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A History of Genetics by Alfred Henry Sturtevant Pdf
In the small “Fly Room†at Columbia University, T.H. Morgan and his students, A.H. Sturtevant, C.B. Bridges, and H.J. Muller, carried out the work that laid the foundations of modern, chromosomal genetics. The excitement of those times, when the whole field of genetics was being created, is captured in this book, written in 1965 by one of those present at the beginning. His account is one of the few authoritative, analytic works on the early history of genetics. This attractive reprint is accompanied by a website, http://www.esp.org/books/sturt/history/ offering full-text versions of the key papers discussed in the book, including the world's first genetic map.
Biological inheritance, the passage of key characteristics down the generations, has always held mankind’s fascination. It is fundamental to the breeding of plants and animals with desirable traits. Genetics, the scientific study of inheritance, can be traced back to a particular set of simple but ground-breaking studies carried out 170 years ago. The awareness that numerous diseases are inherited gives this subject considerable medical importance. The progressive advances in genetics now bring us to the point where we have unravelled the entire human genome, and that of many other species. We can intervene very precisely with the genetic make-up of our agricultural crops and animals, and even ourselves. Genetics now enables us to understand cancer and develop novel protein medicines. It has also provided us with DNA fingerprinting for the solving of serious crime. This book explains for a lay readership how, where and when this powerful science emerged.
Genetics and the Unsettled Past by Keith Wailoo,Alondra Nelson,Catherine Lee Pdf
Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present. Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history. This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.
The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell! From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns “Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technologyand consequently as a book of life. This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the book of life metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been, they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s). Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic book of life.
A Short History of Medical Genetics by Peter S. Harper Pdf
"This book traces the development of genetics in medicine from the first descriptions of inherited diseases more than 300 years ago to the new applications resulting from mapping and sequencing the human genome. It follows both the scientific and the medical advances, focusing especially on those of the past 50 years, which have seen the field of medical genetics emerge as one of the foremost and most rapidly changing medical specialties, now influencing the whole of medicine. It also examines the ethical challenges faced by those working in the field, and describes some of the past disasters that have resulted from these being ignored, notably the abuses of eugenics and the catastrophic destruction of genetics in Soviet Russia. This is the first book of its kind; it is clearly and simply written, and will be valuable to all those who have an interest or concern in the development of medical genetics, as well as those actually working in the field. Historians and social scientists will likewise find this book an important foundation for future detailed studies, which are urgently needed."--BOOK JACKET.
A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford Pdf
'A brilliant, authoritative, surprising, captivating introduction to human genetics. You'll be spellbound' Brian Cox This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species - births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration and a lot of sex. In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about human history, and what history can now tell us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be. *** 'A thoroughly entertaining history of Homo sapiens and its DNA in a manner that displays popular science writing at its best' Observer 'Magisterial, informative and delightful' Peter Frankopan 'An extraordinary adventure...From the Neanderthals to the Vikings, from the Queen of Sheba to Richard III, Rutherford goes in search of our ancestors, tracing the genetic clues deep into the past' Alice Roberts
A Cultural History of Heredity by Staffan Müller-Wille,Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Pdf
Heredity: knowledge and power -- Generation, reproduction, evolution -- Heredity in separate domains -- First syntheses -- Heredity, race, and eugenics -- Disciplining heredity -- Heredity and molecular biology -- Gene technology, genomics, postgenomics: attempt at an outlook.
There is a paradox lying at the heart of the study of heredity. To understand the ways in which features are passed on down from one generation to the next, we have to dig deeper and deeper into the ultimate nature of things - from organisms, to genes, to molecules. And yet as we do this, increasingly we find we are out of focus with our subjects. What has any of this to do with the living, breathing organisms with which we started? Organisms are living. Molecules are not. How do we relate one to the other? In Genetic Analysis, one of the most important empirical scientists in the field in the twentieth century attempts, through a study of history and drawing on his own vast experience as a practitioner, to face this paradox head-on. His book offers a deep and innovative understanding of our ways of thinking about heredity.
