Arthur Whiteley

Arthur Whiteley died after a brief illness in 2013 at age 96.

Whiteley joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1947, which also marked the beginning of his long association with the Friday Harbor Laboratories. Whiteley's research throughout his career focused on the development of sea urchin embryos, with particular focus on the genetic mechanisms controlling development and on the enzymes involved in sea urchin metabolism. Whiteley was recognized as a committed teacher as well as a researcher, and was noted for his long support of a program for training graduate students in developmental biology, which he directed until 1985.

Arthur Henry Whiteley (1916-2013) was a zoologist who spent most of his research career at the University of Washington, where he studied developmental biology using sea urchins as a model organism.

Whiteley was born in 1916 in Michigan to English immigrants. He studied biology as an undergraduate at Kalamazoo College and then received a master's degree in zoology from the University of Wisconsin. He moved to the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D., which focused on early use of 32P radioisotope labeling in biology, supervised by Sumner Cushing Brooks. Whiteley then spent time at Princeton University on a war-related project on decompression sickness in aviation. He next moved to the University of Texas, Galveston and then back to California to work with Albert Tyler at the California Institute of Technology, where he was first exposed to the topic of sea urchin development.