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Early drawing of a male fruit fly.
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Family portrait of the Morgans. Thomas Hunt Morgan is standing next to his father on the right (around 1874).
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Signed and dated photo of T. H. Morgan.
Morgan in the Fly Room at Columbia, 1917. Note the large number of fly cultures.
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Morgan, in the Fly Room at Columbia, 1917. In the lab, Morgan was called "The Boss." This picture was taken by A.H. Sturtevant.
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The Fly Room at Columbia University, around 1920. Note the bananas used as fruit fly food. The room no longer exists at Columbia.
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Morgan at his desk at Columbia, 1920.
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Morgan at work. Note the single ocular microscope; the binocular microsope was not a favored tool of Morgan's.
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New York Times article the day T.H. Morgan won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, December 11, 1933. Supposedly, when asked for a pose, Morgan insisted on this more casual picture with children.
Audio Glossary
Chromosome, Dominant, Gene, Recessive, Sex-linkedVideo Interviews
Garland Allen is a Professor in the Evolutionary and Population Biology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He authored Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man & His Science, and several texts, including Matter, Energy and Life and The Study of Biology.
Clip 1 (0:55)
A description of the "Chromosome debate" that took place during Morgan's time.
Clip 2 (0:45)
Summary of the Chromosome "theory" pre-Morgan.
Clip 3 (1:20)
How & why Drosophila became the experimental model of choice in Morgan's laboratory.
Thomas Hunt Morgan was one of the first true geneticists. He and his "Fly group" made tremendous contributions to our understanding of the role of chromosomes and genes in inheritance. THOMAS HUNT MORGAN (1866-1945) Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky. As a young boy, Morgan loved exploring the countryside collecting samples of wild life and fossils. At the State University of Kentucky, Morgan's course load was heavy in the natural sciences. In 1886, after graduating from State, he went to Johns Hopkins University, a relatively new school at the time, to do graduate work in zoology. His doctoral dissertation was a thorough and well-respected investigation of the embryology of sea spiders. From 1891-1904, Morgan was a professor at Bryn Mawr College where he taught biology and other natural science subjects. He continued his own research, and published books and papers on embryology and zoology. In 1904, he was asked by his good friend, Edmund Wilson, to join the staff at Columbia University as Professor of Experimental Zoology. Morgan accepted, and so began the Drosophila chapter of Morgan's life. Morgan had become interested in species variation, and in 1911, he established the "Fly Room" at Columbia to determine how a species changed over time. For the next 17 years, in a 16 X 23 ft. room, described by many as cramped, dusty, smelly and cockroach ridden, Morgan and his students did ground-breaking genetic research using Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies. Though initially against the idea that the behavior of chromosomes can explain inheritance, Morgan became the leading supporter of the idea. Morgan and his students (Alfred Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges, Hermann Muller and others), developed the ideas, and provided the proof for the chromosomal theory of heredity, genetic linkage, chromosomal crossing over and non-disjunction. Many who knew Morgan described him as an energetic, congenial man with a sense of humor and a flair for practical jokes. In the lab, Morgan was the ideas man and the planner, "the boss." He frequently left the details of planning the experiments to his "boys," his students. Morgan did do his share of work in the lab though he was resistant to the "new" equipment and methods that Calvin Bridges introduced, such as the binocular microscope. Morgan's data, often scribbled on the back of old envelopes or scraps of paper, were decorated with fly corpses. Morgan squashed "unwanted" flies rather than dumping them into the etherized morgue that Bridges set up. In 1928, Morgan moved to Pasadena to organize the biology division at the California Institute of Technology. He became less involved with Drosophila work and returned to his earlier interests in embryology. In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in establishing the chromosomal theory of inheritance. He shared the prize money with his children, and those of his long-time colleagues, Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. Although Morgan officially retired from his position at Cal Tech in 1941, he continued to work in the lab until his death in 1945. | |
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LinksThe Interactive FlyThis site has a nice collection of pictures and images of Drosophila in various stages of development. It also has summaries of different Drosophila genes known to affect development. A Gene Map of the Human GenomeThis site put up by the National Center for Biotechnology Information has the gene maps of human chromosomes based on current information from the Human Genome Project. Bibliography
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