Morgan, Thomas Hunt

T.H. Morgan was born at Lexington, Kentucky, USA, on September 25, 1866. He received a B.S. degree in 1886 from the University of Kentucky, and a Ph.D. in 1890 from The Johns Hopkins University. He served on the faculty at Bryn Mawr College from 1891 to 1904, at Columbia University from 1904 to 1928, and at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1945. Morgan initially worked in descriptive embryology, but soon switched to experimental embryology. He then moved to genetics, and worked with Drosophila, aphids and phylloxerans. This was an important era, in that he demonstrated that the chromosome theory of sex determination was operable in these complex life cycles. His work with Drosophilais perhaps best known, and he discovered exchange between homologous chromosomes, and linkage between sex-linked genes. Morgan’s pioneering work laid the groundwork for the chromosome theory of heredity. He also was first and foremost an experimentalist, and had little patience for...