“The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell,” said Edmund Beecher Wilson, the man who taught the first biology course in this country. Wilson’s course began on this date in 1885 at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, the same year the college was founded. Students were required to attend five lectures each week and work in the lab for eight hours, beginning their studies with animal and plant structures and working their way up to observing chick embryos. Wilson, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913, was the first scientist to publish photographs illustrating how a cell divides. He taught many students both at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University, including Nettie Stevens, who discovered X and Y chromosomes, and Rebecca Craighill Lancefield, who created a system for identifying streptococcal bacteria.

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