Genetics Research
Farabee demonstrated that Mendelian genetics operate in man. The founder of genetics, Gregor Mendel, published the results of his studies on pea plants and heredity in 1865. The work of Mendel was not recognized for its importance until it was rediscovered in 1900. During the intervening 35 years, the "discovery of chromosomes and their behavior in cell division and gametogenesis, and intensive study of cell biological variation, and…a conceptual framework for a theory of heredity, development, and evolution" all came about (Stern 1965). "The time was ripe for Mendelism" according to Stern (Ibid). Mendel had been interested in seeing if his work with dominant and recessive characteristics was applicable to men, but it was Farabee’s work that confirmed this and helped found the study of human genetics.
Farabee was a student of William E. Castle at Harvard. His dissertation, entitled “Heredity and Sexual Influences In Meristic Variation: A Study of Digital Malformations in Man” (Gao, 2004), was published in 1903. The bulk of his research was regarding a hereditary conditions that primarily afflicts the hands of individuals, entitled Brachydactyly.
Brachydactyly is a dominant genetic trait that is characterized by shortened fingers and shortened stature. Farabee noticed that this trait ran in families (Farabee 1905). For his dissertation research, Farabee chose a family affected by this trait and followed their pedigree back five generations. By doing so he showed that the ratio of those with and without brachydactyly followed a pattern explained by Mendel’s pattern of inheritance. The children of an abnormal (A) individual, and a normal (N) individual, had a close to fifty percent chance of being abnormal. Farabee stated that an abnormal individual typically would have a genotype of AN, and the family’s practice of exogamy meant that their spouse would have a genotype of NN. By crossing the two, ANxNN, the offspring could be normal or abnormal with an equal chance of either. Because the trait is dominant, if an individual does not carry the trait, they are homozygous normal and have no risk of passing the trait on to their children, which Farabee also studied in his pedigrees.
Farabee also published on the occurrence of recessive traits in man (Castle, 1903). While in the South, he met several albino African-American individuals, and after inquiring into their family background, noticed that the albino trait followed the 3:1 ratio in the second generation that is typical of recessive genotypes.
Read more about this topic: William Curtis Farabee
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