Francis O. Schmitt

Francis O. Schmitt (1903–1995) was an American biologist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schmitt received an A.B. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1927 from Washington University in St. Louis. During a summer research program at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1923, he worked with Haldan Keffer Hartline under the supervision Jacques Loeb and Thomas Hunt Morgan. Schmitt joined the faculty in 1929 and taught zoology until 1941. He collaborated extensively with Arthur H. Compton to develop x-ray diffraction techniques for biological macro-structures like muscles and nerves. In 1941, Schmitt was recruited by MIT's Karl Compton and Vannevar Bush to lead radically new Department of...