Thomas Hunt Morgan, Pioneer of Genetics by Ian Shine; Sylvia WrobelReview by: Garland E. AllenIsis, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec., 1978), pp. 635-636Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/231125 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 69: 4: 249 (1978) 635

Ian Shine; Sylvia Wrobel. Thomas Hunt Morgan, Pioneer of Genetics. xv + 160 pp., illus., bibl., index. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976. $7.50.

This book is part of a series issued by the University of Kentucky Press during the Bi- centennial to celebrate some of that state's most important historical figures. Brief, lucid, and highly readable, Shine and Wrobel's vol- ume focuses on the life and work of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), embryologist, evolutionist, and geneticist. Winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for his elucidation of the chromosome theory of heredity, Morgan was the nephew of a far more well known Kentuckian, General John Hunt Morgan, the so-called Thunderbolt of the Confederacy and the leader of Morgan's Raiders during the Civil War. As Shine and Wrobel point out (p. 3), the fame of the uncle in traditional history books has far overshad- owed the fame of the nephew. One of the aims of this little volume has been to redress the imbalance.

Morgan was not only an extremely impor- tant figure in the history of twentieth-century genetics, he was also important in the devel- opment of biology in this century, besides being a complex and fascinating man. Shine and Wrobel's book is at its best in interweav- ing a portrait of Morgan as human being and scientist. They show, for example, how Mor- gan related to his students-the informality which so perplexed European visitors-the humor, the give-and-take among the mem- bers of his famous "Fly Room" laboratory at Columbia (where he worked on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster during 1908-1925). Individuals were not differentiated as "stu- dent" or "professor." Morgan and his group of devoted undergraduates (later graduates and research associates), A. H. Sturtevant, C. B. Bridges, and H. J. Muller, worked as a team to lay out the physical basis of heredity: that is, to show the correspondence between Mendelism and the chromosome theory of heredity.

Outside the laboratory, Morgan's life re- volved mostly about his family, though, as the authors point out, he never immersed himself in practical affairs or the day-to-day responsibilities of running a household. It was Morgan's wife who with a bevy of ser- vants dealt with everything from bruised knees to packing everyone up for the summer stay in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where Morgan continued his work at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Although the authors are sensitive to the issue, they perhaps could

have been more explicit in calling the reader's attention to the social significance of such a division of labor between husband and wife. Morgan's wife, Lillian V. Sampson, was a skillful biologist (cytologist) in her own right and had a very successful graduate career at Bryn Mawr before marrying Morgan in 1904. However, from the birth of their first child (1907) until the youngest was finally in school fulltime (late 1921), she gave up her career to raise a family and to run the household in such a way that Morgan could devote his full attention to science. Today, when the role of women in professional life (especially science) is being reevaluated, such a pattern seems particularly unfair and exploitative, and I believe it deserves more mention, not so much to belittle Morgan as to insure that modern readers will not conclude that only by such exploitation can a modern-day re- searcher make contributions comparable to those of great investigators in the past. Since Shine and Wrobel do make a commendable effort to include Lillian Morgan's contribu- tions, it might have been valuable to go one step further to emphasize clearly what costs to women have accrued from the lifestyle enjoyed by Morgan and his contemporaries.

To my mind the weakest points of the book lie in the treatment of the scientific work of the Morgan group, particularly the historical tradition in biology out of which Morgan's work grew. This is perhaps understandable since this is intended to be a short, easily digestible book for the layman. Nonetheless, descriptions of some of the genetic work and summaries of past developments are often so abbreviated as to be difficult to follow. For example, in describing the cytological investi- gations on sex determination in the early years of the century the authors write a para- graph which would be quite difficult for any nonprofessional to comprehend (pp. 59-60):

Work done in England showed female moths and birds to be the heterogametic sex, that is, to have an X and Y chromo- some instead of two X chromosomes, while in the United States research, mostly on insects, showed the male to be the XY or heterogametic sex. To com- pound the diversity and thus the confu- sion, in a certain homopterous insect that has both English and American form, in the English form unfertilized eggs pro- duce males; in the American they pro- duce females.

