Word: geneticists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scientific anachronism, and not because of her 79 years. Unlike most scientists at the famed biology laboratory in the small Long Island, N.Y., town of Cold Spring Harbor, she does not splice, cut or reshuffle the genes of viruses and bacteria. Rather, for the past four decades, Geneticist Barbara McClintock has been carefully breeding and crossbreeding corn, trying to cull from it some kernels of truth about the secrets of genetic diversity, just as the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel did in his famous pea patch more than a century ago. McClintock's colleagues, caught up in the latest wizardry...
...learn to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the past 11,000." So says Corn Geneticist Ronald Phillips of the University of Minnesota. Can it be done, especially since the so-called Green Revolution has just about run out of steam? The answer may lie in the fact that a second Green Revolution, powered by the wonders of genetic engineering, has been gathering impetus for some time and now seems within reach...
Although Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel were contemporaries, they never met. By the 1860s. Darwin had already published The Origin of Species, assuring himself a slice of eternity and a reputation as one of history's most influential scientific thinkers. But, Mendel remained an obscure Austrian cleric, an inconsequential geneticist whose genius was not recognized until 20 years after, his death. Darwin was certainly unfamiliar with the monk's work, and Mendel has left no word of what he thought of Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory that tried to explain the diversity and similarities among organisms, both past...
...pupils to learn biology, as the subject is understood today. The relation of science and morality is an important matter. Creationism may belong in social studies or the history of religion, but it should not be pushed into biology classes or textbooks, especially not by legislative fiat. As celebrated Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution...
During his undergraduate years at Chicago, Sagan spent some summers breeding fruit flies in the Indiana University laboratory of the famed geneticist Hermann Muller, who won a Nobel Prize for showing that X rays could cause mutations. It was ideal training for an astronomer who would become the premier spokesman for exobiology. He also showed early gifts as a popularizer. He organized a highly successful campus lecture series on science, characteristically including himself as one of the speakers; some faculty members dismissed it as "Sagan's circus," but it drew S.R.O. crowds...