Word: geneticists
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Nebraska Farm Boy. These basic facts of genetics were becoming known about the time Geneticist George Beadle was born in 1903. His father ran a small, progressive farm near Wahoo, Neb. (1900 pop. 900). His mother died when he was four, leaving him, his brother and sister to be mothered, after a fashion, by a succession of hired housekeepers. He remembers farm life in general with pleasure, but he still dislikes cream because he had to skim it off endless milk pans...
...garbage pails. As living instruments of genetics they were a happy choice. They are only 1/12 in. long, so their board bill is low. They produce new generations in about two weeks, multiplying rapidly in cream bottles stoppered with wads of gauze. They are easily come by; when a geneticist wants wild "genotype" flies, he puts a banana on the windowsill, and the genotypes come unbidden...
...Beadle teamed up with Dr. Edward L. Tatum, a chemist now of the Rockefeller Institute, and selected a new laboratory victim, the so-called red bread mold (Neurospora crassa), which is really a beautiful coral pink in its natural state, unmolested by geneticists. Neurospora is a geneticist's dream. When properly introduced, it mates and reproduces sexually. It also grows nonsexually, so a truckload of mold with the same heredity can be grown, if desirable, from a single spore. But the best thing about Neurospora is that it asks for so little. It thrives on a medium containing nothing...
...flowed a new attitude toward genetics. No longer were genes considered abstract units of heredity. They became actual things, not entirely understood but known to be concerned with definite chemical actions. Professor Joshua Lederberg, 33, of the University of Wisconsin, probably the world's leading young geneticist, says that the Neurospora work at Stanford clinched the whole idea that genes control enzymes, and enzymes control the chemistry of life...
Never far from the geneticist's mind is the three-letter symbol DNA, which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is a giant molecule of slightly variable composition that is found in chromosomes, and it is believed to be the substance that determines heredity and governs all cells (and therefore all life) from the stronghold of the nucleus. DNA has been known to exist for years, but until postwar years little was known about it. Now it is being attacked from many angles by nearly every breed of scientist...