Heredity and Human Progress

Radiation effects on human heredity.

In experimental organisms such as fruit flies and mice, increased frequencies in germ cell mutations have been detected following exposure to ionizing radiation. In contrast, there has been no clear evidence for radiation-induced germ cell mutations in humans that lead to birth defects, chromosome aberrations, Mendelian disorders, etc. This situation exists partly because no sensitive and pract...

Neuron-based heredity and human evolution

It is widely recognized that human evolution has been driven by two systems of heredity: one DNA-based and the other based on the transmission of behaviorally acquired information via nervous system functions. The genetic system is ancient, going back to the appearance of life on Earth. It is responsible for the evolutionary processes described by Darwin. By comparison, the nervous system is re...

Epigenetic heredity of human height

Genome-wide SNP analyses have identified genomic variants associated with adult human height. However, these only explain a fraction of human height variation, suggesting that significant information might have been systematically missed by SNP sequencing analysis. A candidate for such non-SNP-linked information is DNA methylation. Regulation by DNA methylation requires the presence of CpG isla...

Aspects of Human Heredity in Health and Disease

To the younger members of the Medical School this annual convocation is only one more incident to be endured in an overcrowded curriculum. To the undergraduate with so many new experiences and so much new knowledge continually forced upon him, the retrospect of even one year appears a long way off; and similarly the events to be of a year ahead are in the dim and distant future. However, after ...

Marriage and Heredity