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IN the early 1910s, researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, might have wondered why a colleague, Thomas Hunt Morgan (Figure 1), began shipping fruit flies from his Columbia University lab to the MBL each summer. After all, the Woods Hole currents supplied the MBL with a rich variety of marine organisms and Morgan, an avid practitioner of experimental embryology, made good use of them. Yet those who knew Morgan well would not have been surprised by his insect stocks. A keen naturalist, Morgan studied a veritable menagerie of experimental animals—many of them collected in Woods Hole—as a student and later researcher at the MBL from 1890 to 1942. Moreover, Morgan always had a diversity of investigations going on simultaneously. ‘‘This was the way Morgan worked: he wasn’t happy unless he had a lot of different irons in the fire at the same time,’’ wrote A. H. Sturtevant, Morgan’s long-term collaborator (Sturtevant 2001, pp. 4–5). In Morgan’s f...