Thomas Hunt Morgan - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that September 25 is the anniversary of the birth of American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author Thomas Hunt Morgan "who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity."

Thomas Hunt Morgan and fruit flies
"Thomas Hunt Morgan's pioneering work that established the connection with sex and eye color in fruit flies (and thus helped validate the chromosomal theory of inheritance)."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huDDaj0PjLU

Images:
1. January 1, 1933 Thomas Hunt Morgan discovered that chromosomes play a role in heredity. He found this out by studying the mutation of fruit flies. His discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics.
2. Thomas Hunt Morgan historical marker in Kentucky.
3. Thomas Hunt Morgan 'Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes.
4. 1918 Thomas Hunt Morgan with two of his daughters

1. Background from nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1933/morgan/biographical/
Thomas H. Morgan Biographical
Thomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866, at Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. He was the eldest son of Charlton Hunt Morgan.
He was educated at the University of Kentucky, where he took his B.S. degree in 1886, subsequently doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied morphology with W. K. Brooks, and physiology with H. Newell Martin.

As a child he had shown an immense interest in natural history and even at the age of ten, he collected birds, birds’ eggs, and fossils during his life in the country; and in 1887, the year after his graduation, he spent some time at the seashore laboratory of Alphaeus Hyatt at Annisquam, Mass. During the summer of 1888, he was engaged in research for the United States Fish Commission at Woods Hole. In 1890 he spent the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, thus beginning a long-term association with the MBL as a summer investigator and trustee. In 1890 he obtained his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University. ln that same year he was awarded the Adam Bruce Fellowship and visited Europe, working especially at the Marine Zoological Laboratory at Naples which he visited again in 1895 and 1900. At Naples he met Hans Driesch and Curt Herbst. The influence of Driesch with whom he later collaborated, no doubt turned his mind in the direction of experimental embryology.

In 1891 he became Associate Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College for Women, where he stayed until 1904, when he became Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University, New York. He remained there until 1928, when he was appointed Professor of Biology and Director of the G. Kerckhoff Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology, at Pasadena. Here he remained until 1945. During his later years he had his private laboratory at Corona del Mar, California.
During Morgan’s 24-years period at Columbia University his attention was drawn toward the bearing of cytology on the broader aspects of biological interpretation. His close contact with E. B. Wilson offered exceptional opportunities to come into more direct contact with the kind of work which was being actively carried out in the zoological department, at that time.
Morgan was a many-sided character who was, as a student, critical and independent. His early published work showed him to be critical of Mendelian conceptions of heredity, and in 1905 he challenged the assumption then current that the germ cells are pure and uncrossed and, like Bateson was sceptical of the view that species arise by natural selection. «Nature», he said, «makes new species outright.» In 1909 he began the work on the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster with which his name will always be associated.

It appears that Drosophila was first bred in quantity by C. W. Woodworth, who was working from 1900-1901, at Harvard University, and Woodworth there suggested to W. E. Castle that Drosophila might be used for genetical work. Castle and his associates used it for their work on the effects of inbreeding, and through them F. E. Lutz became interested in it and the latter introduced it to Morgan, who was looking for less expensive material that could be bred in the very limited space at his command. Shortly after he commenced work with this new material (1909), a number of striking mutants turned up. His subsequent studies on this phenomenon ultimately enabled him to determine the precise behaviour and exact localization of genes.

The importance of Morgan’s earlier work with Drosophila was that it demonstrated that the associations known as coupling and repulsion, discovered by English workers in 1909 and 1910 using the Sweet Pea, are in reality the obverse and reverse of the same phenomenon, which was later called linkage. Morgan’s first papers dealt with the demonstration of sex linkage of the gene for white eyes in the fly, the male fly being heterogametic. His work also showed that very large progenies of Drosophila could be bred. The flies were, in fact, bred by the million, and all the material thus obtained was carefully analysed. His work also demonstrated the important fact that spontaneous mutations frequently appeared in the cultures of the flies. On the basis of the analysis of the large body of facts thus obtained, Morgan put forward a theory of the linear arrangement of the genes in the chromosomes, expanding this theory in his book, Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915).
In addition to this genetical work, however, Morgan made contributions of great importance to experimental embryology and to regeneration. So far as embryology is concerned, he refuted by a simple experiment the theory of Roux and Weismann that, when the embryo of the frog is in the two-cell stage, the blastomeres receive unequal contributions from the parent blastoderm, so that a «mosaic» results. Among his other embryological discoveries was the demonstration that gravity is not, as Roux’s work had suggested, important in the early development of the egg.

