The greatest insights in biology of the 19th-20th centuries are considered to be the works of Charles Darwin on evolution, Gregor Mendel on heredity and variability, and Thomas Hunt Morgan on genes and chromosomes. It was Morgan's work that opened up an experimental path of development for genetics. Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan are the biologists who became the luminaries and founders of genetics, and it is to them that all modern molecular biologists should be grateful. Their intuitively chosen research subjects have opened doors to the world of genome sequencing, genetic engineering and transgenic breeding.
At the right time and place
The biography of Thomas Hunt Morgan does not contain tragic rejection by colleagues, persecution for his ideas, loneliness, undeserved oblivion and unappreciated life. He lived for a long time surrounded by close people, built a successful career as a researcher and teacher, became one of the luminaries and icons of fundamental genetics, a science whose representatives still receive more Nobel Prizes than scientists in any other field.
The work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his co-authors of the early 20th century absorbed all the accumulated genetic data, the resultsstudies of cell division (mitosis and meiosis), conclusions about the role of the cell nucleus and chromosomes in the inheritance of traits. His chromosome theory explained the nature of human hereditary pathologies, made it possible to experimentally change hereditary information and became the beginning of modern methods of genetic research. Not being a discoverer, Thomas Hunt Morgan formulated the postulates of a theory that changed the world. After his works, writers' fantasies about life extension, human transformations and the creation of new organs became just a matter of time.
Aristocratic background
On an autumn day, September 15, 1866, in the city of Lexington, Kentucky, the nephew of the legendary General of the Confederate Army Francis Gent Morgan and great-grandson of the first millionaire of the southwestern United States was born. His father, Charleston Hunt Morgan, was a successful diplomat and American consul in Sicily. Mother - Ellen - granddaughter of the author of the American national anthem Francis Scott Key. Thomas has been interested in biology and geology since childhood. From the age of ten, he spent all his free time collecting stones, feathers and bird eggs in the Kentucky mountains in the area. As he grew older, he spent the summer helping USGS research teams in the same mountains that were already his home. After leaving school, the boy entered the College of Kentucky, in 1886 he received a bachelor's degree.
Student years
After graduating from high school, Thomas Morgan entered the only university at that time - the Johns Hopkins University in B altimore(state of Maryland). There he became interested in the morphology and physiology of animals. His first scientific work was on the structure and physiology of sea spiders. He then took up embryology at the Woods Hall laboratory, visiting Jamaica and the Bahamas. He received a master's degree, defended his dissertation, and in 1891 headed the department of biology at Bryn-Mair College. Since 1894, Thomas Hunt Morgan has been an intern at the Zoological Laboratory of Naples. From the study of embryology, the scientist proceeds to the study of the inheritance of traits. At that time, there were disputes in scientific circles between preformists (supporters of the presence of structures in gametes that predetermine the formation of an organism) and epigenists (supporters of development under the influence of external factors). The atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan takes a middle position on this issue. Returning in 1895 from Naples, he received the title of professor. While studying the powers of regeneration, he wrote two books, The Development of the Frog's Egg (1897) and Regeneration (1900), but continued to focus on heredity and evolution. In 1904, Thomas married his student Lillian Vaughan Sampson. She not only bore him a son and three daughters, but also became his companion and assistant in his work.
Columbia University
Since 1903, Morgan has been a professor of experimental zoology at the said university. It was here that he would work for 24 years and make his famous discoveries. Evolution and inheritance are the main topics of the scientific environment of that time. Scientists are looking for confirmation of the theory of natural selection and "rediscovered"Hugo de Vries Mendel's laws of inheritance. Forty-four-year-old Thomas Hunt Morgan decides to experimentally test the correctness of Georg Mendel and for many years becomes the "lord of the flies" - fruit flies. The successful choice of the object for experiments made these insects the "sacred cow" of all geneticists for many centuries.
