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Thomas Hunt Morgan and the Rise of Genetics
Today we stand just over a hundred years removed from
the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws, and exactly fifty years on from
the elucidation of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick
in 1953. Looking back on the past fifty years of genetics that have taken
us from the double helix to designer genes, it is easy to overlook the
stunning advances in our understanding of heredity and variation in the
first half of the twentieth century. Yet, it was in those few decades
after de Vries, von Tschermak and Correns independently rediscovered the
principles of segregation and independent assortment that the science
of genetics grew up from infancy to youth. It was also in those decades
that the foundations for much subsequent research in genetics were laid.
Thomas Hunt Morgan’s professional life straddled the decades of the
adolescence of genetics. It was in his laboratory that X-linked inheritance
was discovered, the first genetic maps made, and the proposition that
genes were linearly arranged on chromosomes experimentally verified. Morgan
himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1933
for “his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome
in heredity”. It was also through its early use as a model system
in Morgan’s laboratory that the fruit fly Drosophila became the First
Organism of genetics, a place it still occupies in the face of competition
from diverse bacteria, viruses, yeasts, worms, mice and plants. Other
geneticists who worked with Morgan as students, research associates or
colleagues – most notably Hermann Muller (Nobel Prize 1946), George
Beadle (Nobel Prize 1958) and Theodosius Dobzhansky – extended genetics
beyond chromosomal mechanics, and the use of Drosophila beyond gene mapping.
Read full article (37 Kb)Thomas Hunt Morgan and Developmental Biology
Thomas Hunt Morgan was in the unique position of being able to combine
genetics and developmental biology and create the discipline of developmental
genetics. Yet, the latter field came of its own much later, in the 1970s,
over 40 years after Morgan won the Nobel Prize. What took it so long?
Morgan’s training and the science of his times give us one perspective,
which only adds to the puzzle.
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