  Many of the model organisms chosen for the HGP had already enjoyed illustrious careers in the history of genetics: the fruitfly D. melanogaster was the organism that started it all in T. H. Morgan's lab at Columbia University in the 1910s, ushering in the era known today as classical genetics; with discoveries of spontaneous mutation and recombination in the 1940s, the bacterium E. coli helped to take genetics molecular, serving also as host for the phage studied by Max Delbrück's group; the nematode worm C. elegans was Sydney Brenner's choice to model the development of the nervous system in the mid-1960s at Cambridge  University.[34] It was, in fact, these histories that recommended them: “the experimental organisms that became ‘model organisms’ were not selected and constructed mainly on the basis of principles of universality or even typicality of their biological characteristics and processes, though it was hoped that many features would prove to be shared or common to other organisms, particularly humans. Instead they were primarily chosen for ease of experimental tractability and due to the availability of some background information on basic genetic composition and relation to phenotype” (Ankeny 2001, pp. S253-S254). 