Volume 47, Number 20 · December 21, 2000
The Cheshire Cat's DNA
By John Maynard Smith
The Century of the Gene
by Evelyn Fox Keller
Harvard University Press, 186 pp., $22.95
In 1900, three biologists independently rediscovered Mendel's laws, according to which the characteristics of organisms are determined by hereditary units, each kind being present once in a gamete, sperm or egg, and hence twice in the fertilized egg. In effect, it was an atomic theory of heredity. The term 'genetics' was introduced by William Bateson in 1906, and, for the hereditary units themselves, the word 'gene' by Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909. By 1930, Thomas Hunt Morgan and his colleagues, working with the fruit fly Drosophila, had shown that genes are arranged linearly along chromosomes.
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