Calvin Blackman Bridges (January 11, 1889 – December 27, 1938) was an American scientist known for his contributions to the field of genetics.

Muller, Bridges was part of Thomas Hunt Morgan's famous "Fly Room" at Columbia University.

Despite this setback, he moved on to be an outstanding student at Columbia University in New York City, which he attended both undergraduate and postgraduate school.

While taking a zoology class at Columbia, Bridges met Thomas Hunt Morgan.

This started a relationship which would eventually lead to many important scientific discoveries regarding genetics and evolution.

The "Fly Room" experiments began in 1910 and continued for seventeen years, with Thomas Hunt Morgan being the project's lead experimental developer.

[1] Among many others working alongside Bridges and Morgan in the laboratory were Alfred Sturtevant and Hermann Joseph Muller.

[2] The success of the "Fly Room" experiments eventually made D. melanogaster a widely popular model organism for biological research of all types.

He suggested the use binocular microscopes instead of hand lenses that had been using before, which improved data quality and convenience.

He thanked her as "Miss Stevens" without stating what her contribution was nor referring to her Ph.D.[citation needed] Bridges' PhD thesis on "Non-disjunction as proof of the chromosome theory of heredity" appeared as the first paper in the first issue of the journal Genetics in 1916.

[4] Bridges' best-known contribution among Drosophila researchers is his observation and documentation of the polytene chromosomes found in larval salivary gland cells.

[citation needed] Bridges was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1936 for his work with Drosophila.

[1] After his death, Bridges' student Katherine Brehme Warren completed work on The Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster (1944), a classic book which was for two decades an indispensable resource for geneticists, with information from the "Red Book" later being transferred to the FlyBase database.