Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,194

This is the grave of Thomas Hunt Morgan.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1866, Morgan was rich and came from a major slaver background. His uncle was John Hunt Morgan, famous for his treasonous raid into Ohio to fight for the right to rape and murder black people while stealing their labor for eternity. He was also the great grandson of Francis Scott Key. So yeah, elite stuff here. The family was downwardly mobile by 1866. See, they had lost all their human capital. The family also had such reprehensible and unreconstructed politics that his father had trouble finding the kind of work he thought appropriate to a man like himself who of course had done nothing worthwhile in his life while living off the brutally expropriated labor of slaves.

So I’m sure you are thinking now that the story of Thomas Hunt Morgan is going to go the way of scumbag early 20th century white supremacist politician, but as you can see from the grave post, it went a different way. Morgan was a smart kid and went to what is now the University of Kentucky, beginning in 1882. I think it’s notable about the state of the family money at that time that the kid went to public school, my god what has become of us. Well, he was a smart young scientist and got a job with the U.S. Geological Survey in the summer. He graduated and started graduate school at Johns Hopkins in zoology. He became an expert in sea spiders, concluding that they were in fact more closely related to spiders than crustaceans. That got him his doctorate in 1890.

Morgan got a job at Bryn Mawr, which I did not know until I wrote this was connected to Johns Hopkins, serving as effectively its woman college. He maintained an interest in women’s education his whole life. He wrote a paper with a student named Ume Tsuda, the first scientific paper published by a Japanese woman in English, for example. He continued his sea spider work as well as other small ocean creatures and frogs. During a leave in 1894 that he spent in Naples, he was introduced to ideas of experimental embryology and this became his research focus going forward.

Then, in 1900, the research of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, completely forgotten about already, was rediscovered by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. All of a sudden, genetics seemed to explain everything. Alas, poor Mendel did not live to see his work taken seriously, having died in 1881. Interestingly, for many years, while believing Mendel had figured out keys to understanding the world, Morgan still considered the ideas of Charles Darwin with skepticism. This was what he pushed in his 1903 book, Evolution and Adaptation, for example.

No one did more with early Mendelian genetics than Thomas Hunt Morgan. Mendel stayed at Bryn Mawr another decade, moving to Columbia in 1904. This allowed him to stop teaching, more or less, and just work in his lab. It was in 1908 that he started working on fruit flies, finding ways to introduce mutations (including radiation), and seeing what happened through their rapid breeding cycles. This allowed him to publish pioneering papers about sex and chromosomes, figuring out which sex led to certain characteristics, etc. Morgan and some colleagues wrote The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity in 1915 that explored these questions. He wasn’t the only scientist working on this; for example, a few years before this, Eleanor Carothers had made many of these connections in her studies of grasshoppers. But understanding how chromosomes work was an enormous scientific advance.

Morgan’s fruit fly room became the cutting edge of genetics for years. He did finally leave Columbia in 1927 for Cal Tech, but the fly room remained for future researchers. He basically established the biology department there, working heavily on theoretical issues, including, of course, around genetics. He also helped establish the Marine Lab at Cal Tech. The school had a huge amount of money behind it, so Morgan recruited many of the nation’s top scientists and many of the next generation came to study with them.

I have no idea to what extent Morgan continued to hold his family’s reprehensible politics. I imagine he did because most people who grow up like that do. And let’s be honest here–being a pioneering geneticist from a white supremacist family who made his big leap forward in science the year The Birth of a Nation came out, well, let’s just the time, place, class, and field of study does not exactly suggest a strong likelihood of rejecting that past. But that’s conjecture on my part. What I can say is that he did not generally accept eugenics. But if we put eugenics in its proper context, we should understand that while of course it is race science, within the context of the time, it didn’t have to per se be racist. There were black eugenicists after all. Breeding better people and creating better people is of course disgusting and horrifying and led to predictably disastrous results, but you could theoretically believe in the idea without per se being a white supremacist, even if it almost always went that way. In other words, Morgan could reject it because he didn’t see it as legitimate science without rejecting white supremacy. In any case, he did reject it and that’s good. He also always supported women’s education and his daughter Isabel became a very important polio researcher who helped develop the vaccine against it. Morgan also completely rejected organized religion and was a confirmed atheist.

In 1933, Morgan won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He had already won just about every possible prize for a scientist in the U.S. He was a pretty humble guy for a big time scientist. He didn’t really think he deserved the prize. He felt that his work had been collaborative. So he took the prize money and gave all of it to his former PhD students Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant, who he believed deserved equal credit for his discoveries, as well as giving some of it to his kids.

Morgan retired in 1942, but he continued to work in his lab. That didn’t last long though. In 1945, he had a heart attack and died. He was 79 years old.

Thomas Hunt Morgan is buried in Woods Hole Community Cemetery, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. However, this grave is brand new. He was buried in California, but it was only in 2025 that the family had him moved to Woods Hole. Why a family would really bother with this 80 years after a family member’s death, a time by which perhaps at best a grandchild or two dimly remembers him, is an interesting question.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Karl Landsteiner is in Nantucket, Massachusetts and Edward Doisy is in Kirkwood, Missouri. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.