February 22, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
Barbara McClintock
The work or rather the observation of the
Belgian priest Frans A. Janssens was later continued by many men the most
notable of them being Thomas Hunt Morgan the American evolutionary biologist,
geneticist and embryologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine for firmly establishing the role of chromosomes in heredity.
But the idea that genetic recombination by
crossing over during meiosis was essentially a DNA repair mechanism which later
got incorporated accidentally into meiosis was proposed by the American female
cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock who primarily worked with maize.
During the course of the work she developed
ways to visualize and characterize maize chromosomes and thereby as a byproduct
of it was the first to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous
chromosomes during meiosis.
In 1931 she along with another American
female geneticist Harriet Creighton published a very influential paper that not
only described chromosomal crossover but also proved that it was associated
with recombination of genetic traits.
At that time both these scientists were
affiliated to the Botany Department of the Cornell University.
The paper was published in the PNAS or
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
and it was titled “A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-Over in
Zea Mays”.
McClintock also proposed the idea that DNA
repair and crossing over are very similar in principle utilizing same protein
complexes.
This would not be her greatest work for
that would come much later while working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
situated in the village of Laurel Hollow in Nassau County in the state of New
York.
This Mon Ami is what the great nation of
the United States is about – housing a private, non-profit genetic research
laboratory and institute in a village.
This village, I must add, is unlike any
village that one may relate to that of a third-world country.
Laurel Hollow, according to the Bloomberg
BusinessWeek, is the 8th wealthiest village-town in America with a
median household income of being more than 200,000 USD.
The per capita income of this village is an
astounding 83,366 USD!
You may wonder (at least I do being a
baniya) that from where does a research laboratory (which houses 52 research laboratories,
600 research staff and 500 administrative and support personnel) that is not
for profit gets it finances from.
I can tell that you a large chunk of its
funding comes from the public.
In the year of 2015 about 34% of its
finances came from the federal agencies of National Institutes of Health and
National Science Foundation.
Another 22% of it came from private
philanthropy with a mere 3% coming from the corporate.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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