John Tyler Bonner

John Tyler Bonner (May 12, 1920 – February 7, 2019) was an American biologist. He was a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, New Jersey.

Bonner was one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime moulds. He was known for his works in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development over a career of 40 years.

Lars Hedin, the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton, has said of him "John was a world-leading scientist in the field of organismal evolution and development... His studies of the curious cellular organization and ecology of slime molds are classic contributions to science, and led the way forward in the field of organismal cooperation and evolution."

Iain Couzin, British scientist and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, remarked that Bonner would climb the stairs to his office on the top floor of Guyot Hall (Princeton Uni.) almost daily to make new discoveries until he moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012 to live with his children. 

Bonner was born on May 12, 1920, in New York City, New York to Paul Hyde Bonner, and Lilly Stehli. His father, Paul Hyde Bonner, was a renowned published novelist and diplomat. John was one of their four children. One of his brothers, Paul Hyde Bonner, Jr., (1918-1989) later became a known literary agent. 

Bonner attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and earned a B.A. in Biology in 1941. Later he attended Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated with an M.A. degree, in 1942. In 1947, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University, basing his doctoral thesis on his pioneering studies of the life cycles of amoebae.

His studies were interrupted by four years, from 1942 to 1946, of service with the Army Air Forces, though he still spent considerable time in the lab.

After obtaining his Ph.D. from Harvard, Bonner joined the Princeton University faculty in 1947 as an assistant professor and was named George M. Moffett Professor Emeritus of Biology in 1966. He was the chairman of the Princeton Biology Department between 1966 and 1977, also in 1983-84 and 1987-88.

He holds four honorary doctorates and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was made a National Academy of Sciences fellow in 1973.

In addition, he was a visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Science in 1993 and the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1990. He has also been visiting faculty at Brooklyn College, Williams College, and University College, London. He also was a Sheldon Travelling Fellow in 1941 in Panama and Cuba while in graduate school, a Rockefeller Traveling Fellow 1953 in Paris, France, and held Guggenheim Fellowships in 1958 and from 1971-1972 in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

Bonner held a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cambridge, England in 1963. He also had Commonwealth Foundation Book Fund Fellowships in 1971 and between 1984 and in 1985 Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation Book Fund Fellowship in 1978 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died in February 2019 at the age of 98.

Bonner was also involved with one of the earliest American efforts to express scientific support for evolution. The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist Hermann J. Muller circulated a petition in May 1966 entitled: "Is Biological Evolution a Principle of Nature that has been well established by Science?". Bonner signed this manifesto, along with 176 other leading American biologists, including several Nobel Prize winners.

Bonner has written several books on developmental biology and evolution, many scientific papers, and has produced numerous works in biology. He defines the complexity of an organism as the number of types of cells in it though complexity theorists disagree and he argues that both plant and animal taxa which have evolved later, have a greater number of cell types than their predecessors, and seeks an explanation acceptable to neo-Darwinism.

He is best known as one of the world's leading experts on slime moulds and he has led the way in making Dictyostelium discoideum a model organism central to examining some of the major questions in experimental biology. 

Among the many books he wrote are: 

• Morphogenesis: An Essay on Development (1952)
• Cells and Societies (1955)
• The Ideas of Biology (1962)
• Size and Cycle (1965)
• The Cellular Slime Molds (1967)
• The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection Paperback (1988)
• Life Cycles: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist (1993)
• Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales (2006)
• The Social Amoebae: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds (2009)
• Randomness in Evolution (2013)

His autobiography, Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science was the winner of the 2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award.

In 2011, he donated his papers, videos and first stained slides of slime molds to the American Philosophical Society.

According to his family, beginning in 1959 and almost to the end of his life, he spent summers at his home in Margaree Harbour, Nova Scotia, where he wrote many of his books and enjoyed fishing and nature walks. His book Fifty Summers in Cape Breton (4 July 2011) recollects his life there and the changes he witnessed on the island.