Eric Davidson (1937–2015)

The complexity of gene regulation and its importance to evolutionary change is now a foundational principle in both development and evolution. But this was not the case in the 1960s when Eric Davidson was one of a small group of scientists who began developing a theoretical framework backed by rigorous experimental work to explore this issue. Davidson and his group made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the logical structure of gene regulatory networks, and to the importance of these networks in controlling the evolution of animal body plans. Eric Davidson, Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology, died 1 September 2015 in Pasadena, California. From the 1970s until his death, Davidson pioneered increasingly rigorous studies of developmental patterns in sea urchins. Over the past decade he has worked out the detailed logical structure of cis-regulatory gene networks and explored how changes in these networks impacted evolutionary possibilities. Davidson’s career was closely tied to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He found himself in the laboratory of L.V. Heilbrunn at the MBL in the summer of 1953. Heilbrunn set Davidson a research project that eventually developed into a winning project for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Heilbrunn was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Davidson worked in his lab there throughout his time as an undergraduate. Davidson moved to Rockefeller University in 1958 where he joined the lab of Alfred Mirsky and worked on gene expression and RNA synthesis in Xenopus laevis. Mirsky became an important mentor, and after Davidson received his PhD in 1963 he stayed at the Rockefeller as a research scientist and then assistant professor. In 1971 Davidson moved to the California Institute of Technology, which was his academic home for the rest of his career. In 1981 he became the Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology at Obituary