Word: eyeless
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...Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. Today, small electric trains carry visitors on a 5-km ride to Postojna's heart; from there the journey is on foot, through what British sculptor Henry Moore described as "nature's most wonderful gallery." Watch out for Proteus anguinus?the "human fish," a colorless, eyeless newtlike creature with legs and gills that's unique to Postojna. A tour of the caves costs...
...carnival-carnivore underbelly. Now, in Minority Report, it's 2054, and the future is more recognizable: tomorrow, only more so. Copies of USA Today flash instant headlines as readers hold them. Cars race down vertical freeways on the facades of mile-high office buildings. On a Washington skid row, eyeless bums peddle the newest nose candy...
...news stunned developmental biologists around the world. For until now, no one suspected that the eyeless gene was so powerful, capable of taking precedence over other genes, like those responsible for elaborating wings and legs. That an eye might partly form on a limb made sense, but not so perfect an eye, complete with all its light receptors. Marvels William McGinnis, a Yale University biologist: "All you have to do, it seems, is switch on the eyeless gene, and you get these beautiful eyes...
...when Gehring and his team replaced eyeless with a gene that controls eye development in mice, they found that the mouse gene also produced flies with multiple eyes. The implication was inescapable: the mammalian gene and the fly gene are so closely related that they are almost certainly derived from a precursor gene in a common ancestor--quite possibly some sort of sea-dwelling worm that lived 500 million or so years ago. "What does this mean?" asks molecular biologist Charles Zuker, of the Howard Hughes Institute in San Diego, with a half smile. "It means that we are basically...
...buzz Gehring created is unlikely to simmer down anytime soon. For master control genes like eyeless, which span the vertebrate and invertebrate worlds, are keys to millions of years of evolution, and scientists are already racing to find more of these revealing snippets...