1909-1975

American microbiologist who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize with George Beadle and Joshua Lederberg for discoveries that demonstrated the relationship between genes and the proteins they controlled. Exploiting the potential of the bread mold Neurospora as a genetic and biochemical tool, they established the "one gene, one enzyme" theory. Beadle and Tatum irradiated the mold to create nutritional mutants and identified specific defects in the mutants. The induced mutations exhibited Mendelian patterns of inheritance.