Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and embryologist who won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.
He was born on the 25th of September, 1866, in Lexington, Kentucky, and studied at the State College of Kentucky before earning a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. He went on to hold professorships at Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology. His pioneering work with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster at Columbia, beginning around 1910, established the chromosome theory of heredity and laid the foundations of modern genetics.
Morgan's surname, Morgan, is of Welsh origin, and his own family's pedigree research traces part of his American ancestry to James Morgan, an immigrant who settled near Boston from Britain in 1636. Genealogical accounts of the Morgan family note that, while the greater part of his lineage was English, it carried at least two distinct Welsh strains alongside Scottish, Irish, French and German threads typical of long-established American families. This is a real but distant and diffuse ancestral connection rather than a documented birthplace or parent from Wales, and it is presented here with that honest caveat.
Morgan died on the 4th of December, 1945, in Pasadena, California.