Fankhauser, Gerhard

Fankhauser, Gerhard

(1901–81) embryologist; born in Burgdorf, Switzerland. He taught in Switzerland (1925–29), then came to the U.S.A. in 1929 for fellowships at the University of Chicago (1929–30) and Yale (1930–31). He spent the remainder of his career at Princeton (1931–69, emeritus 1969–81). He was a popular teacher who made major contributions to research on hormone manipulation and crossbreeding in amphibian embryos. He demonstrated that cell size is directly proportional to the number of chromosomes the cell contains.