Walter Sutton

Walter Stanborough Sutton ( born April 5, 1877 in Utica (New York), † November 10, 1916 in Kansas City ) was an American geneticist and physician.

Sutton was born into a farming family in Kansas. In 1896 he began studying engineering at the University of Kansas, but instead, after one of his brothers had died of typhus, soon in the Department of Biology and Medicine. After graduating as a master, he worked for Edmund B. Wilson at Columbia University.

In his 1903 essay published in The chromosomes in heredity Sutton the first to formulate the chromosome theory of inheritance, in which the recently rediscovered Mendel's laws of heredity on the behavior of chromosomes at meiosis are returned.

After he received his doctorate in medicine in 1907, Sutton worked mainly as a surgeon until he died in 1916 from the effects of acute appendicitis.