Google honors Nettie Stevens, the geneticist who discovered XY chromosome

Nettie Stevens, American female geneticist, gets a Google Doodle on her 155th birthday.

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Google is honoring Nettie Stevens, the American female geneticist who was one of the first to describe the chromosomal basis of sex. She came up with the XY sex-determination system, mostly found in humans to classify gender.

Females have two of the same kind of sex chromosome (XX) and are called the homogametic sex. Males have two distinct sex chromosomes (XY) and are called the heterogametic sex.

Nettie Stevens Google Doodle, aka logo, has the XY replacing the Os in the Google logo. Nettie Stevens is showed looking through a microscope at the chromosomes with other genetic-based imagery around the logo.

Nettie Stevens was born today, 155 years ago, on July 7, 1861, in Cavendish, Vermont. She passed away at the age of 50 from cancer on May 4, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland.

In her short life, she published about 40 papers and was a leading force on genetics.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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