EP 44 · 34:18

Caltech, Morgan, and the genetics lineage

From New Rules For Heredity (Non-Mendelian Inheritance of Epigenetics)

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34:19cool thing about Thomas Hunt Morgan is he went on to found the department of biology at Caltech. When Caltech started in the 1920s, Caltech was this insane place because like they so they hired like the all stars like they just poached all of the big w cuz they just got a bunch of money um I believe from the um the Rockefeller Foundation either them or Carnegie they're whoever whatever they're dead but like if they were alive they'd be pissed that I was mixing them up but one of them gave a lot of money and they just so George Hail who was kind of the founder at the time he he took this Pasadena Community College type thing and was like, "All right, we're just going to hire the

35:00biggest names." It's kind of like when you start like a new team or something, you just like hire the best coach. If you if you got the money, right, you hire the best coach, you hire like Erling Holland or whatever. >> The the perfect analogy for this in in soccer and football is PSG a couple of years ago. >> Oh, really? >> You know, the French [clears throat] league has been viewed for a while as being sort of a farmers league. They got Neymar, they got Messi, uh uh they got Mbappe, Donnarum, a bunch of other players. They just got like literally all the best players in the world. >> Yeah. At the same time. >> At the same time. Yeah. And >> that's what Caltech did. >> That's what they did >> in in the 1920s. They got Milicanin for physics. They got >> um Thomas Huntton Morgan for biology. It was just an insane place to like start out like that.

35:41>> I will I will note it's sometime it doesn't always work because it did not work for PSG. They had that they couldn't win the Champions League and then and then Messi and Mbappé left and uh Neymar left and then they won the Champions League. >> Oh, that's hilarious. >> So, it it can work. >> It can work. Yeah, >> it worked in Caltech's case. >> Yes. Yes. [laughter] Certainly. Because they just they they became like a top institution immediately, which usually it takes years of work to do that, right? Um and his students have won the Nobel Prize too like uh John Howard Northrup he's a Berkeley professor 1946 chemistry Nobel for isolation and crystallization of enzymes and Herman Miller won the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for X-rays to make

36:23so big lineage from Thomas >> legacy >> anyways after Morgan then you have the modern synthesis of genetics so this is we've covered this in a previous episode um with James Watson and his discovery

From the episode
  1. EP 44

    New Rules For Heredity (Non-Mendelian Inheritance of Epigenetics)

    A new mouse genetics paper suggests that non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance may be more common in mammals than previously thought.

    New Rules For Heredity (Non-Mendelian Inheritance of Epigenetics)

BiologyDNAEpigeneticsGeneticsInheritance