Tatum, Edward Lawrie, 1909–75, American geneticist, b. Boulder, Colo., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin (B.A., 1931; M.S., 1932; Ph.D., 1935). From 1937 to 1945 he taught at Stanford and from 1945 to 1948 at Yale. Returning to Stanford in 1948 he became (1956) head of the department of biochemistry. He left Stanford in 1957 to become a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York City. He shared with G. W. Beadle and Joshua Lederberg the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Beadle establishing that genes in bread mold transmit hereditary characters by controlling specific chemical reactions.
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