1866-1945

American Geneticist and Zoologist

Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American geneticist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for his work spanning a 17-year period at Columbia University with mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila. His research specifically established the chromosome theory of heredity. He demonstrated that genes are linked in a series on chromosomes and are responsible for identifiable, hereditary traits. Morgan's work played a key role in establishing the field of genetics.

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in 1866 in Lexington, Kentucky. Morgan's father, Charlton Hunt Morgan, was a U.S. consul and his uncle, John Hunt Morgan, had been a Confederate army general. As a child Morgan had shown an immense interest in natural history and by the age of 10, he was an avid collector of birds, eggs, and fossils. He was educated at the University of...