Edmund Beecher Wilson (October 19, 1856 – March 3, 1939) was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist. He wrote one of the most influential textbooks in modern biology, The Cell in Development and Inheritance. He discovered the chromosomal XY sex-determination system in 1905. Nettie Stevens independently made the same discovery the same year and published shortly thereafter.
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Career
Wilson was born in Geneva, Illinois, the son of Isaac G. Wilson, a judge, and his wife, Caroline Clarke.
He graduated from Yale University in biology in 1878. He earned his Ph.D. in biology at Johns Hopkins in 1881.
He was a lecturer at Williams College in 1883–84 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884–85. He served as professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1891.
In 1888, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
He spent the balance of his career at Columbia University where he was successively adjunct professor of biology (1891–94), professor of invertebrate zoology (1894–1897), and professor of zoology (from 1897).
Wilson is credited as America's first cell biologist. In 1898 he used the similarity in embryos to describe phylogenetic relationships. By observing spiral cleavage in molluscs, flatworms and annelids he concluded that the same organs came from the same group of cells and concluded that all these organisms must have a common ancestor. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1902.