The name of the American geneticist and Nobel Prize winner, along with that of Gregor Mendel, was genericized in the USSR, becoming part of an ideological cliché. A relative of John Morgan, the tycoon, and the great grandson of the composer of the American national anthem, he took interest in biology as a child and in the nascent genetics as a mature man. He disagreed with Mendel at first and did not believe that chromosomes were vectors of heredity. He wanted to use rabbits in his experiments, but keeping them turned out to be expensive, and Morgan settled for vinegar flies (Drosophila melanogaster). They proved to be ideal subjects, and Drosophila melanogaster took its rightful place in science thanks to the lord of the flies as Morgan was called by glib journalists. It helped Morgan greatly as well since it was his experiments with Drosophila melanogaster that confirmed and proved the chromosome theory of inheritance, which was a great scientific discovery of the 20th century.
