George W. Beadle's innovative and diverse research with corn, fruit flies, and bread mold helped to demystify the activities of genes, making it possible to reduce the inheritance of a particular characteristic to a series of steps needed for the manufacture of biochemicals, notably enzymes. For his work on the "one gene-one enzyme" concept, Beadle shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Edward Lawrie Tatum and Joshua Lederberg in 1958.

Beadle was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, to Chauncey Elmer and Hattie Albro Beadle. Beadle may have made a career on the family farm if not for a high school science teacher who advised him to go to college. At the College of Agriculture at the University of Nebraska, Beadle gained an interest in genetics, especially that of corn. Beadle received his undergraduate degree in biology in 1926, then left for Cornell University in New York where he earned...