Although so much of his time and effort was given to genetical work, Morgan never lost his interest in experimental embryology and he gave it, during his last years increasing attention.
To the study of regeneration he made several important contributions, an outstanding one being his demonstration that parts of the organism which are not subject to injury, such as the abdominal appendages of the hermit crab, will nevertheless regenerate, so that regeneration is not an adaptation evolved to meet the risks of loss of parts of the body. On this part of his work he wrote his book Regeneration.

Apart from the books previously mentioned Morgan wrote: Heredity and Sex (1913), The Physical Basis of Heredity(1919), Embryology and Genetics (1924), Evolution and Genetics (1925), The Theory of the Gene (1926), Experimental Embryology (1927), The Scientifc Basis of Evolution (2nd. ed., 1935), all of them classics in the literature of genetics.
Morgan was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London in 1919, where he delivered the Croonian Lecture in 1922. In 1924, he was awarded the Darwin Medal, and in 1939 the Copley Medal of the Society.

For his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933.

Among his collaborators at Columbia may be mentioned H. J. Muller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946 for his production of mutations by means of X-rays.

Morgan married Lilian Vaughan Sampson, in 1904, who had been a student at Bryn Mawr College, and who often assisted him in his research. They had one son and three daughters.
Professor Morgan died in 1945.

From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1965

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Thomas H. Morgan died on December 4, 1945."

2. Background from assignmentpoint.com/arts/biography/biography-of-thomas-hunt-morgan.html
"Thomas Hunt Morgan – American biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author.
Name: Thomas Hunt Morgan
Date of Birth: September 25, 1866
Place of Birth: Lexington, Kentucky, United States
Date of Death: December 4, 1945 (aged 79)
Place of Death: Pasadena, California, U.S.
Occupation: Biologist, Author
Father: Charlton Hunt Morgan
Mother: Ellen Key Howard Morgan
Spouse/Ex: Lillian Vaughan Sampson

Early Life
An American zoologist and geneticist, famous for his experimental research with the fruit fly (Drosophila) by which he established the chromosome theory of heredity; Thomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866, to a rich, influential southern family in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. He is known for his legendary experimental analysis of the fruit fly, after which he formulated the chromosome theory of heredity. Morgan also demonstrated that genes are connected in a series on chromosomes, which carry hereditary traits, therefore kick-starting the modern field of genetics. He received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1933.
Morgan developed an early interest in natural history while roaming around in the countryside of Kentucky and later earned his B.S. in zoology. While working for his postgraduate degree at the newly founded Hopkins University he became especially interested in morphology. Although he began his career at Bryn Mawr College his major works were done at the University of Columbia. Here he stressed mainly on evolution and hereditary and worked with ‘Drosophila melanogaster’ (fruit fly) in order to find heritable mutations. After years of painstaking work, he was not only able to integrate Mendel’s theories with the Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory of inheritance, but also provide irrefutable evidence for it. His discovery of the theory of the chromosome began to be compared with the discovery of Galileo and Newton because it represented a great leap and opened the door for further studies. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his discoveries that explained the role played by the chromosome in heredity.
During his distinguished career, Morgan wrote 22 books and 370 scientific papers. As a result of his work, Drosophila became a major model organism in contemporary genetics. The Division of Biology which he established at the California Institute of Technology has produced seven Nobel Prize winners.

Childhood, Family and Educational Life
An eminent American zoologist and geneticist, Thomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866, in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S. into an influential family of Southern planters. His father, Charlton Hunt Morgan, was a former Confederate officer. His mother, Ellen Key Howard Morgan, was from Maryland.
Following the Civil War, the family fell on hard times with the temporary loss of civil and some property rights for those who aided the Confederacy. His father had difficulty finding work in politics and spent much of his time coordinating veteran’s reunions. Young Thomas spent a lot of time wandering in the countryside of Kentucky and Maryland, collecting birds’ eggs and fossils. It created in him an interest in natural history, which remained with him till his death.
In 1880, Morgan was admitted to the preparatory department of the College of Kentucky. Then in 1882, he received admission in the main College. As an undergraduate student, he focused on science and enjoyed studying natural history.
In 1886 Morgan received the B.S. degree from the State College of Kentucky (later the University of Kentucky) in zoology and then entered Johns Hopkins University for graduate work in biology. At Hopkins, he studied general biology, anatomy, physiology, morphology, and embryology, laying especial stress to morphology, which he studied under William Keith Brooks. After two years of work with Brooks at Hopkins, he received his M.S. degree from the State College of Kentucky in 1888. After being awarded the Ph.D. in 1890, Morgan remained there a year before accepting a teaching post at Bryn Mawr College. Subsequently, he started working for his postdoctoral at the same institute on Bruce fellowship. It allowed him to travel to Bahamas, Jamaica, and Naples for further research.

