Walter S. SuttonDied 10 Nov 1916 at age 39 (born 5 Apr 1877). Walter Stanborough Sutton was an American geneticist who provided the first conclusive evidence that chromosomes carry the units of inheritance and occur in distinct pairs. While he was working as a graduate student at Columbia University, studying grasshopper cells, Sutton observed that chromosomes occurred in distinct pairs, and that during meiosis, the chromosome pairs split, and each chromosome goes to its own cell. Sutton announced this discovery in his 1902 paper On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in Brachyotola. In 1903, Sutton discovered that chromosomes contained genes, and that their behavior during meiosis was random, concepts that later provided the basis for the Chromosomal Theory of Heredity. |
