Ross Granville Harrison (January 13, 1870 – September 30, 1959) was an American biologist and anatomist credited for his pioneering work on animal tissue culture. His work also contributed to the understanding of embryonic development. Harrison studied in many places around the world and made a career as a university professor. He was also a member of many learned societies and received several awards for his contributions to anatomy and biology. Education Harrison received his early schooling in Baltimore, where his family had moved from Germantown, Philadelphia. Announcing in his mid teens a resolve to study medicine, he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1886, receiving his BA degree in 1889 at the age of nineteen. In 1890, he worked as a laboratory assistant for the United States Fish Commission in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying the embryology of the oyster with his close friend E. G. Conklin and H. V. Wilson. In 1891, he participated in a marine zoology field trip to the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory in Jamaica. Attracted to the work of Moritz Nussbaum, he worked in Bonn, Germany during 1892–1893, 1895–1896, and 1898 and became an M.D. there in 1899. Harrison gained his Ph.D. in 1894 after courses in physiology with H. Newell Martin and morphology with William Keith Brooks. He devoted study to mathematics, astronomy and also the Latin and Greek classics. Career Between his studies in Bonn, Harrison taught morphology at Bryn Mawr College with T. H. Morgan from 1894 to 1895. He was an instructor at Johns Hopkins University from 1896 to 1897 and became an associate at the university from 1897 to 1899. From 1899 until 1907, he was the associate professor of anatomy, teaching histology and embryology. By this time he had contributed more than twenty papers and made the acquaintance of many leading biologists. His work on tissue culture became very influential. He then moved to New Haven to take up a post at Yale University, where he was Bronson Professor of Comparative Anatomy. He was made chair of zoology department in 1912, participating through to 1913 in a revitalisation and re-organisation of the several faculties of which he became a member. He undertook further studies at the United States Fish Commission in the early years of the century. In 1913 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Harrison was instrumental in the 1913 opening of