From fruit flies to fallout: Ed Lewis and his science

Edward B. (“Ed”) Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1918, and educated at the E.L. Meyers High School in Wilkes-Barre. He grew up during the Great Depression; his father, a jeweler and watchmaker, supported Ed’s educational and musical aspirations, despite the economic hardships. One of the highlights for Ed was the public library in Wilkes-Barre, which he used to visit daily. Two books and a journal, which he read there as a teenager, had a major impact on his life. The journal was Science and the first book was Bertrand Russell’s The Scientific Outlook (Russell, 1931), both of which I will return to later. The second book, The Biological Basis of Human Nature by H. S. Jennings, a Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and dedicated by him to Calvin Bridges (Jennings, 1930), is where Ed first read about Drosophila and the power of Drosophila genetics (Lewis, 2004). Shown in Figure 1 are two illustrations from the book. On the left is “sexlinked inheritance” of the white gene, which was the subject of T.H. Morgan’s first paper on Drosophila genetics in 1910; on the right is the inheritance of the dominant Bar mutation, which A.H. Sturtevant did a lot of work on, and which was important in motivating Ed to his graduate work. Ed does not remember seeing the Bar figure and says that, if he did, he probably would not have understood it anyway! Ed was a member of the E.L. Meyers High School biology club, which at that time was chaired by Ed Novitski, who also become a Drosophila geneticist. In late 1934, Ed (Lewis) noticed an advertisement in Science for Drosophila cultures from Turtox Products in Chicago for a dollar each. I searched through 4 years worth of Science to find this advertisement but failed. Both Eds, however, assure me that it existed. After a Web search, I did manage to obtain the 1933 issue of a Turtox catalog (Turtox, 1933) and sure enough, there the ad is, offering live Drosophila mutants for two dollars a culture (Fig. 2). Ed thinks that, because of the Great Depression, by 1934 the price had dropped to only 1 dollar. Novitski tells me that not being Drosophila geneticists, when he wrote the letter to obtain this culture, he asked whether for the same price they could throw all the mutants into the same vial. Professor Rifenberg at Purdue who filled the order, wrote back saying that it was clear that they were new to genetics, but for the price, he would send several vials. That was the beginning of Ed’s career as a geneticist. In his autobiography, Ed emphasizes that “by allowing Novitski and me freedom to use the biology lab and its supplies to carry out our experiments on Drosophila, our biology teacher, who also was the athletic coach, could not have been more helpful in furthering our careers. There was none of the present attitude that one cannot become a scientist without having had the benefit of teachers skilled in the art of keeping their students constantly motivated” (Lewis, 2004). In other words, Ed was motivated from the beginning and has stayed motivated throughout his life. Ed is an excellent musician (Fig. 3). He was given a wooden flute by his great-uncle, Thomas Wyllie, in 1928. Later, during the Depression, his father somehow managed to come up with funds to buy Ed a silver flute. He played in the High School Orchestra and the Wilkes-Barre Symphony, beginning his tertiary education at Bucknell College on a music scholarship. After a year at Bucknell, science tri-