Thomas Hunt Morgan was a geneticist and embryologist. He was Professor of Experimental Biology at Columbia University (1904-1928) and Professor of Zoology at California Institute of Technology (1928-1945).

Morgan received a thorough grounding in animal morphology, especially of marine invertebrates, under W. K. Brooks at Johns Hopkins, and as a postdoctoral fellow for a year at the famed Naples Zoological Station. In his first academic position, at Bryn Mawr College, he collaborated in teaching the basic course in biology with Jacques Loeb, who was later to attain renown as an experimental physiologist. A leave of absence from Bryn Mawr enabled Morgan to spend another year (1894-1895) at the Naples laboratory, working especially with Hans Driesch, who became a lifelong friend. It was then that Morgan declared his independence of the descriptive method of studying animals, so characteristic of W. K. Brooks, and determined to be an experimentalist -- specifically, an experimental embryologist.

Morgan began going to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory almost from its founding in 1888, while he was still a graduate student. He became a member of its Board of Trustees in 1897, and he remained on the Board as an active member until 1937. Woods Hole was an ideal place for the sort of investigations in embryology Morgan wished to pursue, for it was there that one could study marine animals while they were still alive.

There were other attractions, too. One of Morgan's children is said to have believed that E. B. Wilson dragged a reluctant Morgan from his research one day to meet "his brightest student" at Bryn Mawr College, Lilian Vaughan Sampson. In any case, they met, and in 1891, when Morgan arrived as a new faculty member at the college, Lilian enrolled as a graduate student and Morgan became her adviser. She received an M.A. degree in 1894. Romance came slowly. They did not become engaged until 1903, and were married in 1904, just before Morgan accepted his friend E. B. Wilson's invitation to fill a professorship at Columbia University. Morgan's interests were centered at this time upon problems of heredity and sex determination. He was, however, notoriously skeptical of the validity of Mendelism and the chromosomal theory of heredity advocated by Boveri and by Wilson and his graduate student W. S. Sutton.

While he was at Naples, Morgan had tried to repeat Boveri's experiment on the fertilization of enucleated sea urchin eggs, which Boveri said led to wholly paternal inheritance; and Morgan could not confirm the result. As a consequence, Morgan discounted Boveri's work all too heavily. Yet why he should have disregarded the superb analysis made by Sutton, which tied together the events of meiosis -- the reduction of the chromosome number in the formation of male and female gametes -- with the Mendelian segregation of alternative characters and the random fertilization of egg cells by male germ cells (sperms or pollen), is truly hard to conjecture. In any case, Morgan wrote a number of skeptical papers about Mendelism that he was later to regret -- one, in fact, that he actually deleted in later years from his bibliography. In 1908 he selected the tiny fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster in order to test where those variations important in evolution come from -- from DeVriesian mutations, as he then thought. In 1910, however, he found a recessive sex-linked mutation, white eye color. [In the Davenport Papers there is a highly interesting letter from Morgan to Davenport, dated June 11, 1910, a letter in which Morgan reports his discovery and analysis of its "sex limited inheritance," while saying not a word of the dispelling of his doubts of Mendelian inheritance or his abandonment of the dictum, "Once crossed, always mixed," which he had applied to the results obtained by Cuenot in his breeding of yellow-coated mice. The letter was sent to Davenport almost a month before Morgan submitted the paper to Science for publication. See B. Glass, "An Exciting Find: Thomas Hunt Morgan Letters," Mendel Newsletter 26: 6-7, August 1986.]

