I'd like to be a geneticist to be honest, but there are limits to what I can do now. For my dream to come true I'd have to be 20 years old again, heading off to a blue chip university.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.
In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.
The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.
As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.
Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.
