Thomas Hunt Morgan by Shine Ian;Wrobel Sylvia;

Author:Shine, Ian;Wrobel, Sylvia; [IAN SHINE and SYLVIA WROBEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

THE FLY ROOM

Should you ask me how these discoveries are to be made . . . I would then say: By industry. . . . By the intelligent use of working hypotheses (by intelligence I mean a readiness to reject any such hypotheses unless critical evidence can be found for their support). By a search for favorable material. . . . And lastly, by not holding genetics congresses too often.

Thomas Hunt Morgan Presidential address to the International Genetics Congress

THE NAME Thomas Hunt Morgan appeared likely to live in history, his father’s wish. And when family regretted the absence of descendants bearing the name (since Morgan’s only son’s children were daughters), they recalled the remark of Morgan’s step-grandson James Mountain: “Praise the name and pass the genes along.” What is more important than either, however, is the cultural heritage that Morgan passed on to scores of young geneticists.

He had gathered around him a group of students remarkable for their intelligence and ability to work both individually and as part of the team. Morgan could have had his pick of the graduate students at Columbia University, many of whom did indeed have space at one time or another in the Fly Room or its more spacious environs. But he had an unerring sense of people, and no sense whatever of the snobbery and appeal of degrees. Morgan met Alfred Henry Sturtevant and Calvin B. Bridges in a general zoology class which he had temporarily taken over for another professor. Both were undergraduates and teenagers. Sturtevant brought Morgan a manuscript he had prepared on coat color among his father’s and brother’s race horses back on a farm in Alabama, and Morgan was impressed. He helped Sturtevant publish it as Study of the Pedigrees of Blooded Trotters and set him to work counting Drosophila. (Unfortunately, Sturtevant was color-blind, and so somewhat limited in his ability to add new color mutants to the growing number.) Within two years, when Sturtevant was only twenty-one, he had made an invaluable contribution by preparing the linear order of genes on the chromosomes, soon to be called maps.

In 1910 Morgan gave a young undergraduate, Calvin Bridges, a job as bottle washer in the laboratory. When Bridges spotted a vermilion-eyed mutant through the thick glass bottle, a color distinction most people have trouble making even with a microscope, he was immediately made Morgan’s personal assistant, presumably paid out of Morgan’s pocket. Bridges continued to spot mutants readily as well as some unusual inheritance patterns from which he inferred the failure of a chromosome pair to separate, which he called nondisjunction. Until he died in 1938, Bridges remained a close colleague of Morgan. Both Bridges and Sturtevant completed their bachelor’s degrees and began doctorates under Morgan’s direction. For seventeen years their chief occupation too was “to count flies for Columbia University.”

Perhaps the best-known of Morgan’s Fly Room students was H. J. Muller, who had already received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1910 and was working on a master’s degree. During 1911 and 1912 he went to Cornell to medical school, but was back at Columbia to complete a Ph.

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