Word: gregorer
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...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 of genetic engineering, have long marveled at the skill and diligence with which she pursued such classical genetics, but they were sometimes patronizing about her work. After...
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...
...only do creative people challenge basic assumptions, they discern previously unseen patterns. This, according to biochemist Calvin, is one of the most important abilities of the scientist. Gregor Mendel, cross-breeding peas in a monastery, noticed a pattern and extended the understanding of heredity. "It's no trick at all," Calvin notes, "to get the right answer when you have all the data. The real creative trick is to get the right answer when you have only half the data, and half of that is wrong...
Reported by Christopher Ogden with Carter and Gregor H. Wierzynski/ Washington
...creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that...