[2] By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor.
His grandfather Julian Monson Sturtevant, a Yale University graduate, was a founding professor and second president of Illinois College, where his father taught mathematics.
[4] When Sturtevant was seven years old, his father quit his teaching job and moved the family to Alabama to pursue farming.
While in college, he read about Mendelism, which piqued Sturtevant's interest because it could explain the traits expressed in the horse pedigrees.
In 1928, Sturtevant moved to Pasadena to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics and remained for the rest of his career, except for one year when he was invited to teach in Europe.
[6] He became the leader of a new genetics research group at Caltech, whose members included George W. Beadle, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sterling Emerson, and Jack Schultz.
[11] In this same time frame, Sturtevant was an outspoken opponent of eugenics and was interested in the effects of the atomic bomb on human populations, due to his previous research on lethal genes.
He warned the public of possible harmful genetic effects of nuclear fallout despite supposedly low levels of ionizing radiation.
[12] Sturtevant's most notable discoveries include the principle of genetic mapping,[14][15] chromosomal inversion,[16][17] the first observation of a single gene mutation affecting behavior,[18] the first reparable gene defect, the principle underlying fate mapping, the phenomena of unequal crossing-over,[19] and position effect.
His main contributions to science include his analysis of genetic “linkage groups,” which became a classical method of chromosome mapping that we still use today.
In 1920, he published a set of three papers under the title “Genetic Studies on Drosophila simulans,” which “proved that two closely related species had newly recurring mutations that were allelic and thus probably identical”.
[24] One of Sturtevant's principal contributions was his introduction of the concept that the frequency of crossing-over between two genes could help determine their proximity on a linear genetic map.
[4] Sturtevant's work on the Drosophila genome enabled geneticists to further map chromosomes of higher organisms, including human beings.
His former Caltech research partner George Beadle claimed that modern biochemical genetics stems directly from Sturtevant's work.