21 Facts About Alfred Sturtevant

1.

Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist.

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2.

Alfred Sturtevant's grandfather Julian Monson Sturtevant, a Yale University graduate, was a founding professor and second president of Illinois College, where his father taught mathematics.

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3.

Alfred Sturtevant attended a one-room schoolhouse until entering high school in Mobile.

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4.

Alfred Sturtevant further pursued his interest in genetics under Thomas Hunt Morgan, who encouraged him to publish a paper of his pedigrees shown through Mendelian genetics.

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5.

Alfred Sturtevant joined Morgan's research team in the "fly room", in which huge advances were being made in the study of genetics through studies of the fruit fly Drosophila.

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6.

In 1928, Alfred Sturtevant moved to Pasadena to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics and remained for the rest of his career, except for one year when he was invited to teach in Europe.

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7.

Alfred Sturtevant taught an undergraduate course in genetics at Caltech and wrote a textbook with George Beadle.

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8.

Alfred Sturtevant became the leader of a new genetics research group at Caltech, whose members included George W Beadle, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sterling Emerson, and Jack Schultz.

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9.

Alfred Sturtevant was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949.

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10.

Alfred Sturtevant loved solving all kinds of puzzles and saw genetics as a puzzle for him to decipher.

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11.

Alfred Sturtevant was widely read, interested in politics, newspapers, scientific journals across many subjects and crossword puzzles.

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12.

Alfred Sturtevant had an impressive memory and composed and edited papers in his head before writing them down from memory.

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13.

Alfred Sturtevant enjoyed a long and prosperous career in genetics until his death on April 5,1970.

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14.

Alfred Sturtevant accomplished most of his work between 1910 and World War II.

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15.

Alfred Sturtevant warned the public of possible harmful genetic effects of nuclear fallout despite supposedly low levels of ionizing radiation.

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16.

Alfred Sturtevant postulated that genes that remained together while being passed from generation to generation must be located on the same chromosome.

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17.

Alfred Sturtevant showed that the gene for any specific trait was in a fixed location.

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18.

Alfred Sturtevant's experiments determined that the frequency of double crossing over can be used to deduce gene order.

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19.

Alfred Sturtevant demonstrated this concept by constructing crosses of three segregating genes, called "three-factor crosses".

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20.

Alfred Sturtevant found that using three genes as opposed to two provided most accurate information about gene order on chromosome.

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21.

Alfred Sturtevant surmised that unequal crossing-over was possibly a main force of evolution.

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