James D. Ebert papers

James D. Ebert was born in 1922 in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1942, was commissioned into the Navy and served as a lieutenant for destroyer duty in the Pacific. He received a Ph.D. in biology and experimental embryology from Johns Hopkins in 1950. He was later awarded honorary degrees from Yale, Duke, Indiana University, Washington and Jefferson College, and Moravian College.

Dr. Ebert taught at MIT and Indiana University before being named Director of the Carnegie embryology department. He became President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1970. He served until 1975 when he was replaced by Keith R. Porter. Dr. Porter served for only one year, and Dr. Ebert resumed as Director and served in 1977 when Paul R. Gross was elected President and Director. In 1977, he became president of Carnegie, where he served until his retirement in 1987. He then returned to Johns Hopkins as director of the Chesapeake Bay Institute and became a professor at the university in 1992.

In 1981, Dr. Ebert was elected a vice president of the National Academy of Sciences; he was also an associate of the Marine Biological Laboratory from 1974 to 2001 and a member of the MBL corporation for 10 years. His 195 publications included four books.

His research contributed to the current understanding of how the body rejects transplanted organs. He also experimented with tumor-causing viruses that demonstrated how normal human cells become cancerous.