Geneticists

The complexities that have been described pose a special problem for the pure geneticist who wants to protect the quality of the human germ plasm but cannot yet say how important it is to do so. I should like to indicate briefly some of the options open to him. 

If he is convinced that the matter is important enough to merit serious personal involvement on his part, with the directly relevant work of assessing the impact of mutations on man and looking for possible changes in the mutation rate, he will be led far from the basic research on the mechanisms of mutation in which he was first interested. If, however, he leaves the task to others, there is a reasonable likelihood that it may not get tackled at all. Social concern in such matters has a tendency to arise first among basic scientists as an outcome of their own research, and it is often not shared in full measure by their more applied colleagues. 

Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, pp. 197-200, General Assembly Official Records Thirteenth Session, Supplement No. 17 (A/3838), New York (1958). 

Newcombe, Present state and long term objectives of the British Columbia population study, in Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Human Genetics, pp. 291-313, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore (1967). 

Acheson, Medical Record Linkage, Oxford University Press, London (1967). 

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Alec Jeffryes, an English geneticist, discovered in the 1980s how to apply this principle to forensics. To do this, it is necessary to locate that portion of the DNA molecule in which the base sequence differs significantly from one individual to another. That part of the molecule is cut out by a "restrictive enzyme" in much the same way that trypsin splits a protein molecule into fragments. The DNA sample obtained in this way from a suspect can be compared with that derived from blood, hair, semen, saliva, and so on, found at the scene of a violent crime. 

A combination of specialized staining techniques and high-resolution microscopy has allowed geneticists... 

Recent developments by academic and industrial geneticists may well prove to have transformed this situation. Tremendous progress has been made since the mid-1980s both in the isolation and manipulation ofthe biosynthetic genes in this pathway and in the related routes to the cephalosporins (via the cephalosporin C-producing... 

A study of the molecular descriptions provided by geneticists and molecular biologists reveals at least three different levels. The first can be illustrated by the schematic models of signal-transduction pathways. In such models, the precise shape of the different proteins, their atomic composition, is of no importance. Sometimes, only the name of the protein is given. What is important is the place of these proteins in the pathways, how they receive upstream signals and transfer them to downstream molecular components. 

The geneticist and ethologist, Hans-Peter Lipp, informs me that he has found substantial changes in the brain structure of laboratory mice released into the wild under the pressure of natural selection within four generations (Lipp, 2000). 

What geneticist could take seriously any explication of reduction-ism which leads to the conclusion that molecular genetics does not amount to a successful reduction of classical genetics (Stent, 1986). 

Lander and Schork s article was written against the backdrop of related investigations by 1990s geneticists, who also found that single-gene disorders were not so simple, even when inherited in a Mendelian way. Cystic... 

Some of the mathematical basis for the equations is due to the geneticist Moto Kimura, who is considered a resolute proponent of the neutral theory of evolution , which states that statistical, chance fluctuations are more important in the formation of new species than is Darwinian natural selection. Evolution via such chance fluctuations is referred to as genetic drift . Dyson considers that both forms of evolution are important (Dyson, 1999). 

Nebert DW. Pharmacogenetics and phar-macogenomics why is this relevant to the clinical geneticist Clin Genet 1999 56 247-258. 

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