Lilian Vaughan Morgan

Lilian Vaughan Morgan was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given to her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lilian Morgan published sixteen single-author papers between 1894 and 1947. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the discovery of the attached-X chromosome and an entirely new pattern of inheritance in Drosophila in 1921. She later described a ring-X chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster in 1933, an early example of a ring chromosome in animals. Ring chromosomes had previously been described in plants by Mikhail Sergeevich Navashin in 1930 and were subsequently studied in maize by Barbara McClintock in the early 1930s.