Genetic Determinism - Crick and Watson

Crick and Watson

The chemical nature of the germ plasm was discovered in 1953, when Francis Crick and James Watson explained the structure of DNA. This event was heralded as the discovery of the book of life, a view still prevalent in the popular press and among many scientists. However, nearly 50 years later, when a “first draft” of the human genome became available, the book of life turned out to be considerably less extensive than had been anticipated. Instead of the expected 100,000 characters, the genome contains less than 30,000. As Nusslein-Volhard points out, morphological complexity does not correlate with size of genome.