Georges Teissier

Georges Teissier (19 February 1900 – 7 January 1972) was a mathematical biologist who contributed to the modern synthesis with quantitative methods.

Growing up with an interest in natural history, he studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure from 1919.

After the war he succeeded Frédéric Joliot-Curie as director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) where he worked with Boris Ephrussi and Philippe L’Héritier to establish a genetics program.

They conducted simultaneous survival experiments on Drosophila strains that differed mainly in mutant loci of interest.

Thus their experimental work on examining natural selection and the maintenance of polymorphism was pioneering although isolated within France.