RESUMEN
In 1920, the German botanist Hans Winkler coined the concept of the 'genome'. This paper explores the history of a concept that has developed in parallel with advances in biology and supports novel and powerful heuristic biological research in the 21st century. From a structural interpretation (the genome as the haploid number of chromosomes), it has changed to keep pace with technological progress and new interpretations of the material of heredity. In the first place, the 'genome' was extended to include all the material in the nucleus, then the sum of all genes, and (with the discovery of the structure of DNA) the sum of the nucleotide base sequences. In the early 21st century, it has become a much more complex and central concept that has spawned the growing field of studies referred to as the 'omics'.
Asunto(s)
ADN/historia , Genoma , Genómica/historia , Investigación Genética/historia , Historia del Siglo XX , Historia del Siglo XXI , HumanosRESUMEN
An important historical relation that has hardly been addressed is the influence of Prosper Lucas's Treatise on Natural Inheritance on the development of Charles Darwin's concepts related to inheritance. In this article we trace this historical connection. Darwin read Lucas's Treatise in 1856. His reading coincided with many changes concerning his prior ideas on the transmission and expression of characters. We consider that this reading led him to propose a group of principles regarding prepotency, hereditary diseases, morbid tendencies and atavism; following Lucas, he called these principles: laws of inheritance.
Asunto(s)
Predisposición Genética a la Enfermedad/historia , Herencia , Inglaterra , Francia , Enfermedades Genéticas Congénitas/genética , Variación Genética , Historia del Siglo XIX , Humanos , Trastornos Mentales/genéticaRESUMEN
La hipótesis provisional de la pangénesis se ha interpretado como una explicación materialista y mecanicista de la herencia, seguramente porque Darwin mismo consideraba que las gémulas eran partículas corporales; sin embargo, analizando los principios en los que descansan las conjeturas de la pangénesis podemos ver cómo están entretejidas con nociones del vitalismo científico, principalmente el principio vitalista del nisus formativus de Blumembach
The provisional hipothesis of the pangenesis has been interpreted as a materialist and mechanistic explanation of heritance, surely because Darwin himself considered that the gemmules were corporal praticles; neverthless, analyzing the principles in which these suppositions on pangenesis rest we can aopreciate how they are interlocked with notions of scientific vitalism, mainly Blumenbach´s vitalist principle nisus formativus
