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00:00The Nobel Prize
00:13Two years work wasted. I have been breeding those flies for all that time, and I've got nothing out of it.
00:22Thomas Hunt Morgan
00:24Thomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866, in Lexington, Kentucky, into an influential family of southern planters.
00:36After the Civil War, because of their involvement with the Confederation, the Morgans lost some of their civil and property rights.
00:44Young Thomas spent a lot of time wandering in the countryside of Kentucky and Maryland, collecting birds, eggs, and fossils.
00:52It created in him an interest in natural history, which remained with him till his death.
01:00In 1880, Morgan was admitted to the Preparatory Department of the College of Kentucky.
01:08Then, in 1882, he received admission in the main college.
01:13In 1886, he graduated as a valedictorian with a B.S.D. degree in Zoology.
01:22Thomas Hunt Morgan completed his post-doctoral in 1891, and in autumn he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College.
01:36Morgan was made a full professor in 1895.
01:40He now began to work on regeneration and development of lava, trying to distinguish between the external and internal causes.
01:49In 1897, he published his first book, The Development of the Frog's Egg.
01:56Subsequently, he began a series of study on the capacity to regenerate in small animals like tadpoles, fish, and earthworms.
02:05In 1901, he published his findings in another book, called Regeneration.
02:10In 1908, Morgan started working on Drosophila melanogaster, common fruit fly.
02:18He began by crossbreeding these flies in order to find heritable mutations.
02:25Ultimately, in 1910, Morgan found a male fly with white eyes among its red-eyed wild sisters.
02:32He then began to crossbreed the white-eyed mutant fly, with its red-eyed wild sisters,
02:40and found that the males were always born with white eye, while the females mostly had red eye.
02:48Although there were exceptions, the work showed for the first time the relationship between hereditary characters and specific chromosome.
02:57In fact, the papers Morgan published during 1909 and 1910 reflected his belief that chromosomes might be related to sex determination.
03:10However, until then, he had not concluded that accessory chromosome X was the actual sex determiner.
03:17In 1911, he published his finding in Science magazine, in which he claimed that some traits were sex-linked,
03:25and these traits were probably carried on one of the sex chromosomes.
03:30He also surmised that the other genes, too, were carried on specific chromosomes.
03:37Morgan next began to concentrate on embryology.
03:41He encouraged his students to take up experimental approach in all fields of biology.
03:47In 1927, Morgan received an offer to establish School of Biology at the California Institute of Technology.
03:55Morgan is best remembered for his work on chromosome theory of inheritance.
04:01His researches with Drosophila melanogaster provided incontrovertible evidence for the inheritance theory,
04:08and made it acceptable to most biologists of the day.
04:12In addition, his success with Drosophila also made it one of the most widely used model organism.
04:21Throughout his life, Morgan suffered from a chronic duodenal ulcer.
04:25In 1945, when he was 79 years old, he experienced a severe heart attack.
04:33He died from a ruptured artery on December 4, 1945.
04:38In 1989, Sweden issued a stamp to commemorate his discoveries.
04:44The Thomas Hunt Morgan School of Biological Sciences at the University of Kentucky has also been named in his honour.
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