Enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma

As Morgan noted at the time, there was no consensus БЂњas to what the genes are-whether they are real or purely fictitious.БЂ«It may seem surprising that scientists could struggle to accept the physical reality of something so fundamental to cellular activity, but as Wallace, King, and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable college text), we are in much the same position today with mental processes such as thought and memory. We know that we have them, of course, but we donБЂ™t know what, if any, physical form they take. So it was for the longest time with genes. The idea that you could pluck one from your body and take it away for study was as absurd to many of MorganБЂ™s peers as the idea that scientists today might capture a stray thought and examine it under a microscope. What was certainly true was that something associated with chromosomes was directing cell replication. Finally, in 1944, after fifteen years of effort, a team at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan, led by a brilliant but diffident Canadian named Oswald Avery, succeeded with an exceedingly tricky experiment in which an innocuous strain of bacteria was made permanently infectious by crossing it with alien DNA, proving that DNA was far more than a passive molecule and almost certainly was the active agent in heredity ...»