Though most of the great discoveries of genetics in the early period are described, Mukherjee ignores the wonderful contribution of genetics, from 1920 onwards, to plant breeding, which increased food and feed productivity by 1 per cent a year, and underpinned the green revolution for which the geneticist Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He had received Gregor Mendel's paper on heredity, but there is no evidence he had read it. He knew that evolution must entail the inheritance of useful attributes, but his theory of heredity was quickly shown to be misplaced. Friends are more interested now but still find it difficult to accept the implications of genes, which affect everything we are and do, but often in a small way that cannot be understood or altered.ĭarwin, a natural sceptic, had no time for religion. The gene is the beautiful and powerful idea that explains biology. Mukherjee sees the gene as “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science”, and he ranks it with the atom as an idea that has transformed our understanding of the natural world. The past 50 years have seen genetics emerge, in the words of Bryan Appleyard, as “the most restless, turbulent and demanding form of knowledge that our species has yet produced”.
The first century of genetics was of little interest to the general public, as I found out at dinner parties in the 1960s. He writes well, often pithily, in his mostly excellent, though occasionally protracted, history of the gene. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a molecular biologist at Columbia University who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and whose family has been affected by heritable illness, is well-placed to explain this complex topic.
If something is in your DNA, this means it's in your genes.
Well, DNA is the chemical genes are made of. The problem, of course, is that most readers do not know what the term means. When The Irish Times says, as it did last month, that "innovation is in our DNA", as a geneticist I might be pleased.
0 kommentar(er)
