Thomas Hunt Morgan, American Geneticist and Biologist

Posted by Tel Asiado Sep 25, 2008

Today, September 25, is the birthday of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), American geneticist and biologist. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Medicine for investigations linking to chromosomes and hereditary traits.

Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and graduated in zoology form Kentucky State College in 1886. Leter, he became Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University and then at the California Institute of Technology.

In his work on Drosophila, the fruit fly, he found that certain traits are linked, but that the traits are not always inherited together.

Morgan wrote and published some books, including The Mendelian Heredity (which established the chromosome theory of inherhitance in confirmation of Gregor Mendel's work), Evolution and Adaptation and The Theory of the Gene.