Word: gened
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...299th try they found an ailing spore that needed only vitamin B-6 (pyridoxine) to make it grow lustily. When it had mated with a normal mold, it transmitted its need for vitamin B-6 to its descendants in the proper Mendelian manner for a single mutated gene...
This was what Beadle had been hoping for. His explanation is that the gene damaged by X-ray violence was originally responsible for producing an enzyme (organic catalyst) needed in the mold's process of making vitamin B-6 out of simpler nutrients. With the gene out of action, the process stopped, and the mold could not grow without help. It was like a human diabetic who needs an external source of the insulin that his body cannot make...
...Attitude. When Beadle and Tatum reported their success in 1941, they had quite a collection of defective molds, each needing some extra nutrient or having some other gene-controlled chemical ailment. In a few years their imitators filled their own laboratories with molds as unnatural as the most monstrous fruit flies. The coral fluffs of normal Neurospora are rare in the test tubes and Petri dishes. In their place are blackish warts, lichenlike incrustations, or sick-looking globules. One horrible kind of mold grown in a moving liquid floats in bunches with limp limbs like soft, dead crabs...
...glow with flowers, some of them experiments in genetics but still attractive, and a patrol of eight Siamese cats keeps watch on everything interesting. Beadle is fond of all cats, but Siamese cats are his favorites. He explains that they would be dark all over except for a mutated gene that permits dark pigments to be formed only in places (ears, tail, nose, etc.) that have a low temperature...
...Blue eyes in humans are also commonly due to a single recessive gene. Dark-eyed people may have this gene in its suppressed state, obtaining it from an ancestor so remote that his blue eyes have been forgotten. When two such people marry, one-fourth of their children (statistically) will have blue eyes...