Oswald T. Avery Biographical File
Abstract
Includes photographs, newspaper articles, biographical sketch.
Dates
- Creation: 1877-1955
Notes about Access to this Collection
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Reproduction Rights
Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Biographical / Historical
Oswald Theodore Avery was born in 1877 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Avery attended Colgate University, where he excelled in literature, public speaking, and debate, earning his BA in the humanities in 1900. In the absence of any scientific background or prior evidence of interest, after college Avery chose a career in medicine and entered the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He received his medical degree in 1904.
Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and was a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for his discovery in 1944 with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.
A lifelong bachelor, Avery moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1949 to be near his brother, Roy, a bacteriologist at Vanderbilt University, and family, and died there of pancreatic cancer in 1955. He is buried in Nashville’s Mount Olivet Cemetery.
Source:https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/mstp/person/oswald-theodore-avery/#:~:text=Avery%20was%20one%20of%20the,genes%20and%20chromosomes%20are%20made.
Full Extent
0.01 Cubic Feet
Language of Materials
English
- Title
- Oswald Avery Biographical File
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- History of Medicine Collections Staff
- Date
- 2024-05-03
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the VUMC Historical Images and Biographies Repository
Eskind Biomedical Library
2209 Garland Ave.
Nashville TN 37232
historyofmedicine@vanderbilt.edu
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