Thomas Hunt Morgan (redirected from T.H. Morgan)

Morgan, Thomas Hunt 

Born Sept. 25, 1866, in Lexington, Ky.; died Dec. 4, 1945, in Pasadena, Calif. American biologist and one of the founders of genetics. President of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1927–31).

Morgan graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1886 and from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1891. From 1891 to 1904 he was a professor at Bryn Mawr College and from 1904 to 1928 at Columbia University in New York City. From 1928 to 1945, Morgan was director of the William G. Kerckhoff Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Morgan’s first works were devoted to experimental embryology; subsequent works dealt with regeneration and sex determination in animals. From 1910 he studied the inheritance of mutations, which were discovered in a new experimental subject of genetic research—the fruit fly, Drosophila. This study provided Morgan and his associates (A. Sturtevant, H. Muller, and C. Bridges) with an experimental corroboration of the physiological foundations of heredity (the corpuscular nature of genetic material [the genes], the linear arrangement of genes in the chromosomes, the principles of the mutational variability of genes, and the cytogenetic mechanisms of the hereditary transmission of genes). This genetic research confirmed the chromosome theory of heredity and made it possible to complete the fundamental aspects of that theory.

The regularities of gene linkage and crossing-over discovered by Morgan and his associates provided a complete explanation for the cytological mechanism of Mendel’s laws and served as a stimulus for the development of the genetic foundations of the theory of natural selection. Morgan was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1933. He became an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1932.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Strukturnye osnovy nasledstvennosti. Moscow-Petrograd, 1924.
Teoriia evoliutsii v sovremennom osveshchenii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1926.
Teoriia gena. Leningrad, 1927.
Eksperimental’nye osnovy evoliutsii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1936.
Razvitie i nasledstvennost’ Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.
Izbrannye raboty po genetike. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.

REFERENCES

Lobashev, M. E. “T. G. Morgan: Osnovatel’ teorii gena.” Genetika, 1966, no. 11.
Sturtevant, A. “Vospominaniia o T. G. Morgane.” Priroda, 1968, no. 8, pp. 91–97.
Sturtevant, A. H. “T. H. Morgan.” Biographical memoirs, 1959, no. 33, pp. 283–325.
Allen, G. E. “T. H. Morgan and the Emergence of a New American Biology.” Quarterly Review of Biology, 1969, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 168–88.

A. E. GAISINOVICH