A successful object and associates are the key to success
Drosophila melanogaster, a small, red-eyed fruit fly, has proven to be the perfect subject for experimentation. It is easy to maintain - up to a thousand individuals perfectly exist in a one and a half liter milk bottle. She breeds already in the second week of life, she has a well-defined sexual dimorphism (external differences between males and females). Best of all, these flies have only four chromosomes and can be studied throughout their entire three-month life. During the year, the observer can track the changes and inheritance of traits in more than thirty generations. Morgan's experiments were helped by his most talented students, who became associates and co-authors - Calvin Bridgers, Alfred Sturtevan, Herman Joseph Meller. That is how, from the milk bottles stolen from the residents of Manhattan, the legendary "fly room" was equipped - laboratory No. 613 in the Shemeron building of Columbia University.
Innovative teacher
Morgan's "fly room" not only became famous all over the world and became a place of pilgrimage for scientists. This room of 24 m22 changed the very organization of the educational process. The scientist built work onprinciples of democracy, free exchange of opinions, lack of subordination, full transparency for all participants and collective brainstorming when discussing results and planning experiments. It was this teaching methodology that became prevalent in all universities in America, and later spread to Europe.
Drosophila with pink eyes
Morgan and his students began experiments, setting themselves the task of finding out the principles of inheritance of mutations. Two long years of breeding flies did not give any visible progress. But a miracle happened - individuals with pink eyes, rudiments of wings, a yellow body appeared, and it was they who provided the material for the emergence of the theory of inheritance. Numerous crossings and counting thousands of offspring, shelves with thousands of bottles and millions of fruit flies - this is the price of success. Convincing evidence of sex-linked inheritance and storage of information about a trait in a specific region (locus) of chromosomes appeared in the scientist’s article “Sex-Linked Inheritance” (“Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophila”, 1910).
Chromosomal theory
The result of all the experiments, the contribution to the biology of Thomas Hunt Morgan was his theory of inheritance. Its main postulate is that the material basis of heredity is chromosomes, in which genes are located in a linear order. Thomas Hunt Morgan's discoveries of linked genes that are inherited together and traits that are inherited with sex stunned the world ("Mechanisms of Mendeleev's Inheritance", 1915). And it happened after allseveral years after the introduction into biology of the very concept of "gene" as a structural unit of heredity (W. Johannsen, 1909).
Professional recognition
Although the train of universal glory did not reach for the scientist, one academy after another makes him their member. In 1923 he became a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Member of the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society and many other internationally recognized organizations. In 1933, for discoveries related to the role of chromosomes in heredity, the biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he himself shared with Bridges and Startevan. In his arsenal, the Darwin medal (1924) and the Copley medal (1939). The Kentucky Department of Biology and an annual award from the Genetic Society of America bear his name. The unit of linkage of genes is called Morganide.
After fame
From 1928 until his death, Professor Thomas Morgan headed the Kirchhoff Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, USA). Here he became the organizer of the Department of Biology, which raised seven Nobel Prize winners in genetics and evolution. He continued to study the laws of inheritance in pigeons and rare mice, the regeneration and development of secondary sexual characteristics in salamanders. He even bought and equipped a laboratory in the California town of Corona del Mar. He died suddenly in Pasadena on December 4, 1945 from an open gastric hemorrhage.
Summing up
In short, Thomas Hunt Morgan's contribution to biology is comparable to such breakthroughs of human thought as the discovery of the nuclear nucleus in physics, human space exploration, the development of cybernetics and computer technology. A benevolent person with a subtle sense of humor, self-confident, but simple and unpretentious in everyday life - this is how his relatives and associates remember him. A pioneer who did not aspire to become a hero of myths, but, on the contrary, wanted to rid the world of myths and prejudices. Which promised not sensations, but a scientific understanding of the subject. In a time when poets were more than poets and great scientists were more than great scientists, Thomas Hunt Morgan managed to remain just a biologist.
