Genefics and Microbiology 25 



Alas, it could not be helped; the same symposium (Cold 

 Spring Harbor, 1946) was already teeming with cytogenes, 

 mutagenesis, allelomorphs, recombination, and heterozy- 

 gotes, and microbiology had already succumbed. 



To an impatient bystander this fusion — or confusion — ■ 

 of disciplines might seem overdue. Mendel was, after all, 

 a contemporary of Pasteur, and could we not imagine their 

 communication and understanding that the abbot's "An- 

 lagen" were the stuff of unspontaneous generation? But 

 Pasteur was a prophet honored in his own time, while 

 Mendel was first ignored and then forgotten, and the 

 burgeoning science of microbiology grew up without 

 benefit of eugenic supervision. 



As a science, genetics dates from the exhumation of 

 Mendelian analysis at the turn of the century; as a term, 

 it was first coined in 1906. Genetics might have been in- 

 fused with microbes from the start, with Blakeslee's dis- 

 covery of the segregation of fungal sex factors in 1904, had 

 the zygospores of the mucors germinated more readily, but 

 he turned to more amenable plants for his genetic work, 

 and he works with them still. 



Heredity has always been an object of avid curiosity and 

 inquiry. Darwin, for example, was obliged to consider some 

 mechanism of inheritance to underlie his evolutionary 

 theory and, with some misgivings, adopted a Lamarckian 

 concept whereby the progeny resemble their parents 

 whether for innate germinal, or incidental somatic pe- 

 culiarities. This fallacy was eroded by Weissmann and 

 (for higher organisms) laid to rest in the 1900's with the 

 Johannsen and de Vries delineation of pure lines and their 

 mutations. Prior to Mendelism, strong circumstantial evi- 

 dence already supported widespread belief that the chro- 

 mosomes were the primary vehicle of heredity. 



Meanwhile, the bacteria were and remain a convenient 

 repository for hypothetical evolutionary starting points 

 and speculated genetic mechanisms that might be refuted 



