Don W. Fawcett
Don Wayne Fawcett ( born March 14, 1917 in Springdale, Iowa; † 7 May, 2009 Missoula, Montana) was an American anatomist and cell biologist.
Life
Fawcett was born the son of a farmer. Due to a disease the father had to give up the farm and the family moved to Boston about. There, Don Fawcett attended the Boston Latin School and went in 1934 from Harvard College, where his interest in biology awoke. In 1938, he earned a bachelor's degree and moved to the Harvard Medical School where he was a pupil of George Wislocki.
1941 Fawcett married his childhood sweetheart from Iowa, Dorothy Secrest, and graduated a year later his studies. He then began training as a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. Triggered by a major fire at the Coconut Grove Night Club, in which 440 people died and Fawcett fought for every human life 30 hours, he thought his career decision and recognized his greater inclination for research and teaching and moved to the Department of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School.
The beginning of his scientific career coincided with the time of development of the electron microscope. Fawcett moved to Keith Porter, one of the pioneers of this technique, at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), where he first dealt with cilia and discovered the 9 2 pattern of microtubules.
Fawcett, however, it withdrew at the Harvard Medical School and he studied further with electron microscopic studies. 1955 Fawcett got a reputation as a professor of anatomy and cell biology at Cornell Medical School in New York City and established there an electron microscope laboratory. In 1959, he refused a professorship at the University of Oxford and instead took the Hersey Professor of Anatomy at Harvard. In 1976, he was Senior Associate Dean for Preclinical Science. In 1985 he retired, but took a position as a Senior Scientist at the International Research Laboratory of Animal Diseases in Nairobi (Kenya ), where he dealt mainly with parasitic diseases ( theileriosis and trypanosomiasis ). After five years working in Kenya, he returned to the United States.
Work
Fawcett made several fundamental discoveries of the ultrastructure and modernized the study of microscopic anatomy. 29 of his students and postdocs were professors, 30 other directors anatomical or cellular biology institutes.
He was one of the founders of the American Society for Cell Biology and in 1961 elected as its first president. From 1965 to 1966, Fawcett president of the American Association of Anatomists. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972.
Fawcett received a number of academic awards and honorary titles. 1988 Fawcett Lecture in Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School was established in honor of him.
Writings (selection )
- Don W. Fawcett: The Cell. Saunders, 1981, ISBN 0-7216-3584-9.