The history of cytogenetics. Portraits of some pioneers.

In his book “La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli” Paul Ricoeur reminds us of “the diffıcult path that must be traversed between memory and its historic representation”. It is hazardous to try it. But it is worth attempting to sketch some faces—those that oblivion has not erased—and to find again the climate of the times, sometimes full of sound and fury, progressing from the polytene chromosomes of diptera to the human chromosomes of today, fluorescent and multicolored, thanks to technological advances that now permit us to explore all their secrets. It has not always been so and if, henceforth, human cytogenetics plays an authoritative role in the classification of animal and vegetable karyotypes, we would be wrong to forget that all began with flies and corn.