Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan ( born September 25, 1866 in Lexington, Kentucky, † December 5, 1945 in Pasadena, California ) was an American zoologist and geneticist who cleared up by crossing experiments with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the basic structure of the chromosomes. He discovered that the genes ( heredity ) are successively on the chromosomes and determined their order and distances between them. He summed up his results together in chromosome maps ( genetic maps ).

In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He is regarded as one of the leading biologists of the late 19th and early 20th century and, after him, the unit centiMorgans is named.

Life

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington (Kentucky). He studied biology at the University of Kentucky, he graduated in 1888 with a Master from. He received his doctorate in 1890 at Johns Hopkins University. After the " Mendelian laws" (now Mendel's laws ) were rediscovered in 1900, partly due to the work of Hugo de Vries, he began to be interested in the genetics. From 1908 on, he undertook two years of crossing experiments with fruit flies without achieving results. In 1910 he discovered among the normally red-eyed fly a male white-eyed mutants. In crosses of these fly with a red-eyed females the descendants of the first generation were all red-eyed, which suggested that the genetic trait for this trait was inherited in a recessive. In crosses of progeny with each half of the thus produced male flies had white eyes. Morgan concluded that the facility for eye color is on the X chromosome and is inherited with this.

This initial success was the occasion to examine with students the inheritance characteristics of thousands of generations of fruit flies to conclude how the genes are located on chromosomes. After 1928 Morgan continued his research at the California Institute of Technology continues.

Morgan married Lilian Vaughan Sampson 1904, the biologist and had four children ( one son and three daughters ). His daughter Isabel Morgan was a significant virologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Awards

In 1919 he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, which honored him in 1924 with the Darwin Medal in 1939 and the Copley Medal. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Aftermath

In the Soviet Union the teachings Morgans among those Gregor Mendel and August Weismann's and thus the modern theory of heredity itself under the " August Meeting" were ( July 31 - August 7, 1948) of the "Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences " discarded and until the 1960s officially banned years. This had disastrous effects on agriculture in the Soviet Union, and not least in China during the cultural Revolution.

Morgan influenced the genetics even after his life: Some of his students and research assistants have been awarded, in the following years, the Nobel Prize. These include George Wells Beadle, Edward B. Lewis and Hermann Joseph Muller. In Memory of Morgan gives the " Genetics Society of America " every year the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal to researchers who have made a significant contribution to the science of genetics.

The Nobel Prize winner Eric Richard Kandel has the Morgans contribution to genetics and biology together with the following words: "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 about genes and Their location on chromosomes helped transform biology into to experimental science. "