George Beadle: A Renaissance Man Spun From Cornsilk

By Andrea Wood Cranford, UNL Alumni Association

George Wells Beadle was a homespun sort of Renaissance man.

The man who laid the foundation for the field of biotechnology and whose name is attached to the world-class research facility at UNL was one of America's foremost geneticists and a Nobel Prize winner dedicated to scholarly precision and integrity. He was also a farmer, an educator, an author, a humanitarian, a mountain climber and a cat fancier who grew corn on his front lawn and raised kittens, at one time owning 15 six-toed cats which he introduced into his genetics lectures.

He was born in 1903 on a 40-acre farm near Wahoo, where his father cultivated potatoes, asparagus, strawberries and bees as he nurtured his three motherless children. Beadle's talent for scientific inquiry was apparent early. A high school teacher recognized and encouraged it, and eventually convinced Beadle's father that the young man was college material. So off he went to the state university in Lincoln where he studied with agronomy professor Frank Keim, earning a bachelor of science in 1926 and a master of science in 1927. It was while doing graduate work at Cornell, where he took his doctorate, that he first became interested in genetics.

In 1931 Beadle began what was to be a long but interrupted association with the California Institute of Technology, first as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow, and then as an instructor until 1935. Eleven years later, after serving on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford universities and of the Institut de Biologie in Paris, he returned to Caltech as professor and chairman of the Division of Biology.

In 1958, while visiting Oxford as the George Eastman Professor, Beadle learned that he had received the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. It was for work he had done with his friends Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum demonstrating that genes control chemical reactions by their formation of specific enzymes.

But if Beadle had the mind of a scientist, he had the heart of an adventurer. At the age of 49, he took up skiing. And mountain-climbing. He scaled Mount Whitney in California, six times, and was one of the first three humans to climb Mount Doonerak in Alaska.

His second wife, Muriel, maintained it was this adventurous nature that led to his acceptance of the University of Chicago presidency in 1961. The university had fallen on hard times; enrollment was declining and faculty were departing. By the time Beadle retired from the presidency in 1968 to do genetic research in his Chicago cornfields, he had lured a number of distinguished scholars, including several Nobel Prize winners, to the university faculty and had overseen the construction of millions of dollars in campus facilities to serve a growing number of students. It was also about this time that he and Muriel co-wrote The Language of Life, a book to help nonscientists understand dramatic scientific discoveries and appreciate the social implications of those discoveries. The effort garnered best science book for youth honors in 1967.

The consequences of scientific research were on Beadle's mind a lot. He pondered the ethical implications of genetic manipulation long before the first test-tube human made her appearance, saying that society must decide whether man is to control his own biological evolution. "There are moral and ethical questions involved," he once said. "Who has the right to say what type (of offspring) we want?"

Beadle believed that man has evolved in two ways - biologically and culturally - and that he has taken a hand in his own cultural evolution by deliberately transmitting knowledge from generation to generation. He also said there is no evidence that one race is genetically inferior to all others, but rather differences in value systems account for one culture regarding itself as better than another. His remedy? Massive doses of supplemental cultural influences - much like today's multicultural curriculum requirements.

For research that traversed the field of modern biology from botany and bread molds through biochemistry and enzymes to zoology and fruit flies, the Nobel Prize winner also received the Lasker Award of the American Public Health Association, the Emil Christian Hansen Prize of Denmark, the Kimber Genetics Award of the National Academy of Sciences and the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in Science. Along the way, he also picked up 35 honorary degrees.

George Beadle died in 1989, but his legacy lives on in the work of biotechnologists around the world.

Editor's note: George Beadle was well-known throughout his career for his honesty, fairness and unpretentious waysÊÑÊalthough he had international stature as a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, he never lost sight of his humble Nebraska roots. In 1958, while dressing for the Nobel Awards banquet in his hotel room in Stockholm, Sweden, Beadle turned to his wife, Muriel, and with a hint of misery in his voice said, "Honey, I wish we were home making compost."

Nobel Winner James Watson To Speak at Beadle Dedication Sept. 22

A speech by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson will launch dedication ceremonies for the George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research at UNL Sept. 22.

Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, will deliver the keynote address at 2 p.m. in the Lied Center for Performing Arts as part of the Lewis E. Harris Lecture on Public Policy.

The official dedication of the Beadle Center will be in the Beadle Center atrium at 19th and Vine streets immediately following Watson's speech. Parking will be available in the lots west and south of the building. Shuttle buses will run from the Lied Center to the Beadle Center after Watson's speech, and back to the Lied Center after the dedication ceremony.

