The grandson of the famous biologist T.H Huxley (1825 – 95), and his brother of the writer Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley studied at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, receiving his zoology degree in 1909.
He spent some time studying marine sponges at the Naples Zoological Station. This led to his first book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom in 1912.
He returned to Oxford in 1910 as a zoology lecturer. Two years later he moved to the Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, as a research associate to establish the biology department. As the first head of the Department of Biology, he planned its laboratories and curriculum and chose its early, distinguished faculty.
In 1916 he returned home serving in the British Army Intelligence Crops until the end of World War I.
After the war he was made a fellow of New College, Oxford during which time he organized the University expedition to Spitsbergen (1921).
Huxley was appointed professor of zoology at King’s College, London, in 1925 but resigned two years later to allow more time to research. His notable studies of the differential growth of different body parts.
By the time of the publication of Problems of Relative Growth in 1932, Huxley had become widely known as a talented popularizer of biology.
Huxley served (1935 – 42), as secretary of the Zoological Society of London and instigated an ambitious program rebuilding, unfortunately he never realized because of the war. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1938. He became widely known through his appearances on the BBC program Brains Trust.
He is perhaps best known among biologists for coining the term ‘evolutionary synthesis’ to refer to the unification of taxonomy, genetics, and Darwinian theory in the 1940s. He helped establish the modern synthetic theory of evolution by natural selection.
He was the first director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946-1948, during which time he traveled widely and identified the growing problem population expansion and environmental destruction.
He collaborated with science fiction writer H. G Wells to write The Science of Life, one of the first biology books for a popular audience.
No stranger to controversy, Huxley supported the contentious view that the human race could benefit from planned parenthood using artificial insemination by donors of ‘superior characteristics’. He died February 14, 1975.
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887 – 1975)
