Pasadena : Caltech Researcher Cited

Edward B. Lewis, professor of biology at Caltech, has received a $20,000 Gairdner Foundation International Award for his pioneering research on how genes direct an embryo’s growth.

Lewis and Walter J. Gehring of the University of Basel, Switzerland, who shared the award, were honored last week at a Gairdner Foundation program at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

The foundation cited Lewis for his work on the “identification and analysis of genes that control basic steps in embryonic development.” A pioneering geneticist, Lewis has been on the Caltech faculty since 1946. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968, and he received the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal of the Genetics Society of America in 1983.