Background
Edmund Wilson was born on October 19, 1856 in Geneva, Illinois, United States, into the family of Isaac Grant Wilson and Caroline Louisa Clark Wilson. He was the second of four surviving children.
Edmund Wilson was born on October 19, 1856 in Geneva, Illinois, United States, into the family of Isaac Grant Wilson and Caroline Louisa Clark Wilson. He was the second of four surviving children.
Edmund attended Antioch College in 1873 - 1874, and University of Chicago in 1874 - 1875. Then he received Bachelor of Science at Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University in 1878. After that he earned Doctor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1881. He also had postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge University, University of Leipzig, and the Zoological Station at Naples.
Edmund was a lecturer at Williams College in 1883 – 1884 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884 – 1885. Then he served as professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1891. He spent the balance of his career at Columbia University where he was successively adjunct professor of biology in 1891 – 1894, professor of invertebrate zoology in 1894 – 1897, and professor of zoology from 1897.
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. He also discovered the chromosomal XY sex-determination system in 1905 — that males have XY and females XX sex chromosomes. Nettie Stevens independently made the same discovery the same year.
In 1907, he described, for the first time, the additional or supernumerary chromosomes, now called B-chromosomes. Professor Wilson published many papers on embryology, and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913. In the last years of his career, Wilson continued his study of cell structures. Despite failing health, he also wrote the third edition of "The Cell in Development and Inheritance", over twelve hundred pages, which was published in 1925. In most respects, this was actually a completely new book that included the new discoveries in biology of the twentieth century. Wilson retired from Columbia University in 1928. He died in New York, on March 3, 1939, of bronchial pneumonia.
Although known for his meticulous approach to the study of the structure and function of the cell, he never lost sight of biology as a unified field that included embryology, evolution, and genetics.
On September 27, 1904 Edmund married Anne Maynard Kidder, with whom he had a daughter Nancy Wilson.