Ross Granville Harrison (January 13, 1870 – September 30, 1959) was an American biologist and anatomist credited for his pioneering work on animal tissue culture.

Announcing in his mid teens a resolve to study medicine, he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1886, receiving his BA degree in 1889 at the age of nineteen.

In 1890, he worked as a laboratory assistant for the United States Fish Commission in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,[2] studying the embryology of the oyster with his close friend E. G. Conklin and H. V.

He was a member of Anatomische Gesellschaft ("Anatomical Society" in German) from 1934 to 1935 and became chair of section F for the American Association for Advancement of Science in 1936.

He was Chairman of the National Research Council from 1938 to 1946 and worked to help people with difficulties obtaining medicines such as penicillin.

[2] Harrison gave a Croonian Lecture in 1933: The origin and development of the nervous system studied by the methods of experimental embryology.

[7] Harrison successfully cultured frog neuroblasts in a lymph medium, proving that nerve fibers develop without a preexisting bridge or chain and that tissues can be grown outside of the body.

[2] He was considered for a Nobel prize for his work on nerve-cell outgrowth, which helped form the modern functional understanding of the nervous system, and he contributed to surgical tissue transplant technique.

Harrison then concluded by this data that the buds determined anteroposterior orientation independent of the surrounding host tissue.

[2][8] Harrison published the results of this study in 1921 in the Journal of Experimental Zoology in a paper titled "On relations of symmetry in transplanted limbs".

[9] The first world war was not a happy time for Harrison, with his pacifist leanings and his German wife and studies, but he persevered with embryology, working upon the symmetries of development.

Although a keen morphogeneticist and an admirer of Goethe, Harrison himself did not philosophise much in his papers and, being somewhat reserved and diffident in his social dealings despite his warm feelings for his students' attainment, did not enjoy lecturing but chiefly confined himself to organisation, publication (his textbook illustrations have been highly praised) and patient experiment.