Genetics and the World Today ^ 



By Curt Stern 



Department of Zoology, University of California 



The scientists look at our world ! Which world ? The world of 

 ideas? The world of human needs? The world of an authoritarian 

 organization? Of a democracy? 



Science appears different from different viewpoints, but none en- 

 compasses all its aspects. "The world" has always meant a multitude 

 of phenomena, some apparently additive, others complementary, still 

 others seemingly incompatible with one another. In the middle of 

 the twentieth century we have become more conscious of this multi- 

 plicity of the world than perhaps ever before. If we look at science 

 today we cannot afford to select some one of its aspects, but must view 

 it from high ground and low. Genetics, the branch of science to 

 which this discourse is devoted, may well serve as an illustration for 

 several of the problems of science and the world today. 



Let us begin with the adventures and delights of the spirit : Genetics 

 as a pure science. Within the confines of the first half of our century, 

 a body of knowledge in the field of heredity has been assembled, and 

 a tool chest of concepts devised, which will always stand as a great 

 accomplisliment of human endeavor. 



We all know the story of Mendel's successful thrust. He crossed 

 a round-seeded to a wrinkle-seeded pea plant. All their offspring 

 were round. He crossed the offspring among one another. Their 

 progeny was part round, part wrinkled. He counted their numbers 

 and found three round to one wrinkled. What of it? — one might be 

 inclined to ask — and his contemporaries' reaction, or lack of reaction, 

 is testimony to this shrugging of the shoulders. Yet out of this 

 childishly simple couple of facts, the deep truth was lifted that the 

 contributions of two parents to their offspring do not blend or merge 

 into a unique hereditary newness but remain separable, to be recov- 

 erable unchanged in a later generation : clear-cut roundness and clear- 

 cut wrinkledness. 



* Reprinted by permission from "The Scientists Look at Our World," the Benjamin 

 Franklin Lectures of the University of Pennsylvania, Fourth Series, University of Penn- 

 sylvania Press, 1952. 



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