Embryology and Genetics

New York: Columbia University Press, 1934. First edition, first printing.

1934 NOBELIST TH MORGAN'S VISION OF EMBRYOLOGY AND GENETICS BEFORE DISCOVERY OF DNA 19 YEARS LATER.

8 3/4 inches tall hardcover, publisher's red buckram binding, gilt title to spine, bookplate of NSR Maluf to front paste-down, i-vii, 258 pp, 129 figures, wrinkling to half-title and title pages, signature of NSR Maluf to front jacket flap, very good in very good jacket protected by mylar cover. Cited in Rainger American Development of Biology (1988): "For American geneticists, Morgan had used the nuclear envelope as a conceptual and disciplinary barrier. Geneticists study the transmission of genetic traits within the nucleus, embryologists study the expression of those traits in the cytoplasm. This division was to allow each discipline to proceed separately. Thomas Hunt Morgan was an embryologist who inadvertentlv founded the gene theory in 1911. While the Mendelian geneticists had been analyzing the segregation of characters from one generation to another, Morgan investigated whether changes in the nuclear composition of an organism affected its development. However, in the years following 1910, Morgan drove a wedge into embryology, splitting it into two divisions comprising the embryologists and the new geneticists. Already one year after The Theory of the Gene was printed, Morgan published Experimental Embryology. These two excellent textbooks demonstrated Morgan's continued knowledge and expertise in both areas. Therefore, when his Embryology and Genetics appeared in 1934, those scientists who desired the resynthesis of the two disciplines had high hopes. Yet, although this volume provided a survey of both genetics and embryology, it did not attempt to integrate them. Morgan's refusal to integrate genetics and embryology and his extremely flexible, even epigenetic, view of the gene opened the way for others to attempt the synthesis.

THOMAS HUNT MORGAN (1866 - 1945) was an American embryologist, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity. Morgan received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in zoology in 1890 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr. Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900, Morgan began to study the genetic characteristics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University, Morgan demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity. These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics.

PROVENANCE: NOBLE SUYDAM RUSTUM MALUF (aka N. S. Royston Maloeuf) (1913 – 2011) was an American urologic surgeon, born in Cairo, who earned his PhD at Cornell and MD at Harvard. He pursued research in metabolism in the 1930s and later in comparative anatomy, through the 1990s. He was a dedicated bibliophile, building a large personal library of important books reflecting the history of biology and medicine.