Thomas Hunt Morgan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1891)

Thomas Hunt Morgan (born September 25, 1866 in Lexington , Kentucky , † December 4, 1945 in Pasadena , California ) was an American zoologist and geneticist who clarified the basic structure of chromosomes by crossing experiments with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster . He discovered that the genes (genetic make-up) lie one after the other on the chromosomes and determined their order and distances from one another. He summarized his results in chromosome maps ( gene maps ). He thus continued the work of Edmund B. Wilson and Nettie Stevens .

In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine . He is considered one of the leading biologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The centiMorgan unit is named after him.

Life

Inheritance of eye color in fruit flies according to Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He completed his studies in biology at the University of Kentucky in 1888 with a master's degree. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 . After the "Mendelian Laws" (today: Mendelian rules ) were rediscovered around 1900, partly due to the work of Hugo de Vries , he began to be interested in heredity. From 1908 onwards he attempted crossbreeding with fruit flies for two years without getting any results. In 1910 he discovered a male, white-eyed mutant among the normally red-eyed flies. When this fly was crossed with a red-eyed female, the offspring of the first generation were all red-eyed, which suggested that the genetic make-up for this trait was inherited recessively . When the offspring were crossed, half of the male flies produced in this way had white eyes. Morgan concluded that the predisposition for eye color is on the X chromosome and is inherited with it.

This first success was the reason to study the inheritance characteristics of thousands of generations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) with his students in order to deduce how the genes are arranged on the chromosomes. The research on fruit flies was initiated by Nettie Stevens in Morgan's laboratory. She also described the chromosome-linked inheritance of sex at the same time as Edmund B. Wilson , on the work of which Morgan was able to build. After 1928, Morgan continued his research at the California Institute of Technology .

Thomas Hunt Morgan married the biologist Lilian Vaughan Sampson in 1904 and had four children (one son and three daughters). His daughter, Isabel Morgan, was a prominent virologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Awards and honors

Morgan was a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1915 . In 1919 he was elected as a "Foreign Member" to the Royal Society , which awarded him the Darwin Medal in 1924 and the Copley Medal in 1939 . From 1927 to 1931 he was President of the National Academy of Sciences , of which he had been a member since 1909. In 1928 Morgan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1931 he became a corresponding and in 1938 a foreign member ( associé étranger ) of the Académie des sciences in Paris. In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine . In 1934 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1935 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . From 1923 he was a corresponding and from 1932 honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences .

Aftermath

In the Soviet Union , the teachings of Morgan, including those of Gregor Mendel and August Weismann, and thus modern heredity as such, were discarded during the “August session” (July 31 - August 7, 1948) of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences and were officially rejected until the 1960s banned. This had a disastrous impact on agriculture in the Soviet Union and not least in China during the Cultural Revolution .

Morgan also influenced genetics after his life: some of his students and research assistants were themselves awarded the Nobel Prize in the following years. These include George Wells Beadle , Edward B. Lewis and Hermann Joseph Muller . In memory of Morgan, the Genetics Society of America annually awards the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal to researchers who have made significant contributions to the science of genetics.

Nobel laureate Eric Richard Kandel summed up Morgan's contribution to genetics and biology in the following words: “Much as Darwin's insights into the evolution of animal species first gave coherence to nineteenth-century biology as a descriptive science, Morgan's findings about genes and their location on chromosomes helped transform biology into an experimental science. "

literature

  • Garland E. Allen: Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science . Princeton University Press, 1978, ISBN 0-691-08200-6 (English).
  • Ian B. Shine, Sylvia Wrobel: Thomas Hunt Morgan: Pioneer of Genetics . University Press of Kentucky, 1976, ISBN 0-8131-0095-X (English).
  • Ilse Jahn, Michael Schmitt (ed.): Darwin & Co - A history of biology in portraits . tape II . CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-44639-6 .
  • Martin Brookes: Drosophila - The Success Story of the Fruit Fly . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-498-00622-3 .
  • Garland E. Allen: Morgan, Thomas Hunt . In: American National Biography Online . Oxford University Press, 2000 (English).
  • Ronald A. Fisher: Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1866-1945 . In: Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society . 1947, p. 451-454 (English).
  • Robert E. Kohler: Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life . University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 0-226-45063-5 (English).
  • Alfred H. Sturtevant : Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945). In: Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Volume 33, (Washington DC) 1959, pp. 281-325 ( PDF ).
  • Manfred Wenzel: Morgan, Thomas Hunt. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1008 f.

Web links

Commons : Thomas Hunt Morgan  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Thomas H. Morgan. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 25, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 172.
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter M. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 25, 2020 (French).
  4. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed March 22, 2020 .
  5. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Thomas Hunt Morgan. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 8, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Morgan, Thomas Hunt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American zoologist and geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Lexington , Kentucky , United States
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1945
Place of death Pasadena, California , United States