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##### October 1, 1959 OBITUARY ## Ross G. Harrison, Yale Zoologist, 89 ##### Special to The New York Times NEW HAVEN, Sept. 30--retired director of the Osborn Zoological Laboratory of Yale University and a pioneer in the embryonic transplantation and culture of animal tissue outside the organism, died at his home here today. He was 89 years old. Dr. Harrison, who was Sterling Professor of Biology Emeritus at Yale, had earned international fame as a zoologist and biologist. He formerly served as chairman of the National Research Council and headed that body from 1938 to 1946. In 1907 Dr. Harrison first adopted the hanging drop culture method to the study of embryonic tissues. His observation that the outgrowth of the nerve from the parent cell body demonstrated that the outgrowth was a form of protoplasmic movement settled a long-standing controversy as to the formation and fundamental nature of nerve fibers. An outgrowth of the tissue-culture technique was the growth of poliomyelitis virus on monkey kidney cells. The technique was cited in an $8,000 award Dr. Harrison received in 1956 from the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, the oldest of Italy's scholarly national societies. Through his successful development of a method of transplanting organs by removing embryonic cells at early stages of development from their normal positions and placing them either in another part of the same embryo or even another embryo it became possible to trace the subsequent development of the particular cells or organ that had been transplanted. Dr. Harrison had served for seventeen years as Sterling Professor at Yale. He was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, a son of Samuel and Katherine Diggs Harrison, on Jan. 13, 1870. He was graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889 and received a Ph.D. there in 1894. Five years later he received a Doctor of Medicine degree at Bonn University in Germany. He subsequently was granted honorary degrees by Yale, Harvard and Columbia Universities and the Universities of Cincinnati, Michigan, Dublin, Chicago, Freiburg and Budapest. Dr. Harrison began his teaching career at Bryn Mawr College as a lecturer in morphology in 1894. For many years Dr. Harrison, who wrote numerous papers in his fields of study, was the editor of The Journal of Experimental Zoology. He served also as a trustee of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., and the Bermuda Biological Station. Surviving Dr. Harrison are his widow, the former Ida Lange; three daughters, Miss Dorothea Harrison of Concord, Mass; Dr. Elizabeth Ross Harrison, a New Haven pediatrician, and Mrs. Rufus Putney of Boulder, Col.; two sons, Ross Granville Harrison Jr., of Darien, Conn., and Richard Edes Harrison of New York; seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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