fbpx
Wikipedia

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan (September 25, 1866 – December 4, 1945)[2] was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.[3]

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Morgan in 1891
Born(1866-09-25)September 25, 1866
DiedDecember 4, 1945(1945-12-04) (aged 79)
Alma mater
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Doctoral students
Signature

Morgan received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in zoology in 1890 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr. Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900, Morgan began to study the genetic characteristics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University's Schermerhorn Hall, Morgan demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity. These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics.

During his distinguished career, Morgan wrote 22 books and 370 scientific papers.[2] As a result of his work, Drosophila became a major model organism in contemporary genetics. The Division of Biology which he established at the California Institute of Technology has produced seven Nobel Prize winners.

Early life and education edit

Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to Charlton Hunt Morgan and Ellen Key Howard Morgan.[3][4] Part of a line of Southern plantation and slave owners on his father's side, Morgan was a nephew of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan; his great-grandfather John Wesley Hunt had been one of the first millionaires west of the Allegheny Mountains. Through his mother, he was the great-grandson of Francis Scott Key, the author of the "Star Spangled Banner", and John Eager Howard, governor and senator from Maryland.[4] Following the Civil War, the family fell on hard times with the temporary loss of civil and some property rights for those who aided the Confederacy. His father had difficulty finding work in politics and spent much of his time coordinating veterans' reunions.

Beginning at age 16 in the Preparatory Department, Morgan attended the State College of Kentucky (now the University of Kentucky). He focused on science; he particularly enjoyed natural history, and worked with the U.S. Geological Survey in his summers. He graduated as valedictorian in 1886 with a Bachelor of Science degree.[5] Following a summer at the Marine Biology School in Annisquam, Massachusetts, Morgan began graduate studies in zoology at the recently founded Johns Hopkins University. After two years of experimental work with morphologist William Keith Brooks and writing several publications, Morgan was eligible to receive a Master of Science from the State College of Kentucky in 1888. The college required two years of study at another institution and an examination by the college faculty.[citation needed] The college offered Morgan a full professorship; however, he chose to stay at Johns Hopkins and was awarded a relatively large fellowship to help him fund his studies.[citation needed]

Under Brooks, Morgan completed his thesis work on the embryology of sea spiders—collected during the summers of 1889 and 1890 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts—to determine their phylogenetic relationship with other arthropods. He concluded that concerning embryology, they were more closely related to spiders than crustaceans. Based on the publication of this work, Morgan was awarded his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1890 and was also awarded the Bruce Fellowship in Research. He used the fellowship to travel to Jamaica, the Bahamas and Europe to conduct further research.[6]

Every summer from 1910 to 1925, Morgan and his colleagues at the famous Fly Room at Columbia University moved their research program to the Marine Biological Laboratory. Aside from being an independent investigator at the MBL from 1890 to 1942, he became very involved in the governance of the institution, including serving as an MBL trustee from 1897 to 1945.[7]

Career and research edit

Bryn Mawr edit

In 1890, Morgan was appointed associate professor (and head of the biology department) at Johns Hopkins' sister school Bryn Mawr College, replacing his colleague Edmund Beecher Wilson.[8] Morgan taught all morphology-related courses, while the other member of the department, Jacques Loeb, taught the physiological courses. Although Loeb stayed for only one year, it was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.[9] Morgan lectured in biology five days a week, giving two lectures a day. He frequently included his recent research in his lectures. Although an enthusiastic teacher, he was most interested in research in the laboratory. During the first few years at Bryn Mawr, he produced descriptive studies of sea acorns, ascidian worms, and frogs.

In 1894 Morgan was granted a year's absence to conduct research in the laboratories of Stazione Zoologica in Naples, where Wilson had worked two years earlier. There he worked with German biologist Hans Driesch, whose research in the experimental study of development piqued Morgan's interest. Among other projects that year, Morgan completed an experimental study of ctenophore embryology. In Naples and through Loeb, he became familiar with the Entwicklungsmechanik (roughly, "developmental mechanics") school of experimental biology. It was a reaction to the vitalistic Naturphilosophie, which was extremely influential in 19th-century morphology. Morgan changed his work from traditional, largely descriptive morphology to experimental embryology that sought physical and chemical explanations for organismal development.[10]

At the time, there was considerable scientific debate over the question of how an embryo developed. Following Wilhelm Roux's mosaic theory of development, some believed that hereditary material was divided among embryonic cells, which were predestined to form particular parts of a mature organism. Driesch and others thought that development was due to epigenetic factors, where interactions between the protoplasm and the nucleus of the egg and the environment could affect development. Morgan was in the latter camp; his work with Driesch demonstrated that blastomeres isolated from sea urchin and ctenophore eggs could develop into complete larvae, contrary to the predictions (and experimental evidence) of Roux's supporters.[11] A related debate involved the role of epigenetic and environmental factors in development; on this front Morgan showed that sea urchin eggs could be induced to divide without fertilization by adding magnesium chloride. Loeb continued this work and became well known for creating fatherless frogs using the method.[12][13]

When Morgan returned to Bryn Mawr in 1895, he was promoted to full professor. Morgan's main lines of experimental work involved regeneration and larval development; in each case, his goal was to distinguish internal and external causes to shed light on the Roux-Driesch debate. He wrote his first book, The Development of the Frog's Egg (1897). He began a series of studies on different organisms' ability to regenerate. He looked at grafting and regeneration in tadpoles, fish, and earthworms; in 1901 he published his research as Regeneration.

