September 25 – Happy Birthday Thomas Hunt Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan is regarded as father of modern Drosophila genetics and today September 25 is his birthday. Born in 1866 at Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A, Morgan is regarded as one of finest embryologists and Geneticist of all time , famous for his experimental research with the fruit fly “Drosophila”. He graduated from the State College of Kentucky (now University of Kentucky) in 1886 and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1890. It was in the year of 1909 he started working on the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster with which his name will always be associated. The credit for making Drosophila an immensely popular model system of modern day will go to Morgan. It is believed that C. W. Woodworth, was the first one to breed Drosophila in quantity and later through F. E. Lutz , Drosophila got introduced to Morgan , the man who made it hugely popular for genetic studies.
During 1909–15, Morgan and students discovered three essential principles of genetics—sex linkage, linkage and crossing over, and sex determination.Using Drosophila, Morgan established the chromosome theory of heredity. He showed that genes are linked in a series on chromosomes and are responsible for identifiable, hereditary traits. Morgan’s work played a key role in establishing the field of genetics.
One day in 1910, Morgan observed a male fruit fly, and saw it was something strange . Instead of having the normal bright red eyes , this fly had white eyes. Morgan was particularly interested in how traits were inherited and distributed in developing organisms, and he wondered what might be responsible for this change in fly’s eye. It was this white-eyed fly which helped Morgan in confirming “chromosome theory”. In this way Morgan would also be the first person to definitively link the inheritance of a specific trait with a particular chromosome. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933, he was the first person awarded the Prize in genetics, for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.
Morgan wrote many famous books : Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915), Heredity and Sex (1913), The Physical Basis of Heredity(1919), Embryology and Genetics (1924), Evolution and Genetics (1925), The Theory of the Gene (1926), Experimental Embryology (1927), The Scientifc Basis of Evolution (2nd. ed., 1935)
Morgan married Lilian Vaughan Sampson, in 1904, who had been a student at Bryn Mawr College, they had one son and three daughters.
The birth of Father of genetics made September 25 a very special day in the field of Genetics. “Happy 144th Birthday – Thomas Hunt Morgan”.
Image Credit : Wikimedia commons
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