In Pursuit of the Gene

186 ¨ THE FLY ROOM
sity worked together in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual respect to
solve the great mystery of modern genetics. Sturtevant’s evocation has an
almost surreal quality:
This group worked as a unit. Each carried on his own experiments, but
each knew exactly what the others were doing, and each new result was
freely discussed. There was little attention paid to priority or to the
source of new ideas or new interpretations. What mattered was to get
ahead with the work. There was much to be done; there were many new
ideas to be tested, and many new experimental techniques to be developed.
There can have been few times and places in scientific laboratories
with such an atmosphere of excitement and with such a record of sustained
enthusiasm. 2
Despite Sturtevant’s bold attempt to airbrush the history, there was
something deeply troubled about the state of affairs in the Morgan lab. A
few years before his death in 1967, Muller granted an interview to Columbia
sociologist Harriet Zuckerman on the subject of collaboration in science,
during which he made it clear that he believed Morgan to be guilty of a serious
breach of professional ethics in the fly room, and that it was his example
that led to problems among the students. 3 As he explained it, “What
happened in this case, it seems to me, is that the major man—if I may
speak out—stole from the younger men, and then some of the young
men stole from each other and were able to get away with it.” After the
first announcement of the new chromosome theory in the 1915 textbook
The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, which was coauthored by Morgan,
Sturtevant, Muller, and Bridges, Morgan attempted to take credit for the
work. In the highly prestigious Vanuxem Lectures given at Princeton in
1915 and 1916, which were published as a book, Morgan made little reference
to the participation of any of the others, presenting the new developments
as if they were the natural outgrowth of his early work without
making any explicit mention of who had formulated the ideas and the experiments
to test them. 4 In 1919 Morgan wrote a second textbook, The Physical
Basis of Inheritance, but this time he wrote the book entirely under his own
name. The second book was so similar to the original and brought out so
soon after it (in 1919), that Holt and Co., the original publisher, considered