Personal Life
On June 4, 1904, Thomas Hunt Morgan married Lillian Vaughan Sampson (1870–1952), who had entered graduate school in biology at Bryn Mawr the same year Morgan joined the faculty; she put aside her scientific work in the early years of their marriage when they had four children. Later she contributed significantly to Morgan’s Drosophila work.
One of their daughters, Isabel Merrick Morgan, later became a virologist at Johns Hopkins University. She became known for her work on the preparation of an experimental vaccine to protect monkeys against polio.

Career and Works
Thomas Hunt Morgan completed his postdoctoral in 1891 and in autumn he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College. There he mainly taught the morphology related subjects. Although he was a good teacher he was more interested in research work. He spent the first few years at the College researching on aquatic animals like sea acorns, ascidian worms, and frogs.
In 1894 Morgan was granted a year’s absence to conduct research in the laboratories of Stazione Zoologica in Naples, where Wilson had worked two years earlier. There he worked with German biologist Hans Driesch, whose research in the experimental study of development piqued Morgan’s interest. Among other projects that year, Morgan completed an experimental study of ctenophore embryology. In Naples and through Loeb, he became familiar with the Entwicklungsmechanik (roughly, “developmental mechanics”) school of experimental biology. It was a reaction to the vitalistic Naturphilosophie, which was extremely influential in 19th-century morphology. Morgan changed his work from traditional, largely descriptive morphology to experimental embryology that sought physical and chemical explanations for organismal development.

During the period 1893-1910, Morgan applied experimental techniques to fundamental problems of embryology. In order to identify causally related events during development, he analyzed such problems as the formation of embryos from separated blastomeres (early embryonic cells) and fertilization in nucleated and nonnucleated egg fragments. As examples of the effects of physical factors, he analyzed the way in which the spatial orientation of eggs affects their future development and the action of salt concentration on the development of fertilized and unfertilized eggs. In 1904 Morgan married one of his graduate students at Bryn Mawr, Lillian V. Sampson, a cytologist and embryologist of considerable skill. The same year, he accepted an invitation to assume the professorship of experimental zoology at Columbia University, where, during the next 24 years, he conducted most of his important research in heredity.

Morgan was made a full professor in 1895. He now began to work on regeneration and development of larva, trying to distinguish between the external and internal causes. In 1897, he published his first book, ‘The Development of the Frog’s Egg’. Subsequently, he began a series of study on the capacity to regenerate in small animals like tadpoles, fish, and earthworms. In 1901, he published his findings in another book called ‘Regeneration’. Sometime now, he also began his research on sex determination. In 1903, he published his third book, ‘Evolution and Adaption’, in which he accepted the process of evolution, but criticized Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Beginning in 1900, Morgan started working on the problem of sex determination, which he had previously dismissed when Nettie Stevens discovered the impact of the Y chromosome on sex. He also continued to study the evolutionary problems that had been the focus of his earliest work.
Like most embryologists and many biologists at the turn of the century, Morgan found the Darwinian theory of evolution lacking in plausibility. It was difficult to conceive of the development of complex adaptations simply by an accumulation of slight chance variations. Moreover, Darwin had provided no mechanism of heredity to account for the origin or transmission of variations, except his early and hypothetical theory of pangenesis. Although Morgan believed that evolution itself was a fact, the mechanism of natural selection proposed by Darwin seemed incomplete because it could not be put to an experimental test.

