The Organization of Genetic Material in Eukaryotes: Progress and Prospects

We have spent this week in considering, in almost a hundred different ways, the dissection of the eukaryote genome. Our discussions have shifted rapidly from equilibrium density gradients, renaturation kinetics, and Kleinschmidt preparations to the analysis of karyotypes and maps of polytene chromosomes. Most of us now seem to take for granted the fact that discussions on base substitutions and gene frequencies in hypothetical natural populations clearly involve similar problems and belong together on the same program. People at Cold Spring Harbor have, of course, known all along that the phage lambda of Hershey, the maize chromosomes of McClintock, and the Drosophila chromosomes of Demerec and Kaufmann have fundamental properties in common, but when these studies all started most people lacked their vision as to the basic unity of genetic mechanisms. This meeting has undoubtedly been the beneficiary in innumerable ways of the legacy from this laboratory. Thus it is...