Harold William Beams was born August 3, 1903, in Belle Plaine, Kansas. In 1925 he received a B. A. degree in biology at Fairmount College (later named Wichita State University) and received his M.A. in zoology from Northwestern University the following year. He took the Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Wisconsin in 1929.

Beams' was appointed assistant professor of zoology at the State University of Iowa in 1930 and was named full professor in 1939. His research in cell biology (cytology) was broad. Beams had an older brother, Jesse W. Beams, a physicist at the University of Virginia, who invented the air turbine ultracentrifuge. Harold utilized his brother's invention in his own research with Robert L. King in 1934 to settle a controversy over whether the Golgi Apparatus was real or artifact. Among the 150 papers Beams published was a review article on the Golgi apparatus, which appeared in the International Review of Cytology in 1968.

Beams was the recipient of an award by the Iowa Microbeam Society for his ground-breaking work in electron microscopy, having published his first studies on this topic in 1949. The Carver/Harold W. Beams Distinguished Professorship was established at the University of Iowa in 1989.

Following his retirement in 1971, Beams continued his research. His laboratory was housed within the Biology Annex, later named the Sciences Library.

Beams married Mona K. Murphy in July 1935 and they had a son, David, and a daughter, Marilyn. Harold Beams died January 26, 1992.