Edmund Beecher Wilson (October 19, 1856 – March 3, 1939)[2] was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist.

[9] Wilson published many papers on embryology, and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913.

For his volume, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, Wilson was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1925.

[10] The American Society for Cell Biology annually awards the E. B. Wilson Medal in his honor.

[11] In 1902 and 1903 Walter Sutton suggested that chromosomes, which segregate in a Mendelian fashion, are hereditary units: "I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division ... may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity".