On a tangental note:
Nazi super cows: British farmer forced to destroy half his murderous herd of bio-engineered Heck cows after they try to kill staff
They did a nice job. :^) Particularly since DNA wasn't discovered/described until 1953.
Here's a clip I tracked down, in a topic about Henrietta Lacks:
A scientist accidentally poured a chemical on a HeLa cell that spread out its tangled chromosomes. Later on, scientists used this technique to determine that humans have 46 chromosomes -- 23 pairs -- not 48, which provided the basis for making several types of genetic diagnoses.Matt Ridley pointed this out in his book "Genome" -- and the interesting part of this story is, because four living primates (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and chimps) have 24 pairs, it was wishful thinking that humans do also. The discoverer of the 23 pairs thought he had a freak, but in looking back, he even found photos in textbooks clearly showing 23 pairs, but captioned as 24 pairs. :')"For thirty years, nobody disputed this 'fact'. One group of scientists abandoned their experiments on human liver cells because they could only find twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in each cell. Another researcher invented a method of separating the chromosomes, but still he thought he saw twenty-four pairs. It was not until 1955, when an Indonesian named Joe-Hin Tjio travelled from Spain to Sweden to work with Albert Levan, that the truth dawned. Tjio and Levan, using better techniques, plainly saw twenty-three pairs. They even went back and counted twenty-three pairs in photographs in books where the caption stated that there were twenty-four pairs. There are none so blind as do not wish to see." (Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, p 23-24)The correct number of chromosomes could have been discerned, one would think, during the almost 35 years involved in the events above. The most daunting realization is that the double heliacal form of DNA was discerned in 1953, two years before this chromosome count was corrected.
I had no idea about the 24, 23 chromosome discovery. Interesting.
Trust the Science!
On a tangental note:
Nazi super cows: British farmer forced to destroy half his murderous herd of bio-engineered Heck cows after they try to kill staff