Beginning in 1900, Morgan started working on the problem of sex determination, which he had previously dismissed when Nettie Stevens discovered the impact of the Y chromosome on sex. He also continued to study the evolutionary problems that had been the focus of his earliest work.[14]

Columbia University edit

Morgan worked at Columbia University for 24 years, from 1904 until 1928 when he left for a position at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1904, his friend, Jofi Joseph died of tuberculosis, and he felt he ought to mourn her, though E. B. Wilson—still blazing the path for his younger friend—invited Morgan to join him at Columbia University. This move freed him to focus fully on experimental work.[15]

 
In a typical Drosophila genetics experiment, male and female flies with known phenotypes are put in a jar to mate; females must be virgins. Eggs are laid in porridge which the larvae feed on; when the life cycle is complete, the progeny are scored for the inheritance of the trait of interest.

When Morgan took the professorship in experimental zoology, he became increasingly focused on the mechanisms of heredity and evolution. He published Evolution and Adaptation (1903); like many biologists at the time, he saw evidence for biological evolution (as in the common descent of similar species) but rejected Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection acting on small, constantly produced variations.

Extensive work in biometry seemed to indicate that continuous natural variation had distinct limits and did not represent heritable changes. Embryological development posed an additional problem in Morgan's view, as selection could not act on the early, incomplete stages of highly complex organs such as the eye. The common solution of the Lamarckian mechanism of inheritance of acquired characters, which featured prominently in Darwin's theory, was increasingly rejected by biologists. According to Morgan's biographer Garland Allen, he was also hindered by his views on taxonomy: he thought that species were entirely artificial creations that distorted the continuously variable range of real forms, while he held a "typological" view of larger taxa and could see no way that one such group could transform into another. But while Morgan was skeptical of natural selection for many years, his theories of heredity and variation were radically transformed through his conversion to Mendelism.[16]

In 1900 three scientists, Carl Correns, Erich von Tschermak and Hugo De Vries, had rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel, and with it the foundation of genetics. De Vries proposed that new species were created by mutation, bypassing the need for either Lamarckism or Darwinism. As Morgan had dismissed both evolutionary theories, he was seeking to prove De Vries' mutation theory with his experimental heredity work. He was initially skeptical of Mendel's laws of heredity (as well as the related chromosomal theory of sex determination), which were being considered as a possible basis for natural selection.

 
Sex linked inheritance of the white eyed mutation.

Following C. W. Woodworth and William E. Castle, around 1908 Morgan started working on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and encouraging students to do so as well. With Fernandus Payne, he mutated Drosophila through physical, chemical, and radiational means.[17][18] He began cross-breeding experiments to find heritable mutations, but they had no significant success for two years.[17] Castle had also had difficulty identifying mutations in Drosophila, which were tiny. Finally, in 1909, a series of heritable mutants appeared, some of which displayed Mendelian inheritance patterns; in 1910 Morgan noticed a white-eyed mutant male among the red-eyed wild types. When white-eyed flies were bred with a red-eyed female, their progeny were all red-eyed. A second-generation cross produced white-eyed males—a sex-linked recessive trait, the gene for which Morgan named white. Morgan also discovered a pink-eyed mutant that showed a different pattern of inheritance. In a paper published in Science in 1911, he concluded that (1) some traits were sex-linked, (2) the trait was probably carried on one of the sex chromosomes, and (3) other genes were probably carried on specific chromosomes as well.

 
Morgan's illustration of crossing over, from his 1916 A Critique of the Theory of Evolution

Morgan and his students became more successful at finding mutant flies; they counted the mutant characteristics of thousands of fruit flies and studied their inheritance. As they accumulated multiple mutants, they combined them to study more complex inheritance patterns. The observation of a miniature-wing mutant, which was also on the sex chromosome but sometimes sorted independently to the white-eye mutation, led Morgan to the idea of genetic linkage and to hypothesize the phenomenon of crossing over. He relied on the discovery of Frans Alfons Janssens, a Belgian professor at the University of Leuven, who described the phenomenon in 1909 and had called it chiasmatypy. Morgan proposed that the amount of crossing over between linked genes differs and that crossover frequency might indicate the distance separating genes on the chromosome. The later English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane suggested that the unit of measurement for linkage be called the morgan. Morgan's student Alfred Sturtevant developed the first genetic map in 1913.

 
Thomas Hunt Morgan's Drosophila melanogaster genetic linkage map. This was the first successful gene mapping work and provides important evidence for the chromosome theory of inheritance. The map shows the relative positions of allelic characteristics on the second Drosophila chromosome. The distance between the genes (map units) is equal to the percentage of crossing-over events that occurs between different alleles.[19]

In 1915 Morgan, Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges and H. J. Muller wrote the seminal book The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity.[20] Geneticist Curt Stern called the book "the fundamental textbook of the new genetics"[21] and C. H. Waddington noted that "Morgan's theory of the chromosome represents a great leap of imagination comparable with Galileo or Newton".[citation needed]

In the following years, most biologists came to accept the Mendelian-chromosome theory, which was independently proposed by Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri in 1902/1903, and elaborated and expanded by Morgan and his students. Garland Allen characterized the post-1915 period as one of normal science, in which "The activities of 'geneticists' were aimed at further elucidation of the details and implications of the Mendelian-chromosome theory developed between 1910 and 1915." But, the details of the increasingly complex theory, as well as the concept of the gene and its physical nature, were still controversial. Critics such as W. E. Castle pointed to contrary results in other organisms, suggesting that genes interact with each other, while Richard Goldschmidt and others thought there was no compelling reason to view genes as discrete units residing on chromosomes.[22]

Because of Morgan's dramatic success with Drosophila, many other labs throughout the world took up fruit fly genetics. Columbia became the center of an informal exchange network, through which promising mutant Drosophila strains were transferred from lab to lab; Drosophila became one of the first and for some time the most widely used, model organisms.[23] Morgan's group remained highly productive, but Morgan largely withdrew from doing fly work and gave his lab members considerable freedom in designing and carrying out their own experiments.

