Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945)

Awarded the Prize “for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.”

American zoologist and geneticist. Morgan was born in Lexington, Kentucky on September 25, 1866. He took his B.S. degree in 1886 at the University of Kentucky, and in 1890 he obtained his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University. In 1904, he became Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Biology and Director of the G. Kerckhoff Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology. Morgan died on December 4, 1945, at Pasadena, California.