Background
George Edward Coleman was born in Grass Valley, California, on December 8, 1867. He
graduated from the University of California in 1891 with a B.S. in chemistry. He worked
in metallurgy and horticulture until 1909, when he began the study of bacteriology and
allied subjects. During 1909 and 1910 he was a volunteer worker at the Pasteur Institute
in Paris and later, for ten months, he studied and worked in the Clinical laboratory of
the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, Italy.