He returned to embryology and worked to encourage the spread of genetics research to other organisms and the spread of mechanistic experimental approach (Enwicklungsmechanik) to all biological fields.[24] After 1915, he also became a strong critic of the growing eugenics movement, which adopted genetic approaches in support of racist views of "improving" humanity.[25]

Morgan's fly-room at Columbia became world-famous, and he found it easy to attract funding and visiting academics. In 1927 after 25 years at Columbia, and nearing the age of retirement, he received an offer from George Ellery Hale to establish a school of biology in California.

Caltech edit

 
1931 drawing of Thomas Hunt Morgan

In 1928 Morgan joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology where he remained until his retirement 14 years later in 1942.

Morgan moved to California to head the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology in 1928. In establishing the biology division, Morgan wanted to distinguish his program from those offered by Johns Hopkins and Columbia, with research focused on genetics and evolution; experimental embryology; physiology; biophysics, and biochemistry. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Marine Laboratory at Corona del Mar. He wanted to attract the best people to the Division at Caltech, so he took Bridges, Sturtevant, Jack Shultz and Albert Tyler from Columbia and took on Theodosius Dobzhansky as an international research fellow. More scientists came to work in the Division including George Beadle, Boris Ephrussi, Edward L. Tatum, Linus Pauling, Frits Went, Edward B. Lewis, and Sidney W. Byance with his reputation, Morgan held numerous prestigious positions in American science organizations. From 1927 to 1931 Morgan served as the President of the National Academy of Sciences; in 1930 he was the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and in 1932 he chaired the Sixth International Congress of Genetics in Ithaca, New York. In 1933 Morgan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; he had been nominated in 1919 and 1930 for the same work. As an acknowledgment of the group nature of his discovery, he gave his prize money to Bridges, Sturtevant, and his own children. Morgan declined to attend the awards ceremony in 1933, instead attending in 1934. The 1933 rediscovery of the giant polytene chromosomes in the salivary gland of Drosophila may have influenced his choice. Until that point, the lab's results had been inferred from phenotypic results, the visible polytene chromosome enabled them to confirm their results on a physical basis. Morgan's Nobel acceptance speech entitled "The Contribution of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine" downplayed the contribution genetics could make to medicine beyond genetic counseling. In 1939 he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society.

He received two extensions of his contract at Caltech, but eventually retired in 1942, becoming a professor and chairman emeritus. George Beadle returned to Caltech to replace Morgan as chairman of the department in 1946. Although he had retired, Morgan kept offices across the road from the Division and continued laboratory work. In his retirement, he returned to the questions of sexual differentiation, regeneration, and embryology.

Death edit

Morgan had throughout his life suffered from a chronic duodenal ulcer. In 1945, at age 79, he experienced a severe heart attack and died from a ruptured artery.

Morgan and evolution edit

Morgan was interested in evolution throughout his life. He wrote his thesis on the phylogeny of sea spiders (pycnogonids) and wrote four books about evolution. In Evolution and Adaptation (1903), he argued the anti-Darwinist position that selection could never produce wholly new species by acting on slight individual differences.[26] He rejected Darwin's theory of sexual selection[27] and the Neo-Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characters.[28] Morgan was not the only scientist attacking natural selection. The period 1875–1925 has been called 'The eclipse of Darwinism'.[29] After discovering many small stable heritable mutations in Drosophila, Morgan gradually changed his mind. The relevance of mutations for evolution is that only characters that are inherited can have an effect on evolution. Since Morgan (1915) 'solved the problem of heredity, he was in a unique position to examine critically Darwin's theory of natural selection.

In A Critique of the Theory of Evolution (1916), Morgan discussed questions such as: "Does selection play any role in evolution? How can selection produce anything new? Is selection no more than the elimination of the unfit? Is selection a creative force?" After eliminating some misunderstandings and explaining in detail the new science of Mendelian heredity and its chromosomal basis, Morgan concludes, "the evidence shows clearly that the characters of wild animals and plants, as well as those of domesticated races, are inherited both in the wild and in domesticated forms according to the Mendel's Law". "Evolution has taken place by the incorporation into the race of those mutations that are beneficial to the life and reproduction of the organism".[30] Injurious mutations have practically no chance of becoming established.[31] Far from rejecting evolution, as the title of his 1916 book may suggest, Morgan, laid the foundation of the science of genetics. He also laid the theoretical foundation for the mechanism of evolution: natural selection. Heredity was a central plank of Darwin's theory of natural selection, but Darwin could not provide a working theory of heredity. Darwinism could not progress without a correct theory of genetics. By creating that foundation, Morgan contributed to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, despite his criticism of Darwin at the beginning of his career. Much work on the Evolutionary Synthesis remained to be done.

