Born 20 May 1918; died 21 Jul 2004 at age 86.

#American #developmental #geneticist who was awarded the 1995 #NobelPrize for #Physiology or Medicine for discovering the functions that control early #embryonic development with co-winners Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus who #identified and #classified 15 key #genes that determine the #body plan and formation of body #segments of the fruit fly #Drosophila melanogaster.

Lewis studied the next step, the #homeotic genes that govern the development of a #larval segment into a specific body segment. (Homeotic means that something has been changed into the likeness of something else.)

Lewis found a co-linearity in time and space between the order of the genes in the #bithorax complex and their effect regions in the segments.

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