Richard Griffith Seed (May 22, 1928 – November 17, 2013) was an American physicist and businessman best known for forcing a national debate on human cloning in the late 1990s.
He graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois before attending Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree there in 1949.
Later, he and his brother, Chicago surgeon Randolph Seed, started another company, Fertility & Genetics Research Inc., to help infertile women conceive children using the same technique.
In the media frenzy that followed, the story of a 69-year-old eccentric, and maverick scientist emerged, but Seed possessed impressive credentials and was not dismissed immediately.
"God made man in his own image," he told National Public Radio correspondent Joe Palca in December 1997.