Awards and honors edit

Morgan left an important legacy in genetics. Some of Morgan's students from Columbia and Caltech went on to win their own Nobel Prizes, including George Wells Beadle and Hermann Joseph Muller. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel has written of Morgan, "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 an experimental science."[32]

Personal life edit

On June 4, 1904, Morgan married Lillian Vaughan Sampson (1870–1952), who had entered graduate school in biology at Bryn Mawr the same year Morgan joined the faculty; she put aside her scientific work for 16 years of their marriage when they had four children. Later she contributed significantly to Morgan's Drosophila work. One of their four children (one boy and three girls) was Isabel Morgan (1911–1996) (Marr. Mountain), who became a virologist at Johns Hopkins, specializing in polio research. Morgan was an atheist.[35][36][37][38]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b "Thomas Morgan". Nasonline.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d Fisher, R. A.; De Beer, G. R. (1947). "Thomas Hunt Morgan. 1866–1945". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 5 (15): 451–466. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1947.0011. JSTOR 769094. S2CID 178714833.
  3. ^ a b "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1933". Nobel Web AB. Retrieved 2010-09-14.
  4. ^ a b Sturtevant (1959), p. 283.
  5. ^ Allen (1978), pp. 11–14, 24.
  6. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science, pp. 46–51
  7. ^ Kenney, D. E.; Borisy, G. G. (2009). "Thomas Hunt Morgan at the Marine Biological Laboratory: Naturalist and Experimentalist". Genetics. 181 (3): 841–846. doi:10.1534/genetics.109.101659. PMC 2651058. PMID 19276218.
  8. ^ Morgan, T. H. (1940). "Edmund Beecher Wilson. 1856–1939". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 3 (8): 123–126. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1940.0012. S2CID 161395714.
  9. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 50–53
  10. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 55–59, 72–80
  11. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 55–59, 80–82
  12. ^ Loeb, Jacques (1899). "On the Nature of the Process of Fertilization and the Artificial Production of Normal Larvae (Plutei) from the Unfertilized Eggs of the Sea Urchin". American Journal of Physiology. 31 (3): 135–138. doi:10.1152/ajplegacy.1899.3.3.135. hdl:2027/hvd.32044107304297.
  13. ^ Loeb, Jacques (1913). Artificial parthenogenesis and fertilization. University of Chicago Press. jacques loeb sea urchin.
  14. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 84–96
  15. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 68–70
  16. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science, pp. 105–116
  17. ^ a b Kohler, Lords of the Fly, pp. 37–43
  18. ^ Hamilton, Vivien (2016). "The Secrets of Life: Historian Luis Campos resurrects radium's role in early genetics research". Distillations. 2 (2): 44–45. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  19. ^ Mader, Sylvia (2007). Biology Ninth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 209. ISBN 978-0-07-325839-3.
  20. ^ Morgan, Thomas Hunt; Alfred H. Sturtevant, H. J. Muller and C. B. Bridges (1915). The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. New York: Henry Holt.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  21. ^ Stern, Curt (1970). "The Continuity of Genetics". Daedalus. 99 (4): 899. ISSN 0011-5266.
  22. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 208–213, 257–278. Quotation from p. 213.
  23. ^ Kohler, Lords of the Fly, chapter 5
  24. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 214–215, 285
  25. ^ Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, pp. 227–234
  26. ^ Allen, Garland E. (2009). Ruse, Michael; Travis, Joseph (eds.). Evolution. The First Four Billion Years. Harvard University Press. p. 746. ISBN 9780674031753.
  27. ^ "I think we shall be justified in rejecting it as an explanation of the secondary sexual differences amongst animals", pp. 220–221, chapter VI, Evolution and Adaptation, 1903.
  28. ^ Chapter VII of Evolution and Adaptation, 1903.
  29. ^ Bowler, Peter (2003). Evolution. The History of an Idea. University of California Press. chapter 7.
  30. ^ A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, Princeton University Press, 1916, pp. 193–194
  31. ^ A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, p. 189.
  32. ^ Kandel, Eric. 1999. "Genes, Chromosomes, and the Origins of Modern Biology", Columbia Magazine
  33. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  34. ^ "Thomas Hunt Morgan". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 2023-02-09. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  35. ^ George Pendle (2006). Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 69. ISBN 9780156031790. The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and stringent atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing the chromosome theory of heredity by examining his swarm of mutated Drosophila (fruit flies) through a jeweler's loupe.
  36. ^ "Morgan's passion for experimentation was symptomatic of his general skepticism and his distaste for speculation. He believed only what could be proven. He was said to be an atheist, and I have always believed that he was. Everything I knew about him—his skepticism, his honesty—was consistent with disbelief in the supernatural." Norman H. Horowitz, T. H. Morgan at Caltech: A Reminiscence, Genetics, Vol. 149, 1629–1632, August 1998.
  37. ^ Judith R. Goodstein. (PDF). Calteches.library.caltech.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 August 2016. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  38. ^ Horowitz, Norman H. (1 August 1998). . Genetics. 149 (4): 1629–1632. doi:10.1093/genetics/149.4.1629. PMC 1460264. PMID 9691024. Archived from the original on 5 April 2016. Retrieved 6 February 2017.

Further reading edit

External links edit

  • Thomas Hunt Morgan on Nobelprize.org   including the Nobel Lecture on June 4, 1934 The Relation of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan Biological Sciences Building at University of Kentucky
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan — Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Works by Thomas Hunt Morgan at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by or about Thomas Hunt Morgan at Internet Archive
  • Works by Thomas Hunt Morgan at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  

