Beadle, George Wells, 1903–89, American geneticist, b. Wahoo, Nebr., grad. Univ. of Nebraska (B.S., 1926; M.S., 1927), Ph.D. Cornell, 1931. Beadle taught (1931–36) biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he also began genetic research on the fruit fly, Drosophila, in T. H. Morgan's laboratory. He was later chairman (1946–61) of the biology department there, and in 1961 he became chancellor of the Univ. of Chicago. Beadle shared with Joshua Lederberg and E. L. Tatum the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology for work with Tatum on the bread mold Neurospora crassa, which showed that genes control the cell's production of enzymes and thus the basic chemistry of the cell.

Bibliography

See G. Beadle and M. Beadle, The Language of Life (1966).

Beadle, George Wells

(born Oct. 22, 1903, Wahoo, Neb., U.S.—died June 9, 1989, Pomona, Calif.) U.S. geneticist. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University. While studying Drosophila, he realized that genes must influence heredity chemically and designed a complex technique to determine the nature of those effects, showing that something as apparently simple as eye colour results from a long series of chemical reactions, which are affected by genes. With Edward L. Tatum, he found that the total environment of a bread mold could be varied so that researchers could locate and identify mutations relatively easily, concluding that each gene determines the structure of a specific enzyme, which in turn allows a single chemical reaction to proceed. For the “one gene, one enzyme” concept, they shared a 1958 Nobel Prize with Joshua Lederberg. Beadle later served as president of the University of Chicago (1960–68).