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Was there life before 1953?

Nature Genetics volume 33, pages 449–450 (2003)Cite this article

It has been fifty years since the Watson–Crick bombshell. Fifty years before that, in 1903, Walter Sutton1 noted the parallelism between chromosome behavior and Mendel's laws, thus identifying genes with chromosomes and marking the beginning of genetics as a science. The next half-century was one of great progress, but it was a different world from ours. My assignment is to contrast genetics before and after 1953. I am well qualified for this task; my genetics career started in the 1930s, so I belong to that fast-disappearing cohort who experienced the old ways.

Through a retrospectroscope, the pre-1953 years look barren indeed: no DNA sequencers, no PCR, no SNPs, no expression chips, no sequence databases, no computers, no central dogma, no reverse transcriptase, no code dictionary, no junk DNA, no antisense RNA, no RNAi, no molecular clock, no knockouts, no gene targeting, no evo-devo and so on and on.

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  1. Genetics Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, 445 Henry Mall, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    James F. Crow

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  1. James F. Crow
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Crow, J. Was there life before 1953?. Nat Genet 33, 449–450 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0403-449

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