FATHER OF MODERN GENETICS

Science and the Fruit Fly.

After the Moravian monk Gregor Johann Mendel's discoveries in the mid nineteenth century, the next major contributor to the understanding of genetic principles was Thomas Hunt Morgan. Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on 25 September 1866 and received his college degree from the State College of Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. in comparative anatomy and physiology from Johns Hopkins in 1890 and then became professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College. In 1904 he went to Columbia University where he became a professor of experimental zoology. Morgan's extensive experiments in genetics began in 1909 when, following a suggestion made by Professor W. E. Castle of Harvard, he began his lifelong work with the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

The Mystery of Genetics.

Mendel was the first to recognize that inherited characteristics were transmitted...