thomas, hunt, morgan, other, people, named, thomas, morgan, thomas, morgan, disambiguation, september, 1866, december, 1945, american, evolutionary, biologist, geneticist, embryologist, science, author, nobel, prize, physiology, medicine, 1933, discoveries, el. For other people named Thomas Morgan see Thomas Morgan disambiguation Thomas Hunt Morgan September 25 1866 December 4 1945 2 was an American evolutionary biologist geneticist embryologist and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity 3 Thomas Hunt MorganForMemRSMorgan in 1891Born 1866 09 25 September 25 1866Lexington Kentucky USDiedDecember 4 1945 1945 12 04 aged 79 Pasadena California USAlma materUniversity of Kentucky B S Johns Hopkins University Ph D Known forEstablishing Drosophila melanogaster as a major model organism in geneticsLinked genesAwardsMember of the National Academy of Sciences 1909 1 Foreign Member of the Royal Society 1919 2 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1933 Copley Medal 1939 Scientific careerFieldsGeneticsEmbryologyInstitutionsBryn Mawr CollegeColumbia UniversityCalifornia Institute of TechnologyMarine Biological LaboratoryDoctoral studentsNettie Maria StevensJohn Howard NorthropHermann Joseph MullerCalvin BridgesAlfred SturtevantChester Ittner BlissTan JiazhenSignatureMorgan received his Ph D from Johns Hopkins University in zoology in 1890 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900 Morgan began to study the genetic characteristics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University s Schermerhorn Hall Morgan demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics During his distinguished career Morgan wrote 22 books and 370 scientific papers 2 As a result of his work Drosophila became a major model organism in contemporary genetics The Division of Biology which he established at the California Institute of Technology has produced seven Nobel Prize winners Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Career and research 2 1 Bryn Mawr 2 2 Columbia University 2 3 Caltech 3 Death 4 Morgan and evolution 5 Awards and honors 6 Personal life 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksEarly life and education editMorgan was born in Lexington Kentucky to Charlton Hunt Morgan and Ellen Key Howard Morgan 3 4 Part of a line of Southern plantation and slave owners on his father s side Morgan was a nephew of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan his great grandfather John Wesley Hunt had been one of the first millionaires west of the Allegheny Mountains Through his mother he was the great grandson of Francis Scott Key the author of the Star Spangled Banner and John Eager Howard governor and senator from Maryland 4 Following the Civil War the family fell on hard times with the temporary loss of civil and some property rights for those who aided the Confederacy His father had difficulty finding work in politics and spent much of his time coordinating veterans reunions Beginning at age 16 in the Preparatory Department Morgan attended the State College of Kentucky now the University of Kentucky He focused on science he particularly enjoyed natural history and worked with the U S Geological Survey in his summers He graduated as valedictorian in 1886 with a Bachelor of Science degree 5 Following a summer at the Marine Biology School in Annisquam Massachusetts Morgan began graduate studies in zoology at the recently founded Johns Hopkins University After two years of experimental work with morphologist William Keith Brooks and writing several publications Morgan was eligible to receive a Master of Science from the State College of Kentucky in 1888 The college required two years of study at another institution and an examination by the college faculty citation needed The college offered Morgan a full professorship however he chose to stay at Johns Hopkins and was awarded a relatively large fellowship to help him fund his studies citation needed Under Brooks Morgan completed his thesis work on the embryology of sea spiders collected during the summers of 1889 and 1890 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole Massachusetts to determine their phylogenetic relationship with other arthropods He concluded that concerning embryology they were more closely related to spiders than crustaceans Based on the publication of this work Morgan was awarded his Ph D from Johns Hopkins in 1890 and was also awarded the Bruce Fellowship in Research He used the fellowship to travel to Jamaica the Bahamas and Europe to conduct further research 6 Every summer from 1910 to 1925 Morgan and his colleagues at the famous Fly Room at Columbia University moved their research program to the Marine Biological Laboratory Aside from being an independent investigator at the MBL from 1890 to 1942 he became very involved in the governance of the institution including serving as an MBL trustee from 1897 to 1945 7 Career and research editBryn Mawr edit In 1890 Morgan was appointed associate professor and head of the biology department at Johns Hopkins sister school Bryn Mawr College replacing his colleague Edmund Beecher Wilson 8 Morgan taught all morphology related courses while the other member of the department Jacques Loeb taught the physiological courses Although Loeb stayed for only one year it was the beginning of their lifelong friendship 9 Morgan lectured in biology five days a week giving two lectures a day He frequently included his recent research in his lectures Although an enthusiastic teacher he was most interested in research in the laboratory During the first few years at Bryn Mawr he produced descriptive studies of sea acorns ascidian worms and frogs In 1894 Morgan was granted a year s absence to conduct research in the laboratories of Stazione Zoologica in Naples where Wilson had worked two years earlier There he worked with German biologist Hans Driesch whose research in the experimental study of development piqued Morgan s interest Among other projects that year Morgan completed an experimental study of ctenophore embryology In Naples and through Loeb he became familiar with the Entwicklungsmechanik roughly developmental mechanics school of experimental biology It was a reaction to the vitalistic Naturphilosophie which was extremely influential in 19th century morphology Morgan changed his work from traditional largely descriptive morphology to experimental embryology that sought physical and chemical explanations for organismal development 10 At the time there was considerable scientific debate over the question of how an embryo developed Following Wilhelm Roux s mosaic theory of development some believed that hereditary material was divided among embryonic cells which were predestined to form particular parts of a mature organism Driesch and others thought that development was due to epigenetic factors where interactions between the protoplasm and the nucleus of the egg and the environment could affect development Morgan was in the latter camp his work with Driesch demonstrated that blastomeres isolated from sea urchin and ctenophore eggs could develop into complete larvae contrary to the predictions and experimental evidence of Roux s supporters 11 A related debate involved the role of epigenetic and environmental factors in