February 24, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Mendel was Largely Overlooked
Gregor Mendel’s two talks at the Natural
History Society did get some attention in the popular media which meant brief
reports in the local news papers which considering the literacy rates of those
days even in Europe would not have been read widely.
The scientific societies though largely
ignored his work.
The very next year, that is 1866, he got
his paper published in the journal “Proceedings of the Natural History Society
of Brünn.”
Can you imagine how the paper was perceived
then by even those few who took care to read the paper?
It was seen more as a description of plant
hybridization which means sexual combination of traits of two organisms of different
breeds to produce a hybrid off spring.
Animal and plant breeders had been
conducting such artificial hybridization since ages (for instance mule which is
a hybrid of a male donkey and a female horse).
In contrast to natural selection such kind
of selective breeding by humans for their agriculture and animal domestication purpose
is called artificial selection.
This was the reason why when seen from the perspective
of hybridization the paper seemed to be presenting nothing new.
Genetics never crossed the minds of the
readers as they were blind to it.
This paper, as far as it is known, was
cited just about three times in the next thirty five years was largely ignored.
Barbara McClintock in contrast to Mendel
faced outright hostility quite ironically because her studies showed new
findings that contradicted simple Mendelian genetics.
McClintock was in essence was merely
treading on the trail or continuing to walk on the trail left behind by Mendel
but only to show that genetical inheritance was not as black and white as shown
and proposed by him.
McClintock in her studies targeted two gene
loci that she named as Dissociation or Ds in short and Activator or Ac in
short.
These genetic loci influenced the synthesis
of colored pigments called anthocyanins which are water-soluble pigments found
in the vacuoles of plant cells.
A lot of flower colors are due to these
anthocyanins as are the patterns on maize seeds and kernels.
Her study began first with plantation of
corn kernels that were self pollinated.
Self-pollination in plants is supposed to
have happened when the stigma of the plant (stigma, style and the ovary
together constitutes the gynoecium or the female reproductive organ of the
plant) receives pollen from its own stamen which is the male reproductive organ
of the plant.
In an animal it is equivalent to an
organism fertilizing his/her own ovum with his/her sperms.
Because of long line of repeated
pollination these plants had developed chromosomal damage in the form of broken
arms at the end of the ninth chromosomes.
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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