Ethel (Nicholson) Browne Harvey (December 14, 1885 in Baltimore, Maryland – September 2, 1965 in Falmouth, Massachusetts) was an American embryologist, known for her critical findings about cell division, using the embryology of sea urchins, and for early work studying embryonic cell cleavage.
Her doctoral thesis in 1913 was on the male germ cells of genus Notonecta, an aquatic insect, leading her to further work focusing on cellular mechanisms in inheritance and development.
[4] In the 1930s, she demonstrated a method of parthenogenetic cleavage, inducing unfertilized sea urchin eggs to cleave and ultimately to hatch.
She termed this method of creating life as "parthenogenic merogony" in which "a portion of the egg without the nucleus is fertilized".
She conducted scientific research in a variety of positions including Princeton University and Cornell Medical College.