Ross Granville Harrison

Infobox Scientist
name = Ross Granville Harrison
box_width =


image_width =
caption =
birth_date = January 13 1870
birth_place = Germantown, Pa., U.S.
death_date = September 30 1959
death_place = New Haven, Conn
residence =
citizenship = American
nationality =
ethnicity =
field = biology and anatomy
work_institutions =
alma_mater =
doctoral_advisor =
doctoral_students =
known_for = tissue culture
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences =
influenced =
prizes =
religion =
footnotes =

Ross Granville Harrison (January 13 1870-September 30 1959) was an American biologist and anatomist credited as the first to work successfully with artificial tissue culture.

Harrison received his early schooling in Baltimore, where his family moved from Germantown. Announcing in his mid teens a resolve to study medicine, he entered Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1886, receiving his degree in 1889 at the age of nineteen, In 1890 he worked as a laboratory assistant for the United States Fish Commission, studying the embryology of the oyster with his close friend E. G. Conklin and H. V. Wilson. [J. S. Nicholas, "Ross Granville Harrison 1870—1959 A Biographical Memoir", National Academy of Sciences, 1961, Accessed May 2008 at http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/rharrison.pdf]

In 1891 he participate in a marine zoology field trip to Jamaica. He worked in Bonn, Germany during 1892-3, 1895-6 and 1898, attracted to the work of Moritz Nussbaum, becoming an M.D. there in 1899. He gained his Ph.D. in 1894 after courses in physiology with H. Newell Martin and morphology with William Keith Brooks. He devoted study to mathematics, astronomy and also the Latin and Greek classics. He worked with T. H. Morgan as a lecturer in morphology at Bryn Mawr. He married Ida Lange in Altona, Germany on January 9th, 1896 and they had a family of four children.

From 1899 until 1907 he was Associate Professor of Anatomy at Johns Hopkins, teaching histology and embryology. By this time he had contributed more than twenty papers and made the acquaintance of many leading biologists. His work on tissue culture became very influential.

He then moved to New Haven to take up a post at Yale, where he was Bronson Professor of Comparative Anatomy, participating through to 1913 in a revitalisation and re-organisation of the several faculties of which he became a member. He undertook further studies at the United States Fish Commission in the early years of the century. In 1913 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. [J. S. Nicholas, op. cit.] From 1914 until his retirement in 1938, Harrison was the Medical School's chief advisor on staffing.

The first world war was not a happy time for Harrison, with his pacifist leanings and his German wife and studies, but he persevered with embryology, working upon the symmetries of development. By means of the dissection of embryos followed by transplantation and rotatation of the limb bud he demonstrated that the main axes of the developing limb are determined independently and at slightly different times, determination of the anterior-posterior axis preceding that of the dorsal-ventral axis.

He successfully cultured frog neuroblasts in a lymph medium and thereby took the first step toward current research on precursor and stem cells. He was considered for a Nobel prize for his work on nerve-cell outgrowth, which helped form the modern functional understanding of the nervous system, and he contributed to surgical tissue transplant technique.

After his retirement he was called upon several times as an advisor to the U.S. government and his organisational skills were of paramount importance in establishing links between scientists, the government and the media. He was Chairman of the National Research Council from 1938 to 1946. He was a member of the Science Committee of the National Resources Planning Board in 1938 and chairman of the Committee on Civil Service Improvement in 1939. He was awarded many prizes and officiated in many learned societies. [Thomas L. Lentz, "History of the Department of Cell Biology, Yale University School of Medicine".] He edited the "Journal of Experimental Zoology" until 1946.

Although a keen morphogeneticist and an admirer of Goethe, Harrison himself did not philosophise much in his papers and, being somewhat reserved and diffident in his social dealings despite his warm feelings for his students' attainment, did not enjoy lecturing but chiefly confined himself to organisation, publication (his textbook illustrations have been highly praised) and patient experiment. He remained a keen walker all his life.

ee also

References