Elizabeth S. Russell, Ph.D, 



PROBLEMS and POTENTIALITIES 

 in the STUDY of GENIC ACTION 

 in the MOUSE * 



Studies of the physiologic genetics of laboratory mammals have a special role in 

 the biomedical sciences in that they can and must be the integrating link between basic 

 information from lower organisms and the human problems to which these facts and 

 concepts must ultimately apply. Recent medical advances, by decreasing the preva- 

 lence and severity of infectious diseases, have increased the relative importance of 

 constitutional or inherited disease. It is to be hoped that knowledge of the etiology 

 of human and analogous experimental mammalian inherited disease syndromes may 

 be useful both for prophylaxis and for therapy. 



During the past quarter century much has been established about the nature of 

 the self-duplicating molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid which transmit genetic in- 

 formation from generation to generation and from cell to cell, along with a beginning 

 insight into the nature of the relationship between these units of genetic transmission 

 and their intracellular products. In experiments with microorganisms many gene- 

 controlled biochemical pathways have been traced. It is very much to be hoped 

 at this particularly stimulating stage in the development of genetics that widespread 

 attention will be turned toward solution of problems of genie action in highly differen- 

 tiated forms, particularly in mammals. Observed inherited characteristics in them 

 are the raw material of many areas of biology : embryology, anatomy, physiology, bio- 

 chemistry, endocrinology, immunology, and pathology, for example. The techniques 

 of these disciplines may profitably be applied to analysis of mammalian genie action, 



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