Thomas Hunt Morgan Facts
Thomas Hunt Morgan Facts
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| Interesting Thomas Hunt Morgan Facts: |
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| Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and was the eldest son. |
| As a child he was interested in natural history and began to collect birds, bird eggs and fossils. |
| In 1886 he earned his B.S. at the University of Kentucky |
| He transferred to Johns Hopkins University for his graduate work. |
| In 1887 he worked at the seashore laboratory of Alphaeus Hyatt in Massachusetts. |
| The next year he was a research for the United States fish Commission at Woods Hole. |
| The summer of 1890 he worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. |
| He subsequently spent many summers there as an investigator. |
| In 1890 he earned his PhD in zoology at Johns Hopkins and he received the Adam Bruce Fellowship. |
| He used it to travel to Europe where he worked at the Marine Zoological Laboratory in Naples. |
| He returned to Naples in 1895 and 1900. |
| While at Naples he met Hans Driesch who influenced him to study embryology. |
| From 1891 to 1904 he was Associate Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College. |
| In 1904 he became Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University. |
| From 1928 to 1945 he was Director of the G.Kerckhoff Laboratories and Professor of Biology at Caltech. |
| While at Columbia Morgan studied the effect of cytology on biology. |
| He was critical of the idea that gametes are pure and uncrossed. |
| In 1909 he had begun his study of Drosophila melanogaster. |
| He chose this particular animal for his study of genetics since it was cheap and took up little room in his cramped laboratory. |
| Shortly after he began his study of them, several mutants occurred in the flies. |
| From his study of the mutant flies he was able to determine the precise behavior and location of the responsible genes. |
| He published a paper on sex linkage on eye color in Drosophila. |
| Morgan bred the flies by the millions and carefully analyzed the results. |
| He discovered that mutations spontaneously appeared. |
| In 1915 he published Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity and theorized that genes are linearly arranged in the chromosomes. |
| His other books include The Physical Basis of Heredity (1919), Embryology and Genetics (1924), Evolution and Genetics (1925), The Theory of the Gene (1926) and The Scientific Basis of Evolution. |
| In addition to the Nobel Prize he received the Darwin Medal and the Copley Medal in recognition of his enormous contribution to the field of genetics. |
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