Frank Rattray Lillie was a Canadian-born American biologist, zoologist, embryologist, and administrator of biological science. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he served as professor of embryology, chairman of the zoology department, and dean of the biological sciences division.
Background
Ethnicity:
Lillie's forebears were Scottish and English; both of his grandfathers were pioneers in Canada.
Lillie was born on June 27, 1870, in Toronto, Canada, the second of five children of George Waddell Lillie and Emily Ann (Rattray) Lillie. His forebears were Scottish and English; both of his grandfathers were pioneers in Canada and both were Congregational clergymen. His father was an accountant and wholesale druggist.
Education
An indifferent student at a boys’ grammar school, in high school Lillie was most interested in extracurricular scientific activities. High school was a time of emotional stress and religious doubts, but he was converted to the Church of England and decided to make religion his lifework. During his last year in high school, he met Alexander J. Hunter, who taught him to collect, identify, and arrange insects and fossils. Both entered the University of Toronto expecting to study for the ministry. They majored in natural sciences, believing that science posed a threat to religion. Lillie received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1891. He took his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in zoology summa cum laude in 1894.
Frank Lillie came to the United States in 1891. His interest in physiological embryology and endocrinology first developed in Toronto under the influence of R. Ramsay Wright and A. B. Macallum. In 1891, he spent the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, then in its fourth year, where he began his research with Charles O. Whitman. He spent the academic year 1891-1892 at Clark University working with Whitman.
His first two teaching positions were at the University of Michigan (1894-1899) and at Vassar College (1899-1900). He was then appointed assistant professor of embryology at Chicago and remained there for the rest of his life. He became professor of embryology in 1906 and he succeeded Whitman as chairman of the department of zoology in 1910, retaining this position until 1931. From 1931 until 1935 he was dean of the division of biological sciences, and concurrently the Andrew MacLeish distinguished professor of embryology.
Lillie was skilled at training his students to think as logically and to work as carefully in the laboratory as he did himself. Many of them have advanced embryology greatly by continuing studies that he began. He also made significant contributions to biology as an administrator both at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, where he spent every summer from 1891 through 1946 and at the University of Chicago. He became assistant director of the Woods Hole laboratory in 1900 and succeeded Whitman as a director in 1908. He held this position until 1925, and then became president of the board of trustees and of the corporation. He retired in 1942. During the early years of his directorship, the laboratory had great financial difficulty and in 1902 its very independence was threatened. It was saved as a result of Lillie's good judgment and tact. He secured financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board, and his brother-in-law Charles R. Crane. But Lillie's contribution to the development of the laboratory far transcended money raising. Because of his high standards, it became the foremost marine laboratory in the world. Cooperation and staff democracy were and remain outstanding features of its administration.
The Oceanographic Institution was founded in 1929; Lillie was president of its corporation from 1920 to 1940. Oceanography did not enjoy, then, the popularity that it has subsequently attained, and its later burgeoning was in large part a result of Lillie's foresight. Lillie was also a wise counselor to national organizations. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1915 and was its president from 1935 to 1939. He was also chairman of the National Research Council (1935 - 1936); while holding both positions simultaneously, he developed cooperative relationships between the institutions, which have grown tighter over the years. He also served as chairman of the Fellowship Board of the National Research Council during the years when its policies and procedures were being determined.
Lillie died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-six, at the Billing's Hospital of the University of Chicago. He was buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal church at Woods Hole.
Lillie's research was highly intuitive, raising important new questions in embryology and opening up important areas of investigation. Because of his clear and logical mind and his disciplined meticulousness in the laboratory, his specific contributions in these areas were impressive and influential. His first research, begun at Woods Hole in 1891, dealt with the development of Unio, a freshwater clam. At Whitman's suggestion, he undertook to trace the fate of the early cleavage cells and their progeny through to the time that they formed the larval organs. Whitman himself, in the 1870s, had begun such studies of cell lineage, and they were popular in the 1890s. Although Lillie wrote in 1944 that the subject was over, "a passing episode in embryological research", the eggs most appropriate for cell lineage studies, those with so-called determinate cleavage, in which the fate of the cell is fixed early in development, again became favored material in the 1970s, when it became possible to study by biochemical methods the controlling influences of the cytoplasm over the genes.
Lillie made a number of other important studies at Woods Hole on marine organisms, some dealing with regeneration in various species, others related to his work on cell lineage. One of these described differentiations without cleavage in the egg of a marine worm, Chaetopterus. This aroused his interest in fertilization, and in 1909 he began an important series of studies on fertilization in various marine species. Lillie emphasized that fertilization involved interaction of specific substances produced by the egg and spermatozoon, and he adopted for the first time the concepts and terminology of immunology to describe the nature and action of these interacting substances. He named the species-specific substance which he demonstrated to be produced by the egg "fertilizing"; he interpreted its action as that of a sperm-isoagglutinin. In 1919 he published Problems of Fertilization, elaborating his fertilizing theory. Current studies of the physiology of fertilization, particularly on species-specificity, still lean heavily on Lillie's immunological analogy, and immunological concepts have been increasingly called upon to explain varied phenomena of embryonic specificity.
While Lillie was carrying out these studies on marine forms during summers at Woods Hole, he began in the early 1900s to study and to perform experiments on the chick embryo. His first experiments were designed to test the regenerative power of the chick's limb bud and other organs. One of his most enduring influences on embroyology emanated from The Development of the Chick, which incorporated many of his discoveries and which has been basic for much subsequent work on chick embryology, normal and experimental. Before the book on the chick was completed, Lillie was already acquiring an interest in the primary causes and the subsequent sequences of events that bring about sexual differentiation. His immediate motivation for attacking this problem came about because of the birth in a herd of purebred cattle at the family farm near Chicago of a free-martin, a sterile female born as a co-twin to a bull calf. Free-martins had been known for centuries, but their origins were not understood. Lillie's intuitive mind saw that there might be a causal relationship between the sterility and the twinning. He collected at a Chicago abattoir pregnant uteri containing twins, and he was able to demonstrate that the sterile free-martin is an original female altered in the male direction by the early action of male hormones, made possible by the fusion of the twins' placentae before sex is differentiated and before the blood circulation has begun. Lillie continued his own experimental analysis of hormone action by studying the action of one of the female sex hormones, and also of the thyroid hormone, on the development of the feather pattern of domestic fowl.
By 24 February 1916 Lillie had carefully analyzed forty-one cases of bovine twins and announced his theory of the freemartin. His full analysis, based on fifty-five pairs of fetal twins, was published the following year (1917). This work is usually considered his most significant and enduring contribution to research, although Lillie’s explanation of causal relationships in freemartin development has been criticized by Short (1970).
Membership
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The record which he established of long and able guidance of a great university department, of that of a chief builder of two great research institutions, of distinguished leadership for a period of the National Academy and the Research Council, and of the affectionate devotion of a host of pupils and colleagues ... marks a career which could well be called incomparable. " - president of the Academy of Sciences
Connections
On June 29, 1895, Lillie married Frances Crane of Chicago. They had four daughters: Catherine Crane, Margaret Halsted, Mary Prentice, and Emily Ann; and three adopted sons: Albert Reed Trenholm, Ethan, and Karl Christopher.