Eileen Southgate

Who is this?

Eileen Southgate is a British biologist who mapped the complete nervous system of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), together with John White, Nichol Thomson, and Sydney Brenner. The work, done largely by hand-tracing thousands of serial section electron micrographs, was the first complete nervous system map of any animal and it helped establish C. elegans as a model organism. Among other projects carried out as a laboratory assistant at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), Southgate contributed to work on solving the structure of hemoglobin with Max Perutz and John Kendrew, and investigating the causes of sickle cell disease with Vernon Ingram.

Trivia

• •Citizenship: United Kingdom
• •Known as: biologist