Lilian Vaughan Morgan
Lilian Vaughan Morgan (née Sampson; July 7, 1870 – December 6, 1952) was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lilian Morgan published sixteen single-author papers between 1894 and 1947. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the discovery of the attached-X chromosome and an entirely new pattern of inheritance in Drosophila in 1921. She also discovered the closed or ring-X chromosome in 1933. Both are important research tools today. Early life Morgan was born in 1870 in Hallowell, Maine. She was orphaned at the age of three when her parents and younger sister died of tuberculosis. After the death of her parents, Morgan and her older sister Edith were raised by her maternal grandparents in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Early research career Morgan enrolled as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr in 1887. She majored in biology and was advised by Martha Carey Thomas. After graduating with honors in 1891, she spent the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where Edmund Beecher Wilson, one of her previous zoology professors, introduced her