymutation, that mutant strain could be grown by adding the necessary nutrient to the minimal medium.[11] This finding suggested that most mutations affected only a singlemetabolic pathway. Further evidence obtained soon after the initial findings tended to show that generally only a single step in the pathway is blocked. Following their first report of three suchauxotroph mutants in 1941, Beadle and Tatum used this method to create series of related mutants and determined the order in which amino acids and some othermetabolites were synthesized in several metabolic pathways. The obvious inference from these experiments was that each gene mutation affects the activity of a single enzyme. This led directly to theone gene-one enzyme hypothesis, which, with certain qualifications and refinements, has remained essentially valid to the present day. As recalled by Horowitz,[12] the work of Beadle and Tatum also demonstrated thatgenes have an essential role inbiosynthesis. At the time of the experiments (1941), non-geneticists still generally believed that genes governed only trivial biological traits, such as eye color, and bristle arrangement in fruit flies, while basic biochemistry was determined in the cytoplasm by unknown processes. Also, many respected geneticists thought that gene action was far too complicated to be resolved by any simple experiment. Thus Beadle and Tatum brought about a fundamental revolution in our understanding of genetics.
In 1946 Beadle returned to the California Institute of Technology as Professor of Biology and Chairman of the Division of Biology. Here he remained until January 1961 when he was elected Chancellor of the University of Chicago and, in the autumn of the same year, President of this university.
After retiring, Beadle undertook a remarkable experiment inmaize genetics. In several laboratories he grew a series ofTeosinte/Maize crosses. Then he crossed these progeny with each other. He looked for the rate of appearance of parent phenotypes among this second generation. The vast majority of these plants were intermediate between maize and Teosinte in their features, but about 1 in 500 of the plants were identical to either the parent maize or the parent teosinte. Using the mathematics of Mendelian genetics, he calculated that this showed a difference between maize and teosinte of about 5 or 6 genetic loci. This demonstration was so compelling that most scientists now agree that Teosinte is the wild progenitor of maize.[13][14]
During his career, Beadle has received many honors. These include the HonoraryDoctor of Science of the following Universities: Yale (1947), Nebraska (1949), Northwestern University (1952), Rutgers University (1954), Kenyon College (1955), Wesleyan University (1956), theUniversity of Birmingham and theUniversity of Oxford, England (1959), Pomona College (1961), and Lake Forest College (1962). In 1962 he was also given the honorary degree of LL.D. by the University of California, Los Angeles. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946.[15] He also received the Lasker Award of the American Public Health Association (1950), the Dyer Award (1951), the Emil Christian Hansen Prize of Denmark (1953), the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in Science (1958), the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1958 with Edward Tatum andJoshua Lederberg, the National Award of the American Cancer Society (1959), and the Kimber Genetics Award of the National Academy of Sciences (1960).
Beadle was married twice. By his first wife he had a son, David, who now lives at The Hague, the Netherlands.[citation needed] His second wife,Muriel McClure (1915–1994), a well-known writer, was born in California.[18] Beadle's chief hobbies were rockclimbing, skiing, and gardening. He is credited with the first ascent ofMount Doonerak in Alaska.[19] He was a member ofFarmHousefraternity while at the University of Nebraska.[citation needed]
^Paul Berg and Maxine Singer.George Beadle: An Uncommon Farmer. The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century. Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003.ISBN0-87969-688-5
^Beadle, G. W. (1966) "Biochemical genetics: some recollections", pp. 23-32 in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, edited by J. Cairns, G. S. Stent and J. D. Watson. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, NY. ASIN: B005F08IQ8
^Horowitz NH (May, 1996). "The sixtieth anniversary of biochemical genetics". Genetics. 143 (1): 1-4. doi:10.1093/genetics/143.1.1.PMC 1207243. PMID 8722756
^George Beadle, An Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century. CSHL Press. 2003. p. 273.ISBN9780879696887. Beadle's views on this occasion were somewhat more tempered than David's characterization of him as a "vehement atheist," and from his earliest days "intolerant of religion and other forms of superstition."
