American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and embryologist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for his discovery of the role played by chromosomes in heredity. He is perhaps most noted for his “fly lab” at Columbia University in New York, where he collected Drosophila (fruit fly) mutants. Morgan studied fruit flies much in the same way that Mendel studied peas. He found that the inheritance of certain characteristics, such as eye color, was affected by the sex of the offspring.