This paper argues that the historiography of genetics ∼1900, the formation period of modern science, is too narrow. It lacks attention to plant breeding. Perhaps this omission also narrows the present understanding of fundamental ideas like the genotype/phenotype distinction and the gene concept? There is a mythical story still told in textbooks and at anniversaries: As modern genetics started with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in 1900, a fateful controversy over continuous or discontinuous variation of heredity between biometricians and Mendelians.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProg Biophys Mol Biol
August 2022
There is at present uneasiness about the conceptual basis of genetics. The gene concept has become blurred and there are problems with the distinction between genotype and phenotype. In the present paper I go back to their role in the creation of modern genetics in the early twentieth century.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHist Philos Life Sci
November 2018
Louis Pasteur's defeat of belief in spontaneous generation has been a classical rationalist example of how the experimental approach of modern science can reveal superstition. Farley and Geison (Bull Hist Med 48:161-198, 1974) told a counter-story of how Pasteur's success was due to political and ideological support rather than superior experimental science. They claimed that Pasteur violated proper norms of scientific method, and that the French Academy of Science did not see this, or did not want to.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genotype theory of Wilhelm Johannsen (1857-1927) was an important contribution to the founding of classical genetics. This theory built on Johannsen's experimental demonstration that hereditary change is discontinuous, not continuous as had been widely assumed. Johannsen is also known for his criticism of traditional Darwinian evolution by natural selection, as well as his criticism of the classical Mendelian chromosome theory of heredity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe terms 'genotype', 'phenotype' and 'gene' originally had a different meaning from that in the Modern Synthesis. These terms were coined in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen. His bean selection experiment and his theoretical analysis of the difference between genotype and phenotype were important inputs to the formation of genetics as a well-defined special discipline.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen's distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation (For instance, W. Provine, 1971.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe suppression of genetics in Soviet Russia was the big scandal of twentieth-century science. It was also a test case for the role of scientists in a liberal democracy. The intellectual's perennial dilemma between scientific truthfulness and political loyalty was sharpened by acute ideological conflicts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "Lysenko affair", which lasted roughly from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, was the big scandal of 20th-century science: a classic example of how politics can corrupt and undermine its rational basis. Under Stalin's leadership the Soviet Government suppressed genuine genetics and other sound biology, with devastating consequences for agriculture and health. The worst example of this occurred in August 1948 when the Politburo outlawed the teaching of and research into classical Mendelian genetics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper examines the development of plant-breeding science in the context of the booming genetic research and autarky policy of the 1930s as well as during World War II in National Socialist-occupied Europe. Soviet scientists, especially Nikolai Vavilov and his VIR institute, had a leading position in the international plant-breeding science of the 1920s. During World War II, German scientists, namely experts from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding, usurped Soviet institutes and valuable seed collections.
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