development on this front Morgan showed that sea urchin eggs could be induced to divide without fertilization by adding magnesium chloride Loeb continued this work and became well known for creating fatherless frogs using the method 12 13 When Morgan returned to Bryn Mawr in 1895 he was promoted to full professor Morgan s main lines of experimental work involved regeneration and larval development in each case his goal was to distinguish internal and external causes to shed light on the Roux Driesch debate He wrote his first book The Development of the Frog s Egg 1897 He began a series of studies on different organisms ability to regenerate He looked at grafting and regeneration in tadpoles fish and earthworms in 1901 he published his research as Regeneration Beginning in 1900 Morgan started working on the problem of sex determination which he had previously dismissed when Nettie Stevens discovered the impact of the Y chromosome on sex He also continued to study the evolutionary problems that had been the focus of his earliest work 14 Columbia University edit Morgan worked at Columbia University for 24 years from 1904 until 1928 when he left for a position at the California Institute of Technology In 1904 his friend Jofi Joseph died of tuberculosis and he felt he ought to mourn her though E B Wilson still blazing the path for his younger friend invited Morgan to join him at Columbia University This move freed him to focus fully on experimental work 15 nbsp In a typical Drosophila genetics experiment male and female flies with known phenotypes are put in a jar to mate females must be virgins Eggs are laid in porridge which the larvae feed on when the life cycle is complete the progeny are scored for the inheritance of the trait of interest When Morgan took the professorship in experimental zoology he became increasingly focused on the mechanisms of heredity and evolution He published Evolution and Adaptation 1903 like many biologists at the time he saw evidence for biological evolution as in the common descent of similar species but rejected Darwin s proposed mechanism of natural selection acting on small constantly produced variations Extensive work in biometry seemed to indicate that continuous natural variation had distinct limits and did not represent heritable changes Embryological development posed an additional problem in Morgan s view as selection could not act on the early incomplete stages of highly complex organs such as the eye The common solution of the Lamarckian mechanism of inheritance of acquired characters which featured prominently in Darwin s theory was increasingly rejected by biologists According to Morgan s biographer Garland Allen he was also hindered by his views on taxonomy he thought that species were entirely artificial creations that distorted the continuously variable range of real forms while he held a typological view of larger taxa and could see no way that one such group could transform into another But while Morgan was skeptical of natural selection for many years his theories of heredity and variation were radically transformed through his conversion to Mendelism 16 In 1900 three scientists Carl Correns Erich von Tschermak and Hugo De Vries had rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel and with it the foundation of genetics De Vries proposed that new species were created by mutation bypassing the need for either Lamarckism or Darwinism As Morgan had dismissed both evolutionary theories he was seeking to prove De Vries mutation theory with his experimental heredity work He was initially skeptical of Mendel s laws of heredity as well as the related chromosomal theory of sex determination which were being considered as a possible basis for natural selection nbsp Sex linked inheritance of the white eyed mutation Following C W Woodworth and William E Castle around 1908 Morgan started working on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and encouraging students to do so as well With Fernandus Payne he mutated Drosophila through physical chemical and radiational means 17 18 He began cross breeding experiments to find heritable mutations but they had no significant success for two years 17 Castle had also had difficulty identifying mutations in Drosophila which were tiny Finally in 1909 a series of heritable mutants appeared some of which displayed Mendelian inheritance patterns in 1910 Morgan noticed a white eyed mutant male among the red eyed wild types When white eyed flies were bred with a red eyed female their progeny were all red eyed A second generation cross produced white eyed males a sex linked recessive trait the gene for which Morgan named white Morgan also discovered a pink eyed mutant that showed a different pattern of inheritance In a paper published in Science in 1911 he concluded that 1 some traits were sex linked 2 the trait was probably carried on one of the sex chromosomes and 3 other genes were probably carried on specific chromosomes as well nbsp Morgan s illustration of crossing over from his 1916 A Critique of the Theory of EvolutionMorgan and his students became more successful at finding mutant flies they counted the mutant characteristics of thousands of fruit flies and studied their inheritance As they accumulated multiple mutants they combined them to study more complex inheritance patterns The observation of a miniature wing mutant which was also on the sex chromosome but sometimes sorted independently to the white eye mutation led Morgan to the idea of genetic linkage and to hypothesize the phenomenon of crossing over He relied on the discovery of Frans Alfons Janssens a Belgian professor at the University of Leuven who described the phenomenon in 1909 and had called it chiasmatypy Morgan proposed that the amount of crossing over between linked genes differs and that crossover frequency might indicate the distance separating genes on the chromosome The later English geneticist J B S Haldane suggested that the unit of measurement for linkage be called the morgan Morgan s student Alfred Sturtevant developed the first genetic map in 1913 nbsp Thomas Hunt Morgan s Drosophila melanogaster genetic linkage map This was the first successful gene mapping work and provides important evidence for the chromosome theory of inheritance The map shows the relative positions of allelic characteristics on the second Drosophila chromosome The distance between the genes map units is equal to the percentage of crossing over events that occurs between different alleles 19 In 1915 Morgan Sturtevant Calvin Bridges and H J Muller wrote the seminal book The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity 20 Geneticist Curt Stern called the book the fundamental textbook of the new genetics 21 and C H Waddington noted that Morgan s theory of the chromosome represents a great leap of imagination comparable with Galileo or Newton citation needed In the following years most biologists came to accept the Mendelian chromosome theory which was independently proposed by Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri in 1902 1903 and elaborated and expanded by Morgan and his students Garland Allen characterized the post 1915 period as one of normal science in which The activities of geneticists were aimed at further elucidation of