Frank A. Brown, Jr.


Frank A. Brown Jr. was a leading mid 20th century researcher of biological rhythms. He was a professor of Biological Sciences at Northwestern University and trustee of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Brown did extensive work with the Fiddler Crab, Uca, finding that they showed both lunar day and solar day rhythms. In other studies he found that a wide variety of organisms displayed responses to gravitational, magnetic and electrical fields leading him to propose an exogenous factor in biological rhythms. This work ran counter to the prevailing trend in chronobiology at the time, the development of the endogenous and bio-chemical model of the circadian clock. Brown envisioned the biological clock as being a duality in which an internal responder to subtle information from the environment is overlain by an endogenous timing mechanism.
Brown's research program which diverged from the mainstream, was ignored by his peers. A paper published in Science magazine in 1957 criticised a methodology of finding cycles with environmental fluctuations, believed to be at least partly directed at Brown. Eight years later, a physiologist and mathematician named A. Heuser published a paper criticising that paper's methodology. Brown continued to study rhythms up to his death in a series of experiments documented in published scientific papers on correlations with magnetic fields, gamma rays and other subtle signals in the natural environment. Later discoveries, such as magnetotactic bacteria, and homing and navigation in birds and turtles, confirmed his recognition of reception of geomagnetic fields in organisms.

Publications