In Pursuit of the Gene

CHAPTER 10
The Fly Room
¨ IN A WELL-KNOWN and perhaps apocryphal story, Edmund Wilson
is reputed to have once quipped that Morgan’s graduate students Alfred
Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges, and Hermann Muller were his three greatest
discoveries. 1 Although there are two radically different accounts of the atmosphere
and dynamics of Morgan’s lab at Columbia, there is nearly universal
agreement on the view that it was these three young men working
together in Morgan’s lab in the years between 1912 and 1915 (when Muller
left Columbia to take a job at the recently formed Rice Institute in Houston)
who were responsible for the integration of Mendelism and the chromosome
theory that is the basis for modern genetics.
Five years before his death in 1970, Sturtevant wrote an account of the
history of genetics that has for several generations been taken as the definitive,
objective account of the founding of classical genetics. His History of
Genetics paints a portrait of a kind of scientific utopia, where Thomas Hunt
Morgan and his group of enthusiastic young protégés at Columbia Univer-