Heredity and Sex: Volume 1

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Jan. 1913 · Columbia University Press

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A pioneer of genetics research in the first half of the twentieth century, Thomas Morgan won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for research that he had begun in 1910 with the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Reaching sexual maturity 12 to 14 hours after birth, the fruit fly had a number of heritable traits, primarily variations of wing shape and eye color, as well as large chromosomes easily visible under the microscopes of the time. The results of the experiments conducted in "The Fly Room," Morgan's laboratory at Columbia University, showed that two apparently different explanations of heredity, the chromosome theory (which identified the chromosomes of the cell nuclei as agents of heredity) and the Mendelian laws of inheritance were closely related. Morgan's contributions to genetics included the ideas that Gregor Mendel's factors or determinants of characteristics (now called genes) were grouped together on chromosomes, that some characteristics are sex-linked, and that the position of genes on chromosomes can be mapped.