Ten Thousand Jars of Fruit Flies in a Room at Columbia
Coming to Wonder Science on 3 December 2026.
In 1910 New York, on the high ground of Morningside Heights, a tall professor named Thomas Hunt Morgan, two young helpers and the custodian's nine-year-old daughter are trying to keep ten thousand milk-bottle jars of fruit flies alive in one cramped sixth-floor room at Columbia University. Among thousands of red-eyed flies, a single white-eyed male appears — and suddenly that one tiny fly must be guarded through spilled crates, soapy wash-tubs, a banana market under the elevated railway, a midnight walk home, a broken hand truck in the steam tunnels and a January blizzard that knocks out the heat. Saved in a rooftop glasshouse, the white-eyed fly's descendants let young Alfred Sturtevant unroll the first gene map across a library floor, and the team shows the world that heredity rides on chromosomes — before carrying their jars by steamer to a summer laboratory by the sea.
About this story
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- Thomas Hunt Morgan — the professor who keeps the fly room running
- Calvin Bridges — the sharp-eyed young assistant who spots everything
- Alfred Sturtevant — the teenage counter who draws the first gene map
- Nellie Mae Doyle — the custodian's daughter who guards the precious jar
What happens on 3 December 2026
This story is finished and scheduled. On 3 December 2026 it opens here in full — every page illustrated — as part of Wonder Science. Nothing on this page is a placeholder: the story exists, it has been reviewed, and this is its address.
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