Walter Sutton
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Walter Stanborough Sutton (April 5, 1877 - November 10, 1916) was an American geneticist whose most significant contribution to present-day biology was his theory that the Mendellian laws of inheritance could be applied to chromosomes at the cellular level of living organisms. This is now known as the Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Sutton was born at Utica, New York, was raised in Russell, Kansas, received Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Kansas. He adopted Ben and Sam Kiley, who were African American, and they attended the Fessenden School in 1903. Sutton then attended Columbia University and obtained his doctorate in medicine, an M.D., in 1907.
[edit] Career
Sutton, working with marine life forms, had also become familiar with the process of "reduction division" (later called meiosis), which gives rise to reproductive germ cells, or gametes. In meiosis, the number of chromosomes is reduced by half in sperm and egg cells, with the original number restored in the zygote, or fertilized egg, during reproduction. This process was consonant with Mendel's idea of segregation. In 1902, Sutton suggested that "the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reduction division...may constitute the physical basis of the Mendellian law of heredity." His "The Chromosomes in Heredity" was published in 1903.
The German biologist Theodor Boveri independently reached the same conclusions as Sutton, and their concepts, often referred to as the Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory, remained controversial in the biological world until 1915, when Thomas Hunt Morgan made the theory universally accepted through his studies of Drosophila melanogaster.
[edit] References
- Ernest W. Crow and James F. Crow (2002). "100 Years Ago: Walter Sutton and the Chromosome Theory of Heredity". Genetics 160.
