Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American geneticist whose experiments with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster provided the first solid experimental evidence for the chromosomal theory of heredity, the idea that genes are located on chromosomes and are inherited together when located near one another. Working at Columbia University in the so-called Fly Room beginning around 1910, Morgan and his students identified specific inherited traits, such as white eye color, that were linked to a particular chromosome, and he went on to show that the frequency with which linked traits are separated during inheritance could be used to map the relative positions of genes along a chromosome. This gene-mapping technique became a standard tool of classical genetics and was extended by his students, including Alfred Sturtevant, who produced the first genetic map in 1913. Morgan received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.