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John Hunt Morgan's Scientific Kin

Here's a semi-interesting tidbit: John Hunt Morgan's brother Charlton, a buddy of Garibaldi (wonder if he knew Wheat) joined the Confederacy in '61 and rode with Morgan's Raiders, being wounded at Shiloh and captured several times by the Yankees. Charlton's son, Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945), became a leading geneticist and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1933. THM's daughter, Dr. Isabel Merrick Morgan (1911-96), was a leading virologist and discovered killed-virus vaccinations that led to the development of the Salk polio vaccination, that many on this board, including me, benefited from in the mid-1950s. (My dad flew with Isabel's husband, Joe Mountain, in Arabia in 1934-35, hence my interest.)

This line of Morgans was also descended from Francis Scott Key. If anyone's interested, there's an online National Academy of Sciences bio on Thomas Hunt Morgan that is quite interesting, although Ken Byrd is arguably one of the few on this board who might be professionally fascinated by the subject of fruit fly genetic traits. As far as I've investigated, Morgan's research doesn't actually clarify which side the flies favored, or if their shade was gray or blue; so perhaps in a spirit of egalitarianism and coming back together we should assume both contingents were equally represented :)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hunt_Morgan

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John Hunt Morgan's Scientific Kin
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