[1] She was the fifth of seven children born to Anne Johanne Daae (1839–1876) and her husband Jacob Aall Bonnevie (1838–1904), a member of the Norwegian parliament.

[13] Medicine didn't suit her, but Zoology was part of preclinical medical training, so she soon switched to it, studying under professors Johan Hjort and Georg Ossian Sars.

"[14] She was so well received by these scholars that eventually they gave her a research stipend that enabled her to quit teaching and focus on her studies.

[13] She developed an expertise in marine biology, working on materials from the Norwegian North Sea expedition of 15 years prior.

To the surprise of many, even though she was one of two finalists with a highly qualified man who slightly surpassed her in education (Kristian Schreiner), Sars chose her.

[18][19] She received another grant to study with German embryologist Theodor Boveri at the University of Würzburg, focusing on cytology and cell biology, and she went there in 1900, just two months after her appointment as curator.

[14] She spent two postdoctoral semesters at Columbia University from 1906 to 1907, studying with zoologist and embryologist Edmund B. Wilson, analyzing sex chromosomes.

Her colleagues Sars and Robert Collett lobbied for that position, along with Haaken Hasberg Gran, and later influenced Parliament to pass the "Lex Bonnevie" on February 9, 1912.

She told an interviewer at Barnard College that Norway was a good place to study human heredity, because at that time its people live in isolated communities.

She later researched a possible connection between fingerprints and mental capabilities - a popular idea during an era when eugenics controversies were active.

[7] Finally, she studied a genetic dysfunction in mice that made them twitch, proving it was hereditary and caused by the accumulation of water in the brain.

[23] Between 1922 and 1933, Bonnevie contributed to the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations (with Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and others).

[20] Both had been caught up in the racist aspects of eugenics, and her earlier professional rival Kristian Schreiner suffered for not cooperating with Nazis.

[33] She established the Institutt for arvelighetsforskning [no] in 1916, intending it to serve as a scientific counterbalance to the Den konsultative norske komité for rasehygiene [no], which had been founded in 1908 by John Alfred Mjøen [no].

[34] She is recognized as one of Norway's most important women for her efforts in helping Jews escape to Sweden during World War II.