The problem with this passage is that it intro- duces terms (heterogametic, homopterous)

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636 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 69: 4: 249 (1978)

which are unnecessary for the main point, it states a simple problem in a complex way, and it leaves the impression that the confu- sion arises in part, or largely, because work was being done on different geographic spe- cies. The history of studies on sex determina- tion is very important for understanding the reluctance of Morgan (and many other con- temporaries) to accept the chromosome inter- pretation of heredity prior to 1910. For ex- ample, in 1909 Morgan argued that if chromosomes were the major carriers of her- editary information, and if sex were deter- mined by the accessory chromosome pair, then how could it be that in one species the same combination of chromosomes (XX) produced a female and in another species a male? The issue was not geography but the apparent absurdity of a scientific explanation which claimed that chromosomes determined a specific phenotypic trait (i.e., sex) and yet that the same combination of chromosomes (e.g., XX) could in one case produce maleness and in another femaleness.

In other places the authors become unne- cessarily sketchy. They repeat cliches about the battle between science and Christianity in the nineteenth century (p. 46). They intermix in a confusing way the cell theory (Schleiden and Schwann) with the study of cell division (mitosis and meiosis): the main question here was not whether cells give rise to other cells (part of the cell theory), but whether chromo- somes are the major heredity-bearing factors from cell generation to generation (part of the chromosome theory). Other errors are slight, but still disturbing: epigenesis is presented as opposed to the "biogenetic law," which it is not (p. 36); H. J. Muller left the fly room in 1911 to take a master's degree in physiology at Cornell Medical School, not to "go to medical school" (p. 82); an article in the notes is ascribed to me when it was actually written by Edward Manier (p. 154, in Synthese, 1969); and it is not true that Morgan failed to combine physics and chemistry into his own work, while admiring such a combination in the work of others (p. 114). Especially in his later years at Caltech, Morgan worked with several biochemists and a protein chemist to try to determine the factor (or factors) on the surface of the sperm or egg which were re- sponsible for self-sterility in an hermaphrodi- tic species (Ciona).

In the last analysis what to me is most important about Morgan's work in genetics, embryology, or evolution was his emphasis on a new methodology in biology. Like his friend and colleague Jacques Loeb, Morgan

broke with the tradition of the old-style mor- phologists who based their conclusions on hypothesis, extrapolation, and speculation. While not downgrading observation, Morgan insisted that biology should become quantita- tive and experimental-that biologists should formulate hypotheses which could be tested rigorously in the laboratory. Biology, he once wrote, should be placed on the same footing as physics and chemistry as a rigorous science, what we today call a "hard" science. It could become so, Morgan thought, if biol- ogists employed the experimental method and learned to use the techniques df physico- chemical analysis whenever possible. To Morgan the most important aspect of his work on heredity was not the specific conclu- sions which he and his co-workers reached but the fact that they achieved their results by using the experimental method. To Morgan this method could revolutionize many phases of biology in the twentieth century in the same way it had revolutionized physics and chemistry in previous centuries. It is this aspect of Morgan's influence on modern biol- ogy which Shine and Wrobel have treated less thoroughly than I would have preferred. They portray Morgan as the founder of mod- ern genetics, which in many ways he was. But his influence goes far beyond that, for he was less a peculiar individual in this matter than representative of a new generation of biolo- gists and a new tradition in the life sciences which was emerging in the twentieth century. By not emphasizing this point enough, Shine and Wrobel portray Morgan as too much an individual, a "great genius of science." With- out detracting from his unique contributions, it is fair to say that he was part of a much larger change in the methods and concepts of biology which has profoundly reshaped our view of organisms in the twentieth century.

GARLAND E. ALLEN

Department of Biology Washington University

St. Louis, Missouri 63130

Roger Stuewer. The Compton Effect. Turn- ing Point in Physics. xii + 367 pp., illus., app., index. New York: Science History Publica- tions, 1975. $25.

Historians of modern physics have not attended as much to radiation theory as to atomic concepts, nor to experiment as much as to theory. Professor Stuewer's book on the

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