George Wells Beadle

In 1928, he met Marion Hill, who was then doing her MS in botany at the University of Cornell. They married in the same year and their son David was born in December 1931. However, trouble began once they returned to Caltech in 1946. Finally they divorced in the summer of 1953.

Not long after, Beadle married Muriel McClure Barnett, the well-known editor of the Women’s Section of the Los Angeles Times and adopted Muriel’s son, Redmond Barnett. Towards the end of their life, the couple shifted to a retirement colony in Pomona, California, where he led an active life tending to his garden.

When he was around eighty years old Beadle developed Alzheimer’s disease and over the course of time, it became so severe that he failed to connect with reality. He lived in this stage until his death on June 9, 1989.

George Wells Beadle was born on October 22, 1903, in Wahoo, Nebraska. His father, Chauncey Elmer Beadle, was a well-to-do farmer with forty acres of land. He was also highly enterprising, hardworking and independent. His mother, Hattie Albro Beadle, died in 1908, when George was only five years old.

George Wells Beadle, lovingly called Beets, had an elder brother and a younger sister. Unfortunately, his elder brother too died in 1913 and so it fell upon ten year old Beadle to look after her younger sister and help his father at the farm in whatever way he could.

Beadle had his early education at Wahoo High School. It was an accepted notion that George would join the family farm once he passed out. But things turned out differently.

Beadle’s science teacher, Bess McDonald, recognized his talent and urged him to join College of Agriculture under the University of Nebraska for further education, which he did against the wish of his father. Beadle enjoyed his time there and finally received his bachelor’s degree in 1926.

Subsequently, he joined the Department of Plant Breeding at the College of Agriculture under the University of Cornell and earned his M. Sc. degree from there in 1927. Here, he worked on sterile mutants of maize and showed that mutants can affect the formation of the sex cells, egg, and pollen.

George Wells Beadle joined California Institute of Technology in 1931 and continued with his work on maize. Subsequently, he joined the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan and worked on Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) with other eminent scientists. His work led to realization that gene chemically influence heredity.

Some time now, he began to wonder how the process of embryonic development is determined by the genes. He then teamed up with visiting French embryologist Boris Ephrussi to investigate into the development of Drosophila with a special reference to its eye pigments.

In 1935, he went to Paris for six months. There at Institut de Biologie physico-chimique, Beadle and Ephrussi set out to determine if imaginal disc from one larva would develop into an eye when transplanted into another larva.

Finally they were able to produce an adult fly with three eyes, two in the normal head position and one in the abdomen. This work later became the foundation of his research on the genetics of the fungus Neurospora.

In 1936, he left Caltech to join the Harvard University as Assistant Professor. The following year he shifted to the University of Stanford and started working on the function of gene in detail. Sometime now, Edward Tatum joined his team and the two scientists started working in close collaboration.

Beadle is best known for his work on ‘one gene - one enzyme hypothesis’. He did this work in close collaboration with Edward Tatum. They first induced mutation in Neurospora by exposing it to X-ray and found that some of the sprouting cells were unable to grow in the minimal cultural medium they had been provided with.

These were then isolated and many normal metabolite began to be added to the cultural medium first in groups and then in singles. Finally after years of painstaking experimentation, the two scientists established that genes act through the production of enzymes.

They also concluded that each gene is responsible for producing a single enzyme and this enzyme, in its turn, affects a single step in a metabolic pathway. The theory was later dubbed as ‘one gene - one enzyme hypothesis’ and led to the formation of biochemical genetics.