Edward Butts Lewis (May 20, 1918 – July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology.

Early life

Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis (née Histed) and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but his birth certificate was incorrectly filled out with "B." as his middle name.

Lewis graduated from E. L. Meyers High School.

Education and career

He received a BA in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota in 1939, where he worked on Drosophila melanogaster in the lab of C.P. Oliver. In 1942 Lewis received a PhD from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working under the guidance of Alfred Sturtevant. In 1939, Edward B. Lewis arrived at Caltech and finished his PhD within three years. Lewis enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Corps training program in meteorology in 1942 and later received his master's degree in the area a year later. As he left for military service in 1943, he was told by the university president Robert A. Millikan that he had a position as an instructor at Caltech when he returned. He served working mostly as a weather forecaster in Hawaii and Okinawa for four years. Lewis returned in 1946 and took his position at Caltech where his duties included helping in the laboratory for an introductory genetics course. He was promoted in 1956 to a professor and became the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology in 1966. He is credited with development of the complementation test. A collection of his key publications and perspectives is presented in the edited volume Genes, Development and Cancer: The Life and Work of Edward B. Lewis.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Lewis carried out foundational studies on closely linked mutations in Drosophila, introducing the concept of pseudoallelism. Through analysis of loci such as white and apricot, he demonstrated that mutations previously thought to represent multiple alleles of a single gene could in fact be separated by recombination, revealing that genes could consist of multiple closely linked functional elements. These studies helped establish the concept of intragenic recombination and challenged the classical view of genes as indivisible units, laying the groundwork for his later work on gene complexes such as the Bithorax complex.

At the scientific level of the debate, the crucial question was whether the "threshold theory" was valid or whether, as Lewis insisted, the effects of radioactivity were "linear with no threshold", where every exposure to radiation had a long-term cumulative effect.

The issue of linearity versus threshold re-entered the debate on nuclear fallout in 1962, when Ernest Sternglass, a Pittsburgh physicist, argued that the linearity thesis was confirmed by the research of Alice Stewart.

  • Honorary doctorate, University of Umeå, Sweden (1981)
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (1983)
  • Gairdner Foundation International award (1987)
  • Wolf Foundation prize in medicine (1989)
  • Rosenstiel award (1990)
  • National Medal of Science (1990)
  • Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1991)
  • Louisa Gross Horwitz prize (1992)
  • Honorary doctorate, University of Minnesota (1993)
  • Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1995) (with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus)