Word: fruited
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...large populations of fruit flies, a few are apt to be naturally defective, with stunted wings or misshapen limbs. In some cases these defects are inherited in a Mendelian manner, like the color of Mendel's flowers. Some traits are dominant, others recessive. They are caused by mutations (damaged genes) in the flies' chromosomes (they have only four pairs), and Morgan's method was to study every possible way that mutations could be passed from generation to generation...
Thomas Hunt Morgan's work won a Nobel Prize, and his laboratory was probably the first in the U.S. to which European scientists and students made serious pilgrimages. Genetic knowledge dredged out of fruit flies had an enormous effect on plant and animal breeding. Geneticists believe that a great bronze statue of a Drosophila. suitably mutated, should be erected in some such place as Iowa, where farm production has been greatly expanded by genetically sophisticated corn...
...gospel of fruit-fly genetics and its many practical applications reached young Student Beadle at the University of Nebraska, mostly through Professor Franklin D. Keim, who was working on hybrid wheat. Beadle helped Keim in summers, and when he graduated from college in 1926, Keim got him a graduate assistantship at Cornell at $750 a year. George Beadle still intended to become some sort of agricultural expert, but when he started working at Cornell with Professor Rollins Adams Emerson, founder of the ''corn school'' of genetics, he found the work so fascinating that he could...
Enter Radiation. About this time a new thing happened to genetics. Since the beginning, geneticists had regretted the scarcity of mutated flies, corn. etc.. to work with. The scarcity ended in 1926 when Professor Hermann J. Muller. now of Indiana University, discovered that X rays applied to fruit flies or any other living organism, create a wealth of mutations, apparently by damaging the genes in their chromosomes. Muller, too, won a Nobel Prize, and soon most genetics laboratories had X-ray machines and were buzzing with dwarfed, twisted, crippled or half-alive fruit flies whose ancestors had been Xrayed...
...supplied by Mullers X rays gave genetics a big boost, and Beadle felt the benefit along with his colleagues. After getting his doctorate (in genetics) at Cornell in 1931, he went to the California Institute of Technology on a National Research Council fellowship. Dr. Morgan, grand maestro of the fruit flies, had moved there in 1928 to head the biology section, and several of his keenest disciples had come with him. Young Dr. Beadle found himself in the best genetic society...