DRAWING MUTANTS: A key member of the Fly Room group was illustrator Edith Wallace, who produced detailed ink drawings of mutated flies. This is a bithorax fly, so named for the second thorax from which an extra winglike structure protrudes (on the left). The drawing was made at the California Institute of Technology, to which Morgan and his colleagues relocated the Fly Room in 1928, and the mutation helped one of Sturtevant’s students, Edward Lewis, discover the famous Hox genes, now known as ubiquitous controllers of development. The work earned Lewis a Nobel Prize in 1995.COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.In 1904, developmental biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan was appointed professor of experimental zoology at Columbia University in New York City, where he began to explore heredity as the key to development. A few years later, he turned to the suitably fecund fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to search for mutations—the spontaneous, heritable changes that had already been observed in plants—and set up a dedicated lab in Schermerhorn Hall’s room 613. Here, hundreds of fly-filled milk bottles cluttered a cramped space that became known as the Fly Room, where Morgan and his students made seminal discoveries about genes and chromosomes that paved the way for modern genetics and transformed biology into an experimental science.
“Morgan’s discoveries made it possible to address a series of questions regarding the function and structure of genes,” wrote neurobiologist Eric Kandel in a 2002 essay in Columbia’s alumni magazine. Some answers came from Morgan and his protégés; others came from the scientists they influenced, added Kandel. “In every case, the discoveries made by these pioneering researchers set the agenda for biology in the twentieth century.”
The first couple of years in the Fly Room were frustrating. Despite subjecting roughly 60 generations of flies to extreme temperatures and exposing them to salts, sugars, acids, alkalis, X-rays, and radium, Morgan and his colleagues failed to detect any visibly mutated flies. Then, in April 1910, they finally spotted one: a fly with white eyes rather than the ...
