Walter Sutton

Walter Stanborough Sutton (1877 to 1916) was an American biologist who trained as a physician and practised as a surgeon. He grew up on a farm in Kansas, studied at the University of Kansas and then at Columbia University, where his work on grasshopper chromosomes led him to propose that Mendel's laws of inheritance operate through the chromosomes inside cells. That idea is now known as the Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory, because the German biologist Theodor Boveri reached the same conclusion independently. Sutton later completed a medical degree at Columbia in 1907, interned in surgery at Roosevelt Hospital in New York and became an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Kansas Medical School. During the First World War he served as surgeon-in-chief at the American Ambulance Hospital near Paris, where he used fluoroscopy to locate shrapnel in wounded soldiers. He died young, at the age of 39.