Genetics in the Madhouse by Theodore M. Porter Pdf
"In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages. Genetics in the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for 'feebleminded' children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of human heredity. In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the hidden history behind modern genetics. He looks at the institutional use of pedigree charts, censuses of mental illness, medical-social surveys, and other data techniques--innovative quantitative practices that were worked out in the madhouse long before the manipulation of DNA became possible in the lab. Porter argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on the border of subjectivity and science. A bold rethinking of asylum work, Genetics in the Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well as a medical and biological one"--Jacket.
Heredity Produced by Staffan Müller-Wille,Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Pdf
The cultural history of heredity: scholars from a range of disciplines discuss the evolution of the concept of heredity, from the Early Modern understanding of the act of "generation" to its later nineteenth-century definition as the transmission of characteristics across generations. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the biological makeup of an organism was ascribed to an individual instance of "generation"--involving conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, lactation, and even astral influences and maternal mood--rather than the biological transmission of traits and characteristics. Discussions of heredity and inheritance took place largely in the legal and political sphere. In Heredity Produced, scholars from a broad range of disciplines explore the development of the concept of heredity from the early modern period to the era of Darwin and Mendel. The contributors examine the evolution of the concept in disparate cultural realms--including law, medicine, and natural history--and show that it did not coalesce into a more general understanding of heredity until the mid-nineteenth century. They consider inheritance and kinship in a legal context; the classification of certain diseases as hereditary; the study of botany; animal and plant breeding and hybridization for desirable characteristics; theories of generation and evolution; and anthropology and its study of physical differences among humans, particularly skin color. The editors argue that only when people, animals, and plants became more mobile--and were separated from their natural habitats through exploration, colonialism, and other causes--could scientists distinguish between inherited and environmentally induced traits and develop a coherent theory of heredity. Contributors David Sabean, Silvia De Renzi, Ulrike Vedder, Carlos López Beltrán, Phillip K. Wilson, Laure Cartron, Staffan Müller-Wille, Marc J. Ratcliff, Roger Wood, Mary Terrall, Peter McLaughlin, François Duchesneau, Ohad Parnes, Renato Mazzolini, Paul White, Nicolas Pethes, Stefan Willer, Helmuth Müller-Sievers
The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution. Genetic Crossroads is an unprecedented history of human genetics in the Middle East, from its roots in colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. It illuminates how scientists from Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, transformed genetic data into territorial claims and national origin myths. Burton shows why such nationalist appropriations of genetics are not local or temporary aberrations, but rather the enduring foundations of international scientific interest in Middle Eastern populations to this day.
How genomics reveals deep histories of inequality, going back many thousands of years. Inequality is an urgent global concern, with pundits, politicians, academics, and best-selling books all taking up its causes and consequences. In Inequality, Carles Lalueza-Fox offers an entirely new perspective on the subject, examining the genetic marks left by inequality on humans throughout history. Lalueza-Fox describes genetic studies, made possible by novel DNA sequencing technologies, that reveal layers of inequality in past societies, manifested in patterns of migration, social structures, and funerary practices. Through their DNA, ancient skeletons have much to tell us, yielding anonymous stories of inequality, bias, and suffering. Lalueza-Fox, a leader in paleogenomics, offers the deep history of inequality. He explores the ancestral shifts associated with migration and describes the gender bias unearthed in these migrations—the brutal sexual asymmetries, for example, between male European explorers and the women of Latin America that are revealed by DNA analysis. He considers social structures, and the evidence that high social standing was inherited—the ancient world was not a meritocracy. He untangles social and genetic factors to consider whether wealth is an advantage in reproduction, showing why we are more likely to be descended from a king than a peasant. And he explores the effects of ancient inequality on the human gene pool. Marshaling a range of evidence, Lalueza-Fox shows that understanding past inequalities is key to understanding present ones.
The History and Geography of Human Genes by L L Cavalli-sforza,Paolo Menozzi,Alberto Piazza Pdf
Hailed as a breakthrough in the understanding of human evolution, The History and Geography of Human Genes offers the first full-scale reconstruction of where human populations originated and the paths by which they spread throughout the world. By mapping the worldwide geographic distribution of genes for over 110 traits in over 1800 primarily aboriginal populations, the authors charted migrations and devised a clock by which to date evolutionary history. This monumental work is now available in a more affordable paperback edition without the myriad illustrations and maps, but containing the full text and partial appendices of the authors' pathbreaking endeavor.
Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.
