Edward B. Lewis

Edward B. Lewis was an American geneticist whose decades of work on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster helped found the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Lewis studied the Bithorax gene complex, a cluster of homeotic genes that control the identity and development of body segments along the fly body axis, and his analysis showed that genes could be built of multiple closely linked functional elements that together specify body plan, challenging simpler earlier views of what a single gene was. He also developed the complementation test, a genetic method for determining whether two mutations affecting the same trait lie in the same gene or in different genes, which became a standard tool across genetics. Lewis earned his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1942 under Alfred Sturtevant, returned there after wartime service, and eventually became the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology in 1966. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus, for discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.