the details and implications of the Mendelian chromosome theory developed between 1910 and 1915 But the details of the increasingly complex theory as well as the concept of the gene and its physical nature were still controversial Critics such as W E Castle pointed to contrary results in other organisms suggesting that genes interact with each other while Richard Goldschmidt and others thought there was no compelling reason to view genes as discrete units residing on chromosomes 22 Because of Morgan s dramatic success with Drosophila many other labs throughout the world took up fruit fly genetics Columbia became the center of an informal exchange network through which promising mutant Drosophila strains were transferred from lab to lab Drosophila became one of the first and for some time the most widely used model organisms 23 Morgan s group remained highly productive but Morgan largely withdrew from doing fly work and gave his lab members considerable freedom in designing and carrying out their own experiments He returned to embryology and worked to encourage the spread of genetics research to other organisms and the spread of mechanistic experimental approach Enwicklungsmechanik to all biological fields 24 After 1915 he also became a strong critic of the growing eugenics movement which adopted genetic approaches in support of racist views of improving humanity 25 Morgan s fly room at Columbia became world famous and he found it easy to attract funding and visiting academics In 1927 after 25 years at Columbia and nearing the age of retirement he received an offer from George Ellery Hale to establish a school of biology in California Caltech edit nbsp 1931 drawing of Thomas Hunt MorganIn 1928 Morgan joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology where he remained until his retirement 14 years later in 1942 Morgan moved to California to head the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology in 1928 In establishing the biology division Morgan wanted to distinguish his program from those offered by Johns Hopkins and Columbia with research focused on genetics and evolution experimental embryology physiology biophysics and biochemistry He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Marine Laboratory at Corona del Mar He wanted to attract the best people to the Division at Caltech so he took Bridges Sturtevant Jack Shultz and Albert Tyler from Columbia and took on Theodosius Dobzhansky as an international research fellow More scientists came to work in the Division including George Beadle Boris Ephrussi Edward L Tatum Linus Pauling Frits Went Edward B Lewis and Sidney W Byance with his reputation Morgan held numerous prestigious positions in American science organizations From 1927 to 1931 Morgan served as the President of the National Academy of Sciences in 1930 he was the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1932 he chaired the Sixth International Congress of Genetics in Ithaca New York In 1933 Morgan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine he had been nominated in 1919 and 1930 for the same work As an acknowledgment of the group nature of his discovery he gave his prize money to Bridges Sturtevant and his own children Morgan declined to attend the awards ceremony in 1933 instead attending in 1934 The 1933 rediscovery of the giant polytene chromosomes in the salivary gland of Drosophila may have influenced his choice Until that point the lab s results had been inferred from phenotypic results the visible polytene chromosome enabled them to confirm their results on a physical basis Morgan s Nobel acceptance speech entitled The Contribution of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine downplayed the contribution genetics could make to medicine beyond genetic counseling In 1939 he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society He received two extensions of his contract at Caltech but eventually retired in 1942 becoming a professor and chairman emeritus George Beadle returned to Caltech to replace Morgan as chairman of the department in 1946 Although he had retired Morgan kept offices across the road from the Division and continued laboratory work In his retirement he returned to the questions of sexual differentiation regeneration and embryology Death editMorgan had throughout his life suffered from a chronic duodenal ulcer In 1945 at age 79 he experienced a severe heart attack and died from a ruptured artery Morgan and evolution editMorgan was interested in evolution throughout his life He wrote his thesis on the phylogeny of sea spiders pycnogonids and wrote four books about evolution In Evolution and Adaptation 1903 he argued the anti Darwinist position that selection could never produce wholly new species by acting on slight individual differences 26 He rejected Darwin s theory of sexual selection 27 and the Neo Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characters 28 Morgan was not the only scientist attacking natural selection The period 1875 1925 has been called The eclipse of Darwinism 29 After discovering many small stable heritable mutations in Drosophila Morgan gradually changed his mind The relevance of mutations for evolution is that only characters that are inherited can have an effect on evolution Since Morgan 1915 solved the problem of heredity he was in a unique position to examine critically Darwin s theory of natural selection In A Critique of the Theory of Evolution 1916 Morgan discussed questions such as Does selection play any role in evolution How can selection produce anything new Is selection no more than the elimination of the unfit Is selection a creative force After eliminating some misunderstandings and explaining in detail the new science of Mendelian heredity and its chromosomal basis Morgan concludes the evidence shows clearly that the characters of wild animals and plants as well as those of domesticated races are inherited both in the wild and in domesticated forms according to the Mendel s Law Evolution has taken place by the incorporation into the race of those mutations that are beneficial to the life and reproduction of the organism 30 Injurious mutations have practically no chance of becoming established 31 Far from rejecting evolution as the title of his 1916 book may suggest Morgan laid the foundation of the science of genetics He also laid the theoretical foundation for the mechanism of evolution natural selection Heredity was a central plank of Darwin s theory of natural selection but Darwin could not provide a working theory of heredity Darwinism could not progress without a correct theory of genetics By creating that foundation Morgan contributed to the neo Darwinian synthesis despite his criticism of Darwin at the beginning of his career Much work on the Evolutionary Synthesis remained to be done Awards and honors editMorgan left an important legacy in genetics Some of Morgan s students from Columbia and Caltech went on to win their own Nobel Prizes including George Wells Beadle and Hermann Joseph Muller Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel has written of Morgan 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 an experimental science 32 Johns Hopkins awarded Morgan an honorary LL D and the University of Kentucky awarded him an