Ross Granville Harrison, 1870-1959

Abstract

The published research of Ross Harrison, the inventor of tissue culture, and amongst the greatest of experimental embryologists, spans a period of 54 years. Before describing this immensely important contribution to biological knowledge, which must be the main concern of this memoir, the biographical framework in which it was made needs first to be sketched. Harrison was born on 13 January 1870, in Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania. His father, Samuel Harrison, was an engineer whose work took him for long periods abroad. His mother died when he was a child. After schooling in Baltimore, he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1886, somewhat undecided about his future. He recalls, in his Croonian Lecture, that it was Newell Martin, T. H. Huxley’s assistant and one of the original group of professors at Johns Hopkins, who first inspired him to become a zoologist. He started graduate work with W. K. Brooks, Martin’s successor, in 1889, amongst his fellow-students being two of his great contemporaries, E. G. Conklin and T. H. Morgan. He went abroad to work with Nussbaum in Bonn in 1892, establishing a connexion with German anatomists which was of great importance in his development. His Ph.D. at Hopkins followed in 1894, and after a year as Lecturer in Morphology at Bryn Mawr College, where T. H. Morgan had become Associate Professor of Biology, and another visit to Bonn, in 1896 he joined the staff of F. P. Mall, Professor of Anatomy at Johns Hopkins and a distinguished embryologist. In 1896 he married Ida Lange, whom he had met on his first visit to Bonn. They had a family of three daughters and two sons. He returned briefly to Bonn twice before the end of the century, and took his M.D. there in 1899, the same year that he became Associate Professor of Anatomy at Johns Hopkins. He stayed a further eight years in Baltimore, and this was the period of his momentous invention of tissue culture. The brilliance of this research is all the more astonishing in that he was at this same time launching and guiding, as managing editor, the new Journal of Experimental Zoology ; and as he later ruefully remarked, in those days the editor of a scientific journal had to be business manager and office boy as well.