Possible Anticipation of Beadle and Tatum's Results
Historian Jan Sapp has studied the controversy in regard to German geneticist Franz Moewus who, as some leading geneticists of the 1940s and 50s argued, generated similar results before Beadle and Tatum's celebrated 1941 work. Working on the algae Chlamydomonas, Moewus published, in the 1930s, results that showed that different genes were responsible for different enzymatic reactions in the production of hormones that controlled the organism's reproduction. However, as Sapp skillfully details, those results were challenged by others who found the data 'too good to be true' statistically, and the results could not be replicated.
Read more about this topic: One Gene-one Enzyme Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words anticipation, beadle and/or results:
“In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[University students] hated the hypocrisy of adult society, the rigidity of its political institutions, the impersonality of its bureaucracies. They sought to create a society that places human values before materialistic ones, that has a little less head and a little more heart, that is dominated by self-interest and loves its neighbor more. And they were persuaded that group protest of a militant nature would advance those goals.”
—Muriel Beadle (b. 1915)
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)