Prizeman

To a dowdy little old zoologist, pottering in spectacles and carpet slippers among millions of bottled fruit flies at Pasadena, last week went the 1933 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Cried Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan with academic orthodoxy:

"I am very happy, of course, to hear about the award. I am especially appreciative of it as a recognition of the importance of genetics to medical science."

Dr. Morgan's technical superior at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate Robert Andrews Millikan, would not let Dr. Morgan's acknowledgment pass so modestly. Exclaimed he proudly : "Dr. Morgan's discoveries in genetics are among the great fundamental discoveries in the realms of biology."

The Morgan discoveries show how the physical and mental characteristics of ancestors are transmitted to offspring. Gregor Mendel showed that such transmission occurred according to a regular system. Other investigators showed that the work is carried on by the male and female sex cells and that in those sex cells the significant factors are microscopic rods called chromosomes.

Dr. Morgan at Bryn Mawr College (1891-1904) and Columbia University (1904-28) was one of the pioneers in chromosome study. In fact he hopped to scholarly repute from a frog's egg. Man has 24 chromosomes in his germ cells, the fruit fly 4. Dr. Morgan picked the fruit fly as most convenient for the study of inheritance. The fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) produces 25 generations a year, which is about as many as man produces in 500 years.

Dr. Morgan submitted successive generations of Drosophila eggs to variations of temperature, light, x-rays, and other physical conditions. Each condition had some very definite effects which appeared in the adult fly.

These observations led to two of Dr. Morgan's unimpeachable genetic discoveries: 1) Lying in the rodlike chromosomes of the germ cells, like links of sausage, are ultramicroscopic units (genes) which transmit individual characteristics (say, brown eyes) from parent to child. 2) When the chromosomes of the two parents mingle in the egg (which ultimately becomes their child), the genes do not mix helter-skelter but "cross over" in groups. That is why, for example, in Drosophila, black body color tends to be inherited with purple eyes, vestigial wings, and a speck at the base of the wings.

No man has seen a gene, although the late Geneticist John Belling of the University of California recorded their reflections with photomicrographic equipment. As to the substance of the genes. Dr. Morgan surmises that they are single, or perhaps small clusters of, complex chemical molecules. His view of inheritance is purely mechanistic, his view of life purely materialistic. At its simplest, life to him is nothing more than a sunbeam jiggling on an atom of carbon.

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