John Tyler Bonner — American Educator born on May 12, 1920,

John Tyler Bonner is an emeritus professor, now lecturer with the rank of professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He is a pioneer in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development over a career of 40 years and is one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime moulds. Arizona State University says that the establishment and growth of developmental-evolutionary biology owes a great debt to the work of Bonner’s studies. His work is highly readable and unusually clearly written and his contributions have made many complicated ideas of biology accessible to a wide audience... (wikipedia)

The sudden appearance of mushrooms after a summer rain is one of the more impressive spectacles of the plant world.
In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.
My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.
It is hard to explain the huge variety of diatoms - a microorganism that has 100,000 species - in terms of natural selection.
That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life's matter in all its aspects.