A Guinea Pig's History of Biology: the plants and animals who taught us the facts of life (original) (raw)
2007
he triumphs of recent biology - understanding hereditary disease, the modern theory of evolution - are all thanks to the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish and a handful of other organisms, which have helped us unravel one of life's greatest mysteries - inheritance. Jim Endersby traces his story from Darwin hand-pollinating passion flowers in his back garden in an effort to find out whether his decision to marry his cousin had harmed their children, to today's high-tech laboratories, full of shoals of shimmering zebra fish, whose bodies are transparent until they are mature, allowing scientists to watch every step as a single fertilised cell multiples to become millions of specialised cells that make up a new fish. Each story has - piece by piece - revealed how DNA determines the characteristics of the adult organism. Not every organism was as cooperative as the fruit fly or zebra fish, some provided scientists with misleading answers or encouraged them to ask the wrong questions.
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IN the early 1910s, researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, might have wondered why a colleague, Thomas Hunt Morgan (Figure 1), began shipping fruit flies from his Columbia University lab to the MBL each summer. After all, the Woods Hole currents supplied the MBL with a rich variety of marine organisms and Morgan, an avid practitioner of experimental embryology, made good use of them. Yet those who knew Morgan well would not have been surprised by his insect stocks. A keen naturalist, Morgan studied a veritable menagerie of experimental animals—many of them collected in Woods Hole—as a student and later researcher at the MBL from 1890 to 1942. Moreover, Morgan always had a diversity of investigations going on simultaneously. ‘‘This was the way Morgan worked: he wasn’t happy unless he had a lot of different irons in the fire at the same time,’’ wrote A. H. Sturtevant, Morgan’s long-term collaborator (Sturtevant 2001, pp. 4–5). In Morgan’s f...
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