James D. Ebert

James David Ebert (1921-- May 22 2001) was an American developmental biologist. He and his wife Alma (nee Goodwin) were killed in a car accident. Ebert, trained at Johns Hopkins as a PhD embryologist, came into embryology at the end of the era of descriptive embryology. His own studies of the chick embryo culminated in the book "Interacting Systems in Development", published in six languages before being pirated by both the Soviets and the Red Chinese. As Director of the Department of Embryology of The Carnegie Institutions of Washington located on the Baltimore Hopkins campus, he pushed the institution out of the age of specimen collecting into the modern era of genetic research. His most important contribution to embryology was in his early investigation of the "graft-host" reaction. This seminal work would comprise the first blocks in the foundation for the modern medical industry of organ transplants and set the stage for stem cell research. During his long career he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, a Vice President of The National Academy of Sciences, President of the Carnegie Institutions of Washington, and President and Director of The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where he and Alma had remained in some capacity for over fifty years. At one time or another he headed or sat on the board of nearly every organization that contributed to developmental biology. His interests were not limited to biology, however. In 2000, on his 79th birthday, scant months before his death in 2001, he attended the grand opening or "First Light" celebration of the Magellan Telescopes of The Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, which as President of the Carnegie Institutions he had helped to bring to reality. Alma and Jim were killed with Alma's dog Caper in a traffic accident in their new maroon Toyota Camry on the highway out of Baltimore while they headed to Woods Hole for yet another summer.

External links

* [http://www.sdbonline.org/archive/SDBMembership/ebert-obit.html Obituary] from the Society of Developmental Biology
* [http://www.whoi.edu/mr/obit.do?id=767 Obituary] from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
* [http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2001/may2901/29ebert.html News report/obituary] from Johns Hopkins University
* [http://www.mbl.edu/inside/what/news/obit/obit_ebert.html Obituary] from Marine Biological Laboratory