Hans Spemann
Walter Sutton
Oswald Avery
Francis Crick
James Watson
Paul Berg
Stanley Cohen
Herbert Boyer
Kary B. Mullis
Steen Willadsen
Ian Wilmut
Keith Campbell
Richard Seed

American scientist who was the first to provide proof that chromosomes contained the cell's units of inheritance.

Sutton, born in Utica, New York, attended Columbia University and obtained his doctorate in medicine in 1907.

While Sutton was working as a graduate student at Columbia University, he became the first scientist to provide evidence that chromosomes carried the cell's units of inheritance. While studying grasshopper cells, Sutton observed that chromosomes occurred in distinct pairs, and that during meiosis, the chromosome pairs split, and each chromosome goes to its own cell. Sutton announced this discovery in his 1902 paper "On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in Brachyotola."

In 1903, Sutton discovered that chromosomes contained genes, and that their behavior during meiosis was random, concepts that later provided the basis for the Chromosomal Theory of Heredity.

Despite the implications of his discovery to the field of genetics, Sutton pursued a career practicing general surgery in Kansas City, Kansas until his death.

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