In 1908, Morgan started working on ‘Drosophila melanogaster’ (common fruit fly). He began by cross-breeding these flies in order to find heritable mutations. Ultimately in 1910, Morgan found a male fly with white eyes among its red-eyed wild sisters. He then began to cross breed the white-eyed mutant fly with its red-eyed wild sisters and found that the males were always born with white eye while the females mostly had red eye. Although there were exceptions, the work showed for the first time the relationship between hereditary characters and specific chromosome. In fact, the papers Morgan published during 1909 and 1910 reflected his belief that chromosomes might be related to sex determination. However, until then he had not concluded that accessory chromosome X was the actual sex determiner.

Morgan also discovered a pink-eyed mutant that showed a different pattern of inheritance. In a paper published in Science in 1911, he concluded that (1) some traits were sex-linked, (2) the trait was probably carried on one of the sex chromosomes, and (3) other genes were probably carried on specific chromosomes as well. Morgan, along with his team of scientist, then accumulated thousands of mutant flies and began to study their complex inheritance patterns. In 1913, he published his findings in his fifth book, titled ‘Heredity and Sex’. Slowly, he began to accept Mendel’s laws and at the same time continued his research with fruit fly. Ultimately, in 1915, he integrated Mendel’s theories with the Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory of inheritance and provided incontestable evidence for it.

Also in 1915, Morgan wrote a seminal book with Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges, and H. J. Muller. Titled ‘The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity’, the book is considered to be the fundamental book for the study of new genetics. Morgan next began to concentrate on embryology. He encouraged his students to take up an experimental approach in all fields of biology.
Morgan returned to embryology and worked to encourage the spread of genetics research to other organisms and the spread of the mechanistic experimental approach (Enwicklungsmechanik) to all biological fields. After 1915, he also became a strong critic of the growing eugenics movement. This adopted the ideas of genetics in support of racism and worse. Morgan’s fly-room at Columbia became world-famous, and he found it easy to attract funding and visiting academics. In 1927 after 25 years at Columbia, and nearing the age of retirement, he received an offer from George Ellery Hale to establish a school of biology in California. Although he had by then neared the retirement age he took up the offer enthusiastically and shifted to California in 1928.
Morgan also extensively studied the field of experimental embryology. He knew the hypothetical connections between genetics and development but was rather unwilling at the time to reveal those links explicitly.

Morgan retired from the institute in 1942 but continued as professor and chairman emeritus until his death. The institution under him became a renowned center of research for experimental embryology, genetics, and evolution, physiology, biophysics, and biochemistry. He also established the Marine Laboratory at Corona del Mar. Concurrently, he also held a number of prestigious positions. For example, from 1927 to 1931 Morgan was the President of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1930 he became the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A
wards and Honor
In 1924, Morgan received Darwin Medal from the Royal Society “For his valuable work in zoology and more especially his researches on heredity and cytology.”
In 1933 Thomas Hunt Morgan was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of “hereditary transmission mechanisms in Drosophila”
In 1939 Morgan was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society of London, of which he was a foreign member.
In 1919, Morgan was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He received an honorary LL.D. from John Hopkins University and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky.
In 1927-31 Thomas Hunt Morgan served as president of the National Academy of Sciences; in 1930 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and in 1932 of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics. He remained on the faculty at Caltech until his death.

Death and Legacy
Thomas Hunt Morgan had throughout his life suffered from a chronic duodenal ulcer. In 1945, when he was 79 years old, he experienced a severe heart attack. Morgan died from a ruptured artery on December 4, 1945, in Pasadena, California, United States.
Morgan is best remembered for his work on chromosome theory of inheritance. His researches with ‘Drosophila melanogaster’ provided incontrovertible evidence for the inheritance theory and made it acceptable to most biologists of the day. In addition, his success with Drosophila also made it one of the most widely used model organism.
Morgan left an important legacy in genetics. Some of Morgan’s students from Columbia and Caltech went on to win their own Nobel Prizes, including George Wells Beadle and Hermann Joseph Muller. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel has written of Morgan, “Much as Darwin’s insights into the evolution of animal species first gave coherence to nineteenth-century biology as a descriptive science, Morgan’s findings of genes and their location on chromosomes helped transform biology into an experimental science.”

In 1989, Sweden issued a stamp to commemorate his discoveries. The Thomas Hunt Morgan School of Biological Sciences at the University of Kentucky has also been named in his honor.

Information Source:
1. famousscientists.org
2. britannica.com
3. thefamouspeople.com
4. wikipedia

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Maj Marty Hogan Great find for genetics.

Thanks for the history share.