Thomas Hunt Morgan - Legacy and Honors

Legacy and Honors

Morgan left an important legacy in genetics. Some of Morgan's students from Columbia and Caltech went on to win their own Nobel Prizes, including George Wells Beadle and Hermann Joseph Muller. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel has written of Morgan, "Much as Darwin's insights into the evolution of animal species first gave coherence to nineteenth-century biology as a descriptive science, Morgan's findings about genes and their location on chromosomes helped transform biology into an experimental science."

• Johns Hopkins awarded Morgan an honorary LL.D. and the University of Kentucky awarded him an honorary Ph.D.
• He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and made a foreign member of the Royal Society.
• In 1924 Morgan received the Darwin Medal.
• The Thomas Hunt Morgan School of Biological Sciences at the University of Kentucky is named for him.
• The Genetics Society of America annually awards the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, named in his honor, to one of its members who has made a significant contribution to the science of genetics.
• Thomas Hunt Morgan's discovery was illustrated on a 1989 stamp issued in Sweden, showing the discoveries of eight Nobel Prize-winning geneticists.
• A junior high school in Shoreline, Washington was named in Morgan's honor for the latter half of the 20th century.