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George Wells Beadle was born at Wahoo, Nebraska, U.S.A., October 22, 1903, the son of Chauncey Elmer Beadle, a farmer, and his wife Hattie Albro. 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 at Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1926 he took his B.Sc. degree at the University of Nebraska and subsequently worked for a year with Professor F.D. Keim, who was studying hybrid wheat. In 1927 he took his M.Sc. degree, and Professor Keim secured for him a post as Teaching Assistant at Cornell University, where he worked, until 1931, with Professors R.A. Emerson and L.W. Sharp on Mendelian asynopsis in Zea mays. For this work he obtained, in 1931, his Ph.D. degree. In 1931 he was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, where he remained from 1931 until 1936. During this period he continued his work on Indian corn and began, in collaboration with Professors Th. Dobzhansky, S. Emerson, and A.H. Sturtevant, work on crossing-over in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

In 1935 Beadle visited Paris for six months to work with Professor Boris Ephrussi at the Institut 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 at Harvard University. A year later he was appointed Professor of Biology (Genetics) at Stanford University and there he remained for nine years, working for most of this period in collaboration with Tatum. In 1946 he 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.

During his career, Beadle has received many honours. These include the Hon. D.Sc. of