Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland (14 November 1892, Newton County, Mississippi – 12 February 1969) was an American zoologist and protistologist, famous for giving the first, strong empirical proof for the existence of a symbiotic relationship between internal microorganisms and their metazoan host.
[1] From biological material collected in the mountains of Virginia, Cleveland discovered that the wood-dwelling, wood-feeding roach Cryptocercus punctulatus contains protozoa in an enlarged portion of its proctodeum (hindgut).
[1] In a series of elegant experiments, done while he was a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene, Cleveland showed that the ability of termites to live on a diet of wood or cellulose depends on the digestive capacities of their intestinal flagellates.
[1] Cleveland collected termites in Panama and Costa Rica with the aid of a grant from the Bache Fund of the National Academy of Sciences.
[2] Cleveland is known to historians of astronomy as an odd footnote; in 1924, when Edwin Hubble presented a paper at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), proving that the Andromeda nebula is in fact a galaxy just like our own Milky Way, he was awarded the AAAS Thousand Dollar Prize, a recently established award given for the best paper presented at the annual meeting.