1920s and 1930s – Foundation

"At the California Institute of Technology, Morgan wanted to give a concrete form to his philosophy of science in general and of biology in particular. He wanted to emphasize the new direction in which he thought biological research ought to move. It was his aim to bring together the best possible people representing the most modern lines of biological research…and allow them virtually unrestricted possibilities to interact." Allen, G.E. (1978) Thomas Hunt Morgan, the Man and His Science, Princeton, 447 pp., p. 334.

The Caltech Biology Division was founded in 1928. Thomas Hunt Morgan, the world’s pre-eminent geneticist, Professor of Biology at Columbia University, and President of the National Academy of Sciences, was hired by the Institute to start a Division of Biology. The first wing of the Kerckhoff building was constructed (1928) and Morgan set out to recruit a young but distinguished faculty in the five areas of genetics and evolution, experimental embryology, biophysics, physiology, and biochemistry. He intended later to add faculty in experimental psychology – what we call today integrative neurobiology.

Morgan recruited first in genetics, and the starting faculty in 1928 was primarily from his own laboratory and from that of R.A. Emerson at Cornell, the leading plant geneticist of the time. By the 1929-1930 school year the faculty consisted of full professors T.H. Morgan; Alfred H. Sturtevant, a Drosophila geneticist from Morgan’s lab and the discoverer of genetic mapping; and Karl J. Belar. Belar was a distinguished young cytogeneticist who had been hired away from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem. He was to die in an automobile accident during a trip to the desert in 1931. Ernest G. Anderson, a maize geneticist from the Emerson lab and a former postdoc in Morgan’s lab, was associate professor, and the assistant professors were Theodosius Dobzhansky (evolutionary genetics, a recent postdoc of Morgan’s from Russia), Sterling Emerson (plant genetics, and the son of R.A. Emerson), Henry Borsook, a biochemist from Toronto, and Herman E. Dolk, a plant physiologist from the Netherlands. Dolk, like Belar, was to die in an automobile accident, in 1932. Calvin Bridges, with Sturtevant the core of Morgan’s Drosophila group, came as a Research Fellow of the Carnegie Institution, a position he held at Caltech until his death in 1938; and Albert Tyler, an embryologist, graduate student of Morgan’s and Caltech’s first Ph.D. in Biology (1929), was appointed instructor, eventually (1938) becoming a professor, and remaining at Caltech for the rest of his life (to 1968).

Not everyone who was asked to join the new Division accepted. Among those considered but not landed were Curt Stern (a geneticist from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, who later visited Caltech in 1932, while in flight from Germany), Leonor Michaelis (of the Michaelis-Menten equation) and Selig Hecht, the Columbia biophysicist – each to become important scientists in their respective fields, but not at Caltech.

Others hired as professors, mostly assistant professors, in the first half of the 1930s included Robert Emerson (biophysics, 1930), Hugh Huffman (biochemistry, 1931), Frits Went (plant physiology, 1932, to replace the late Dolk), George MacGinitie (a marine biologist hired in 1932 to direct the new Kerckhoff Marine Lab at Corona del Mar, and one of only two faculty members in Divisional history not to have a doctoral degree-the other was Dobzhansky), and Cornelis Wiersma in physiology (1934). Later in the decade the professorial faculty was augmented by Arie Haagen-Smit (a bio-organic chemist, 1937), James F. Bonner, a plant physiologist and Caltech Ph.D. in biology (Ph.D. 1934, hired in 1938), Anthonie van Harreveld (neurophysiology, 1939) and Johannes van Overbeek (plant physiology, 1939). Kenneth Thimann, the plant physiologist, was an instructor beginning in 1930.

During the Division’s first decade a number of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and visiting professors were also at work. Many of these rose later to great prominence in biology. Among the postdoctoral fellows were George Beadle, later to chair the Division; Max Delbrück, later to return as Professor of Biology; Barbara McClintock; Charles Burnham; and Georgii Karpechenko (a student of Vavilov’s who was to return to the Soviet Union and to die, like Vavilov, in one of Stalin’s prison camps as a victim of Lysenkoism). Other international postdoctoral visitors were Cyril Darlington, Curt Stern, Boris Ephrussi, and D.G. Catcheside. Among the graduate students were Chia-Chen Tan (now Jia-Zhen Tan, former President of Fudan University, and China’s most revered geneticist); Norman Horowitz, later to join the faculty of the Division, and to serve as chair in the 1970s; David M. Bonner (after whom Bonner Hall at U.C. San Diego is named, and brother of James); Edward Novitski; and Edward B. Lewis – who later joined the Divisional faculty, and remained a member of it until his death in 2004. Novitski has written a memoir on aspects of the Division, including his life as a graduate student, in the late 1930s, which can be seen at http://www.drosophilahistory.com/.

A program in undergraduate education was also established when the Division was founded. The original courses taught in the 1929-30 school year were Bi 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5bc, introductory courses in biology including physiology, botany and histological technique, and a series of advanced courses such as Bi 100, Genetics, taught by Sturtevant, Anderson, Dobzhansky and Emerson, and Bi 110, Biochemistry, taught by Borsook. Bi 110 is still the biochemistry course number, more than 70 years later. After 20 years (through 1950) the total number of men who received the B.S. degree in Biology was around 80 (and they were all men, as Caltech did not accept women as undergraduates until 1970). Thus the program was small by current standards. Around 80% of the graduates went on for doctoral degrees, half to earn Ph.D. degrees and half to work toward the M.D. degree.

One highlight of the 1930s was the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology to T.H. Morgan, in 1933 – the first of the 6 Nobel Prize winners to serve as members of the Biology Division faculty in its first 73 years. Another was the completion in 1938 of the second wing of the William G. Kerckhoff Laboratories – the eastern part of the present building.

“Now, his kindness, his undoubtedly sensitive nature, he hid under a protective cover of eccentricity and what I can describe no better than to say impishness. He was an imp. He liked to shock people, liked to say something unexpected, to behave in a somewhat unorthodox manner. He was dressing himself so poorly that there was at least one occasion when the laboratory janitor was taken to be Professor Morgan, and Professor Morgan was taken to be the janitor. In summer time in California, very frequently he was walking with his trousers kept in place not by a belt or by suspenders, but by a string. A piece of string.” Theodosius Dobzhansky, Reminiscences, Columbia University Oral History Collection, 1962.