Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan earned his Ph.D. in zoology from Johns Hopkins in 1890 and spent his early years studying embryology at Bryn Mawr. After Mendelian inheritance was rediscovered in 1900, he turned to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, setting up his Fly Room at Columbia's Schermerhorn Hall. There, through meticulous breeding experiments, he demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and form the mechanical basis of heredity - founding modern genetics. Over his career he published 22 books and 370 scientific papers, and the fly became biology's workhorse. The Division of Biology he later built at Caltech went on to produce seven Nobel laureates.