honorary Ph D He was elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1909 1 He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915 33 He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 1919 2 In 1924 Morgan received the Darwin Medal He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928 34 The Thomas Hunt Morgan School of Biological Sciences at the University of Kentucky is named for him The Genetics Society of America annually awards the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal named in his honor to one of its members who has made a significant contribution to the science of genetics Thomas Hunt Morgan s discovery was illustrated on a 1989 stamp issued in Sweden showing the discoveries of eight Nobel Prize winning geneticists citation needed A junior high school in Shoreline Washington was named in Morgan s honor for the latter half of the 20th century citation needed Personal life editOn June 4 1904 Morgan married Lillian Vaughan Sampson 1870 1952 who had entered graduate school in biology at Bryn Mawr the same year Morgan joined the faculty she put aside her scientific work for 16 years of their marriage when they had four children Later she contributed significantly to Morgan s Drosophila work One of their four children one boy and three girls was Isabel Morgan 1911 1996 Marr Mountain who became a virologist at Johns Hopkins specializing in polio research Morgan was an atheist 35 36 37 38 See also editMildred Hoge Richards pupilReferences edit a b Thomas Morgan Nasonline org Retrieved 28 April 2019 a b c d Fisher R A De Beer G R 1947 Thomas Hunt Morgan 1866 1945 Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 5 15 451 466 doi 10 1098 rsbm 1947 0011 JSTOR 769094 S2CID 178714833 a b The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1933 Nobel Web AB Retrieved 2010 09 14 a b Sturtevant 1959 p 283 Allen 1978 pp 11 14 24 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan The Man and His Science pp 46 51 Kenney D E Borisy G G 2009 Thomas Hunt Morgan at the Marine Biological Laboratory Naturalist and Experimentalist Genetics 181 3 841 846 doi 10 1534 genetics 109 101659 PMC 2651058 PMID 19276218 Morgan T H 1940 Edmund Beecher Wilson 1856 1939 Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 3 8 123 126 doi 10 1098 rsbm 1940 0012 S2CID 161395714 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 50 53 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 55 59 72 80 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 55 59 80 82 Loeb Jacques 1899 On the Nature of the Process of Fertilization and the Artificial Production of Normal Larvae Plutei from the Unfertilized Eggs of the Sea Urchin American Journal of Physiology 31 3 135 138 doi 10 1152 ajplegacy 1899 3 3 135 hdl 2027 hvd 32044107304297 Loeb Jacques 1913 Artificial parthenogenesis and fertilization University of Chicago Press jacques loeb sea urchin Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 84 96 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 68 70 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan The Man and His Science pp 105 116 a b Kohler Lords of the Fly pp 37 43 Hamilton Vivien 2016 The Secrets of Life Historian Luis Campos resurrects radium s role in early genetics research Distillations 2 2 44 45 Retrieved 22 March 2018 Mader Sylvia 2007 Biology Ninth Edition New York McGraw Hill p 209 ISBN 978 0 07 325839 3 Morgan Thomas Hunt Alfred H Sturtevant H J Muller and C B Bridges 1915 The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity New York Henry Holt a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Stern Curt 1970 The Continuity of Genetics Daedalus 99 4 899 ISSN 0011 5266 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 208 213 257 278 Quotation from p 213 Kohler Lords of the Fly chapter 5 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 214 215 285 Allen Thomas Hunt Morgan pp 227 234 Allen Garland E 2009 Ruse Michael Travis Joseph eds Evolution The First Four Billion Years Harvard University Press p 746 ISBN 9780674031753 I think we shall be justified in rejecting it as an explanation of the secondary sexual differences amongst animals pp 220 221 chapter VI Evolution and Adaptation 1903 Chapter VII of Evolution and Adaptation 1903 Bowler Peter 2003 Evolution The History of an Idea University of California Press chapter 7 A Critique of the Theory of Evolution Princeton University Press 1916 pp 193 194 A Critique of the Theory of Evolution p 189 Kandel Eric 1999 Genes Chromosomes and the Origins of Modern Biology Columbia Magazine APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved 2023 11 02 Thomas Hunt Morgan American Academy of Arts amp Sciences 2023 02 09 Retrieved 2023 11 02 George Pendle 2006 Strange Angel The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons Houghton Mifflin Harcourt p 69 ISBN 9780156031790 The Nobel Prize winning geneticist and stringent atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing the chromosome theory of heredity by examining his swarm of mutated Drosophila fruit flies through a jeweler s loupe Morgan s passion for experimentation was symptomatic of his general skepticism and his distaste for speculation He believed only what could be proven He was said to be an atheist and I have always believed that he was Everything I knew about him his skepticism his honesty was consistent with disbelief in the supernatural Norman H Horowitz T H Morgan at Caltech A Reminiscence Genetics Vol 149 1629 1632 August 1998 Judith R Goodstein The Thomas Hunt Morgan Era in Biology PDF Calteches library caltech edu Archived from the original PDF on 22 August 2016 Retrieved 28 April 2019 Horowitz Norman H 1 August 1998 T H Morgan at Caltech A Reminiscence Genetics 149 4 1629 1632 doi 10 1093 genetics 149 4 1629 PMC 1460264 PMID 9691024 Archived from the original on 5 April 2016 Retrieved 6 February 2017 Further reading editAllen Garland E 1978 Thomas Hunt Morgan The Man and His Science Princeton University Press ISBN 0 691 08200 6 Allen Garland E 2000 Morgan Thomas Hunt American National Biography Oxford University Press Kohler Robert E 1994 Lords of the Fly Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 45063 5 Shine Ian B Sylvia Wrobel 1976 Thomas Hunt Morgan Pioneer of Genetics University Press of Kentucky ISBN 0 8131 0095 X Stephenson Wendell H April 1946 Thomas Hunt Morgan Kentucky s Gift to Biological Science Filson Club History Quarterly 20 2 Retrieved 2012 02 22 permanent dead link Sturtevant Alfred H 1959 Thomas Hunt Morgan Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 33 283 325 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thomas Hunt Morgan category Thomas Hunt Morgan on Nobelprize org nbsp including the Nobel Lecture on June 4 1934 The Relation of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine Thomas Hunt Morgan Biological Sciences Building at University of Kentucky Thomas Hunt Morgan Thomas Hunt Morgan Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences Works by Thomas Hunt Morgan at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Thomas Hunt Morgan at Internet Archive Works by Thomas Hunt Morgan at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Thomas Hunt Morgan amp oldid 1206969264, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.