Articles tagged 100 Years of GENETICS
(15 results)

These worms are as long as a pencil’s tip and only just visible without a microscope. They are among the smallest multicellular animals, but they still have complex organ systems. They are Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most important organisms in modern biology and a key to understanding the most basic molecular processes of life.…

In Kentucky 150 years ago today, a child was born who would—with the help of a hardy inhabitant of trash cans and fruit bowls— grow up to change the world. That boy was Thomas Hunt Morgan. By the 1900s, the energetic young Morgan had become a well-respected expert investigating questions in experimental embryology and animal regeneration.…

The beautiful cover of the August issue of GENETICS was created by artist Michele Banks to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of a pivotal moment in the history of evolutionary biology: the 1966 publication of a pair of GENETICS papers using protein electrophoresis to reveal that natural genetic diversity is bountiful. Thanks to a conversation between…

Check out the August issue of GENETICS by looking at the highlights or the full table of contents! ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS This Month’s Centennial Articles Horvitz and Sulston on Caenorhabditis elegans cell lineage mutants, pp. 1485-1487 Kenneth J. Kemphues Kenneth Kemphues introduces Horvitz and Sulston’s 1980 GENETICS Classic, which demonstrated that systematic mutational analysis could dissect the regulation of the…

For two weeks in the summer of 1953, Motoo Kimura enjoyed a welcome respite from loneliness and the austerity of post-war Japan. Crossing the Pacific from Yokohama to Seattle to commence PhD studies at Iowa State University, Kimura played deck golf, enjoyed full service meals, and napped to the soothing vibrations of the venerable passenger…

Sometimes, great advances in science come from combining the old with the new. Genomic selection is one such case; in 2001, Meuwissen, Hayes, and Goddard surveyed the changing landscape of genetics, had the foresight to work on a then-theoretical problem, and laid the foundation for a boom in biotechnology-assisted breeding that continues to this day.…

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) and the Editorial Board of the journal GENETICS are pleased to announce the winners of the first Centennial Award for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2015. The awards were inaugurated just this year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of GENETICS. Three exceptional articles are recognized from three…

At the time of her death in 1912, Nettie Maria Stevens was a biologist of enough repute to be eulogized in the journal Science by future Nobelist Thomas Hunt Morgan and for her passing to be noted in The New York Times. In 1910 she had been listed among 1,000 leading American “men of science.”…

In the early 1940s, many biologists doubted bacteria had genes. After all, they seemed to play by their own genetic rules: they appeared to lack chromosomes, meiosis, mitosis, sex, and all the other trappings of Mendelian inheritance. They even seemed to show a kind of Lamarckian inheritance, in which an individual could pass on traits acquired…

In 1917, amidst the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, a bug-obsessed teenager in Kiev discovered a new species of ladybird beetle in the debris washed up on the banks of the flooding Dnieper River. The following year, he described the species in his first scientific publication. That 18-year old ladybug spotter —Theodosius Dobzhansky— would go…

In 1931, Sewall Wright—a quiet American geneticist specializing in livestock and guinea pigs—published a GENETICS paper that changed how we study evolution. Wright’s “Evolution in Mendelian populations” was one of the founding documents of population genetics and was among the first formal frameworks to reconcile Mendel’s laws of inheritance with Darwin’s vision of natural selection.…