So the great Drosophila era of genetics, with its verification of the Chromosome Theory of Heredity, its mapping of genes according to linkage and recombination values, had begun. Already, too, in the "fly room" in Schermerhorn some extraordinary students, both graduate and undergraduate, were at work -- among them Bridges, Sturtevant, and Muller, who collaborated with Morgan in writing the book of the time, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. A number of foreign holders of fellowships also arrived to join the heady atmosphere of novel theories and methods of genetical research. The first of these was probably Otto Lous Mohr, from Norway, who with his wife Tove became especially warm, lifelong friends of the Morgan family. In the late 1920s came Curt Stern and Theodosius Dobzhansky. In 1927 Morgan received an invitation to come to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, to establish and head a Biology Division. He accepted, and took Bridges and Sturtevant with him. In planning and administrative work, however, Morgan lost his zest for Drosophila genetics, and when he resumed experimental work, it was to return to his first love, embryology, to seek once again to unite it with genetics and thereby provide a more solid basis for evolutionary theory.

The core of the Morgan collection at the APS is comprised of twenty-eight letters and one telegram written by various members of the Morgan family and the Otto Lous Mohr family.... After his return to Norway, Mohr became professor of anatomy, and later rector, at the University of Oslo. He was a member and president of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and did pioneering work in human genetics and the inheritance of genetic diseases. The letters, written between 1919 and 1945, reflect all aspects of the relationship between the two families: general family gossip, news of friends and colleagues, politics, and of course work in progress. They chronicle the Mohrs' nightmarish experiences during the German occupation of Norway, and the Morgan family's trip to Scandinavia for the awarding of the Nobel Prize. Two drafts of letters nominating Morgan for the Prize, in Norwegian, from Mohr to the Nobel Committee are included in the collection, as well as letters concerning financial support of ongoing research, descriptions of the progress in mapping chromosomes, and discussions of new ideas and theories.

Also of importance are the financial and estate records of Morgan, his wife Lilian V. S. Morgan (d. 1952) and his sister Ellen K. H. Morgan (d. 1956). These papers include not only wills, passports, letters, and other documents which detail the financial status of the family, but numerous letters between the Morgan children, Edith M. Whitaker, Howard K. Morgan, Isabel M. Mountain, and Lilian M. Scherp, letters which concern many aspects of their lives beyond the settlement of the estates.

Three letters written to Morgan during the 1920s are contained in the collection, all of which are comments on his published work. R. R Gates, Richard Palmer, and W. P. Thompson wrote to him, about The Physical Basis of Heredity, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, and The Theory of the Gene, respectively. A fourth letter, from Julian Huxley to Richard Shryock in 1963, describes some of Huxley's memories of Morgan. Finally, there is a five-page biographical sketch of C. B. Bridges which is anonymous and may well have been written by Bridges himself.

Physical description

Ca. 800 items

Ca. 800 items

Provenance

Presented by Otto L. Mohr through Leslie C. Dunn and accessioned 01/--/1963 (1963 81ms). One additional item presented by L.C. Dunn and accessioned, 1963 (1963 1259ms). Financial papers presented by Isabel Morgan Mountain and accessioned, 12/15/1975 (1975 1478ms).

Other finding aids

See also Mardi Bettes Fuller, "Thomas Hunt Morgan Papers," Mendel Newsletter 21: 6-8 (1981); Bentley Glass, "An Exciting Find: Thomas Hunt Morgan Letters," Mendel Newsletter 26, 6-7 (1986).

Related material

Additional letters to and from T.H. Morgan may be found in the Blakeslee Papers (34 items, 1904-1934), Davenport Papers (279 items, 1893-1930), Dunn Papers (21 items, 1918-1945), Jennings Papers (23 items, 1907-1924), Pearl Papers (64 items, 1911-1931), and Stern Papers (32 items, 1927-1952).

Genetics Note

This collection contains materials which relate to the history of genetics.

• Passports.

• Norway -- History -- German occupation, 1940-1945.

• Bridges, Calvin B. (Calvin Blackman), 1889-1938
• Gates, R. Ruggles, (Reginald Ruggles), 1882-1962
• Morgan, Ellen K. H.
• Morgan, Lilian V.
• Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 1866-1945

• Genetics.
• Nobel Prizes.
• Zoology.