On his father's side they traced their ancestry to an Isaac Taylor from County Antrim, Ireland who came to Virginia around 1740.
He studied at Mount Morris College, Illinois and after receiving an AB in 1911 he became a principal of a school at Valley City, North Dakota.
He joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1914 and studied mouse reproduction in 1914 under Joseph A.
He worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory with Robert Chambers on micromanipulation techniques using glass micropipettes.
In 1939, he organized a symposium to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Schleiden and Schwann's cell theory.