Abstract

The shape of our knowledge regarding certain aspects of life is being changed to-day as it was changed in the past by the work of Mendel, Darwin and Pasteur. This is a situation not merely in Biology, but in Physics and Chemistry and other branches of knowledge as well. Starting with Mendel the concept of the gene has undergone evolution comparable to the concept of atom in physics and chemistry with many transformations, contradictions, paradoxes and reconstructions. But most geneticists have, however, been so far content to employ the gene concept as perhaps the last member of the series, organism-cell-nucleus-chromosome-gene and mainly as a useful tool in research and to define it, if at all, in terms of its effects (19). The concept of atom also was long employed by physicists and chemists with conspicuous success when far less was known about its actual nature than is known today. Formerly, the deepest properties of life were interpreted on biological basis and today they are being related to a physical and chemical basis. So is the "gene".

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