Word: morganization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...wealth 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...
Teaming up with Alfred H. Sturtevant, one of Morgan's men, Beadle worked for three years on corn and fruit-fly genetics. But he felt vaguely that something was wrong, that perhaps corn and fruit-fly chromosomes were almost worked out. His friend Professor Boris Ephrussi, a visiting embryologist from the University of Paris, agreed. Both decided that genetics had become too isolated; what it needed was ideas from other sciences...
...Caltech needed a new head for its now famous Division of Biology. Professor Morgan had retired. Beadle was tapped for the job and accepted, knowing well that he would have to curtail, perhaps abandon, his personal research. Some of his friends felt that a great scientist was being wasted on a routine administrative job, and there was a precedent for their fears in the history of genetics. Mendel himself did nothing of note after he was made abbot...