Edward Lawrie Tatum

Edward Lawrie Tatum

Edward Lawrie Tatum (born December 14, 1909 in Boulder , Colorado , † November 5, 1975 in New York City ) was an American geneticist .

Edward Lawrie Tatum, son of Professor of Pharmacology Arthur Lawrie Tatum, attended college at the University of Chicago , where he studied microbiology and biochemistry and then at the University of Wisconsin . In Wisconsin he received his Ph. D. in biochemistry in 1934 with a thesis on the nutrition and metabolism of bacteria. From 1937 he conducted research at Stanford University (from 1941 as assistant professor) and worked here with the geneticist George Wells Beadle . In 1941, Tatum and Beadle were able to confirm Garrod's one-gene-one-enzyme hypothesis using the mold Neurospora crassa .

From 1945 he worked as an assistant professor of botany and microbiology at Yale University with Joshua Lederberg and in 1946 demonstrated the conjugation event . In 1948 he returned to Stanford and worked there again as a professor of biology with Beadle. In 1957 he went to Rockefeller University .

In 1958 he and Beadle received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery that genes are effective by regulating certain chemical processes". The other half of the Nobel Prize went to his other colleague Lederberg. In 1952 Tatum was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1957 to the American Philosophical Society, and 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

literature

• Edward L. Tatum , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 05/1976 from January 19, 1976, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Renate Wagner: Tatum, Edward Lawrie. In: Werner E. Gerabek u. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of medical history. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1379 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Edward Lawrie Tatum in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1958 award ceremony for Edward Tatum