A. H. Sturtevant, an influential geneticist and winner of the National Medal of Science in 1968, is best known for his demonstrations of the principles of gene mapping. This discovery had a profound effect on the field of genetics and led to projects to map both animal and human chromosomes. He is the unacknowledged father of the Human Genome Project, which mapped all of man's 30,000-plus chromosomes by the year 2000. Sturtevant's later work in the field of genetics led to discovery of the first reparable gene defect as well as the position effect, which showed that the effect of a gene is dependent on its position relative to other genes. He was a member of Columbia University's "Drosophila Group," whose studies of the genetics of fruit flies advanced new theories of genetics and evolution.

Alfred Henry Sturtevant, the youngest of six children, was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, to Alfred...