Walter Sutton

Walter Stanborough Sutton (April 5, 1877 - November 10, 1916) was an American biologist whose most significant contribution to present-day biology was his theory that the Mendelian laws of inheritance could be applied to chromosomes at the cellular level of living organisms.

Sutton was born in Utica, New York, raised in Russell, Kansas, received Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Kansas. He adopted Ben and Sam Kiley, who were African American, and they attended the Fessenden School in 1903. Sutton then attended Columbia University and obtained his doctorate in medicine, an M.D., in 1907.

Sutton, working with marine life forms, had also become familiar with the process of "reduction division" (later called meiosis), which gives rise to reproductive germ cells, or gametes. In meiosis, the number of chromosomes is reduced by half in sperm and egg cells, with the original number restored in the zygote, or fertilized egg, during reproduction. This process was consonant with Mendel's idea of segregation. In 1902 Sutton suggested that "the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reduction division...may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity." His "The Chromosomes in Heredity" was published in 1903.

The German biologist Theodor Boveri reached the same conclusions as Sutton independently of his research, and their concepts, often referred to as the Boveri-Sutton Chromosome Theory, remained controversial in the biological world until 1915, when Thomas Hunt Morgan made the theory universally accepted through his studies of Drosophila melanogaster.

Sutton died because of appendicitis at the age of thirty-nine.