His interest in natural history was exhibited at an early age and he liked collecting things and spending as much time as possible in the countryside.

He was educated at Germantown Academy followed by the University of Pennsylvania where his interest in science excluded most of the social activities enjoyed by his contemporaries.

He then moved to New York where he started his doctoral research under the evolutionary biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University.

In 1916 he married a marine biologist, Ethel Nicholson Browne, and during their honeymoon in Japan he became fascinated by the bioluminescent ostracod Vargula hilgendorfii.

[6] He discovered that the light-emitting substances known as luciferins were acted on by enzymes called luciferases and that both were species specific and not interchangeable.