The Beadle Center will offer tours and open house activities from 9 a.m. to noon Sept. 23 and from 1-3 p.m. Sept. 24. All dedication activities are free and open to the public.

Editor's note: Watson's lecture will be transmitted live via Closed Circuit Campus Channel 8 and repeated at 3:30 p.m. on Campus Channel 8 and NEB*SAT Space Net 3 Channel 4.

Little Known Facts About the Beadle Center

Here's a few facts about the Beadle Center that you can use to amaze and impress your friends and colleagues:

• Architects used 261 30- by 42-inch sheets of blueprints, or the equivalent of 2,284 square feet of drawing surface, to design the building.
• There are nearly 10.5 miles of cast-in-place concrete piles supporting the Beadle Center.
• If the laboratory work benches in the Beadle Center were put end to end, they would go end zone to end zone on a football field approximately 14 times.
• There are 215 sinks, 606 doors and 110 laboratory fume hoods in the Beadle Center.
• Walk around the outside of the Beadle Center three times and you will have walked one mile.
• If each fan at a Nebraska football home game held one linear foot of pipe, it would equal the total amount of laboratory piping installed in the Beadle Center.
• The electrical power supplied to the Beadle Center is enough to provide power for approximately 300 single-family dwellings.

Research and Education Go Hand in Hand at the Beadle Center

By Kim Hachiya, News & Information

It's the name that throws you off. The George W. Beadle Center for Genetics and Biomaterials Research doesn't exactly prompt the casual passer-by to think: Bet a lot of great teaching goes on in there. Nope. You think of white lab coats. Lasers. Fancy equipment. Research. And it's all there.

But key to the center's future is its teaching mission.

"Research is a part of the educational exercise," said Jack Morris, chair of the school of biological sciences. "And people learn a heckuva lot better by doing. And if you are going to be learning science, you will be doing scientific research. The most significant product from this building is going to be that young well-trained scientist with research experience at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels. That is perhaps our most important mission. Because when students are doing research in faculty labs it helps build an enthusiasm for science."

To say that Morris is keen on the Beadle Center is an understatement. He seems positively ecstatic about its future as a teaching facility.

"It's going to be the most visible mechanism on this campus to interest young people in science," he said. "Students will need to perceive the facility as something they can belong to."

One key is the 170-seat lecture hall. Manter Hall, home to the biological sciences at UNL, was built nearly 20 years ago ÊÑÊwithout a lecture hall because the funding ran dry. So the department that generates the most science-related credit hours on campus uses classrooms all over campus for lecture space.

A few years back, the department poured money into renovating the auditorium at Henzlik Hall to bring it up to state-of-the-art technology. But, Morris said, it's a shared facility, not dedicated solely to science education.

"What kind of a message does that send to our biology students?" he said.

The new auditorium is just a few paces from the new instructional greenhouses, Morris noted. That means lots of time saved in transporting plants and it means more students will get their hands dirty as they work with the corn, peas and beans that are the staple plants of introductory botany, biology, biochemistry and horticulture classes. While only a few courses have been scheduled for Beadle this fall (professors are eager to be sure the building is actually up and running before they give up their current classrooms) it's anticipated that once it's fully on-line, thousands of students will use Beadle's labs each year.

Morris said that the building is located close to parking and residence halls, always a plus. And a computer lab will be dedicated for student use as well. Three smaller classrooms, primarily for upper-division seminar courses, also have been included in the building's footprint.

"People think of this as a research building for biotechnology and that's partly true," Morris said. "But it's not true because of the number of instructional courses we will be offering."

Some space at Beadle remains merely a shell: it was enclosed and a floor poured in anticipation of use by the biological sciences once it was determined that Chemical Engineering, an original tenant, would not be sited at Beadle. Morris said professors want to look at the space and determine the best way to renovate it for use by biologists. And they are going to ease their way into the lecture hall, too, waiting to see what the space will be like before tackling the project of making it a high-tech classroom.

"We have a shared vision of using the space for outreach and other kinds of instructional activities, like televised instruction," Morris said. "We are planning a state-of-the-art multimedia classroom for that space. Right now, it is so acoustically perfect that you can speak in a normal voice and it can be heard around the room. But that might change once you fill the room with students. We want to look at things like that before we permanently wire the room."

For questions regarding these Scarlet pages, contact:
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