Week7

In the last class you talked briefly about gene therapy. You mentioned that it was somewhat uncommon and potentially deadly. I was under the impression from what I learned in high school that it was an up-and-coming new treatment. What diseases do doctors use it to treat and what diseases have they eliminated it as a treatment option? http://www.scid.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy http://www.guineapigzero.com/jesse.html

Why does eye color not have a dominant and recessive but pretty much everything else does? For instance both of my parents and my two older siblings all have blue eyes and I don't. Why does this happen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color http://museum.thetech.org/ugenetics/eyeCalc/eyecalculator.html

My question may not be completely related to the current topics but I have been trying to work it in since we were talking about Darwin and Mendel.

How do you think Darwin or Mendel would explain the genetics behind a caterpillar and a butterfly? They appear to be completely different species however it is the same creature which undergoes major changes in life. How could this be explained per period of the creatures life time?

Johanssen unilaterally introduced the term "gene" as a successor to the unwieldy, constraining older terms. Despite the sufficiency of the term falling into dispute for several decades, are there any particular reasons there hasn't been a serious attempt by detractors to come up with unique successive term(s)? Ironically some attempts to create successors are still subordinate to the term--e.g. Jacob and Monod's "genetic program" concept for organic development.

I was having a lot of trouble wording this question and here is the best I could come up with:

Is the main difference between genetics and eugenics that genetics doesn't have the religious overtones?

Diane Paul writes, "Ultimately, however, the effort to distinguish a potentially good (medical) eugenics from the bad eugenics of the past proved unsuccessful. Public aversion to anything labeled eugenics (at least when called by that name) ultimately swamped the reform movement" (125).

Why was the public so opposed to even "good medical eugenics" ? When the same principles were proposed under a different name (such as "medical genetics"), how much did public acceptance really change?

The Rockefeller Foundation provided the funding for the invention of tools and techniques such as the centrifuge and electrophoresis. These devices greatly helped the field of genetics and biology. My question is, how far behind do you think science would be today if the Rockefeller Foundation wasn't there to support with funding?

My question is about the experiments we discussed in class this week. I was wondering if the tests being done with the bread mold and E.coli were actually able to be used in improving medicine? As in was the information discovered able to be used to help improve the types of medicine used by doctors or for any other medical advancements?

The questions and evidence posed by Lionel Penrose were clearly different than the ideas of the eugenics movement. How important was he to the decline of eugenics, and how did people react to his paper in the Journal of Genetics in 1932 and his other work?

It continues to amaze me that Oswald did not make the connection between DNA and it being what codes for genes. Did Oswald even perhaps think this but did not assert it because he felt he did not have sufficient evidence. Did he leave behind any written material that further explains his whole thought process in concluding the results of his experiment? If so, how did he fail to see the connection? === Why didn't Oswald Avery continue his research on pneumonia and rats to further look into why DNA from the infectious S strand of the disease, when mixed with the noninfectious R strand created the S type. He could have been the man to finally put to rest the controversy over what contained the human genome several years before Watson and Crick and (enter other lost name to history). Was it truly because he is an "Oswald" or were there other factors? http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/CC/p-nid/158