Where is the New Biology Taking Us

A review of THE GENETIC REVOLUTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1998. Edited byJustine Burley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. $14.95 (paper). xxviii + 220 p; index. ISBN: 019-286201-4. 1999. As the twentieth century ends, we have hardly taken stock of what has happened during this century of biology. We began the new century in 1900 (just as we begin, erroneously, the new century and millennium in 2000) with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's laws by Hugo De Vries, Carl Correns, and Ernst von Tschermak (the latter despite Curt Stern's efforts to demote him as a rediscoverer). William Bateson quickly took up the cause of Mendelism and named the field of genetics (1906), winning the battle against the biometricians who erroneously (then) thought that Mendelism had nothing to do with either evolution or heredity. In 1909 WilhelmJohannsen gave us a name-the gene-to replace contending verbal monstrosities such as character-unit, unit factor, and other laden terms that misled early investigators. Classical genetics emerged from the fusion of cytology (Walter Sutton's chromosome theory of heredity in 1902) and breeding analysis, especially in the able hands of Edmund Beecher Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. The Drosophila Group (or Fly Lab) established linkage, chromosome maps, X-linked inheritance, the correlation of linkage groups to chromosome number, assorted chromosomal rearrangements, nondisjunction, dosage compensation, complex association of gene and character through chief genes and genetic modifiers, construction of genetic stocks, and a variety of new, wonderful insights and tools for genetic analysis. The studies of plant geneticists (especially by E M East and D FJones) provided the agricultural revolution that liberated, at least for the twentieth century, the world from the gloomy predictions by Malthus of world hunger on a massive scale as human population soared in response to the practical benefits of the germ theory and the reduction of infant mortality. By the 1920s many insights into gene number and function had been established, and mutation of the gene was isolated from other varieties of chromosomal disturbances, allowing geneticists to focus on mutation rates and the search for agents that induce mutations. HermannJoseph Muller was the first to successfully tackle these problems, and his induction of mutations by x-rays in 1927 set off a wave of repetitions in plants, animals, and microbes that created both the field of radiation genetics and the practical application of radiation (later chemical mutagens) to produce desired mutations, including the greatly augmented yields of penicillin from mold. The late 1930s saw the first rumblings of biochemical genetics and the conception of molecular genetics. Virus genetics (Max Delbruick's school), sex in bacteria Joshua Lederberg's findings), and the hints that DNA may be of genetic significance after all (so E B Wilson thought as early as the 1890s) led to the explosion of new knowledge that followed the end of the second World War. DNA was the genetic material (as the Rockefeller and Cold Spring Harbor laboratories reported), its structure (as worked out by Watson and Crick and confirmed by Wilkins and Franklin) was a double helix, and its implications rolled forth: the genetic code, semiconservative replication, molecular basis of mutagenesis, genetic fine structure associated with pseudoallelism and nests of cognate genes, and genetic regulation, all by 1965. In the next thirty-five years came the sequencing of genes, enzymology of DNA replication, the PCR tool of copying genes, identification of introns and exons in eukaryotic genes, directed mutation, and recombinant DNA technology. Genetics suddenly became fused with engineering, in addition to physics, mathematics, physiology, cell biology, embryology, breeding analysis, cytology, chemistry, biochemistry, and evolution. At the same time as genetics shifted in the middle of the century from the classical to molecular approaches, human genetics expanded greatly, purged of eugenics, and found its way into medical schools, infiltrating departments of pathology, obstetrics, and pediatrics.