John Tyler Bonner

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John Tyler Bonner (born May 12, 1920 in New York City - † February 7, 2019 ) was an American developmental and evolutionary biologist.

Career

Bonner, the son of Paul Hyde Bonner (1893–1968) and Lilly Stehli, grew up in Locust Valley on Long Island in the 1920s and in France (1930) and London (1932), where he visited the Natural History Museum became interested in biology. In 1934 the family returned to the USA and Bonner attended the Phillips Exeter Academy .

He studied biology from 1937 at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1941 (after which he was on a research trip to Panama and Cuba as a Sheldon Traveling Fellow) and a master's degree in 1942. At Harvard, he initially dealt with embryology of lower plants and fungi William H. Weston , because the animal embryology, which he was interested in, initially seemed too complex. During World War II he was a lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1946, where he did research on physiology at high altitudes. In 1947 he received his doctorate in biology from Harvard, where he became an assistant professor and later professor. In his dissertation, he discovered chemotaxis in the aggregation of slime molds from individual organisms, which became his main research area. In 1951/52 he was an instructor for embryology at the Woods Hole Marine Research Laboratory and in 1953 as a Rockefeller Fellow in Paris .

1966 to 1977, 1983/84 and 1987/88 he headed the biology faculty in Princeton , where he became George M. Moffett professor in 1966 . In 1990 he retired.

In 1963 he was a Senior Fellow of the National Science Foundation in Cambridge . In 1993 he was visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Science and in 1990 at the Indian Academy of Sciences (as Raman Professor). He was also visiting scholar at Brooklyn College (1966) and University College London (1957) and visiting professor at Williams College (1989).

He is particularly known for his research on the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum as a model organism for a number of biological questions such as the formation of multicellular organisms and cellular communication. He dealt with the slime mold in his bachelor thesis in 1941 (inspired by a dissertation by Kenneth Raper on this) and in his dissertation. A number of textbooks and popular science books on developmental and evolutionary biology came from him.

In 1955 he received the Waksman Medal. He received four honorary doctorates from Middlebury College (1970) and Concordia University, among others .

He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (1973), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1981) and a member of the American Philosophical Society .

In 1958 and 1971/72 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Edinburgh , where he was also a visiting scholar several times later and on sabbatical years (mainly to write his books).

From 1964 to 1988 he was on the Board of Trustees at Princeton University Press.

In 1942 he married Ruth Anna Graham, with whom he had several children.

Books

  • Morphogenesis: An Essay On Development, Princeton University Press 1952, Atheneum 1963
  • Basics of biology: evolution, genetics, development, Econ Verlag 1965
  • Cells and societies, Princeton UP 1955
  • The evolution of development, 1958
  • The ideas of biology, 1962
  • The cellular slime molds, Princeton UP, 1959, 2nd edition 1967
  • Size and cycle. An Essay on the structure of Biology, Princeton UP 1965
  • The scale of nature, 1969
  • with Thomas A. MacMahon: Form and Life: Constructions from the drawing board of nature, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag 1985
  • On development: the biology of form, Harvard UP 1974
  • Kultur-Evolution bei Tiere, Parey 1983 (English original: The Evolution of culture in animals, Princeton UP 1980)
  • The evolution of complexity, 1988
  • Researches on cellular slime molds, 1991
  • Evolution and Development: Reflections of a Biologist, Vieweg 1995
  • Sixty Years of Biology: Essays on Evolution and Development, Princeton UP 1996
  • Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science, Harvard UP 2002 (autobiography)
  • Why size matters. From bacteria to blue whales, Princeton UP 2006
  • The social amoebae: the biology of cellular slime molds, Princeton UP 2009
  • First signals: the evolution of multicelluar development, Princeton UP 2009
  • Randomness in Evolution. Princeton University Press 2013

He also re-edited D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic On Growth and Form (in German translation by Birkhäuser 1973)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Bonner, John Tyler
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 2019