William James Beal was born on March 11, 1833, in Adrian, Lenawee County, Michigan.

He was an American botanist and a pioneer in the development of hybrid corn. He studied at the University of Michigan where he earned his B.A. degree (1859) and his M.A. degree (1865). He received his B.Sc. degree from Harvard University in 1865 and his M.Sc. from the University of Chicago in 1875. Between 1858 and 1861 he was a teacher of Natural Sciences at Friends Academy at Union Springs, New York. In 1871, he became the Head of the Botany Department at the Michigan Agricultural College (now University of Michigan) and stayed in this position for forty years. He led the research using cross-fertilization to increase the yield from 8 rowed Indian corn to 24 rowed hybrid corn. He also founded the W. J. Beal Botanical Garden in 1877, making it the oldest continuously operated botanical garden in the United States.

He died on May 12, 1924, in East Lansing, Ingham County, Michigan.

Tarleton Hoffman Bean was born on October 8, 1846, in Bainbridge, Pennsylvania.

He was an American ichthyologist, educator, and author. In 1883, he was awarded an M.Sc. degree from Indiana University. In addition to his work in ichthyology, he was a forester, a fish culturist, a conservationist, an editor, an administrator, and an exhibitor. His focus on ichthyology began in the summer of 1874 when he worked as a volunteer at the Fish Commission laboratory in Noank, Connecticut. There, he first met Spencer F. Baird, an American naturalist, and ichthyologist. Bean spent the next two decades in Washington working for the National Museum and the Fish Commission. From 1895 to 1898 he was the first Director of the New York Aquarium. He spent most of the next eight years working on the fisheries and forestry exhibits at the world's fairs in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904). In 1906, he became New York’s state fish culturist, a position he held until his death in 1916 following an automobile accident. He was the bearer of the Royal Imperial Order of the Red Eagle, conferred by the Emperor of Prussia Wilhelm II.

He died on December 28, 1916, in Albany, New York.

William Bennett Bean was born in the Philippines in 1909 and grew up in the U.S. His father, Robert Bennett Bean, was a physician of note and a resident under William Osler. William Bennett Bean received his M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1935. He interned at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Bean became an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati but soon after was inducted in to the U.S. Army, where his assignments included important research in nutrition and dehydration. Dr. Bean returned to the University of Cincinnati in 1946 as associate professor, but left in 1948 to become head of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa. He left Iowa in 1974 to become director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. In 1980 he returned to Iowa and in 1982 published Walter Reed: A Biography. (From http://www.vh.org/adult/provider/history/bean/, Sept. 17, 2003)