Historical fine-mapping.

摘要

When phage biologistg and historian of science Gunther Stent reviewed Jonathan Werner's book on Seymour Benzer, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (1999), he praised the book yet complained that "the work that should secure for Benzer a place in the pantheon of biology-his bridging the experimental gap between formal genetics and DNA structure-occupies only a dozen or so of the book's 300 pages" (Stent 1999). As his final piece of scholarship, Frederic L. Holmes produced the book that Stent felt should be written: a careful history of Benzer's virtuosic fine-mapping of the rII region of the phage T4 genome. Benzer demonstrated that the gene was not an indivisible unit-that recombination could happen within a single gene. His results showed that the recombination and complementation maps of this genetic region of phage were in agreement, and strongly suggested that both mirrored the linear structure of DNA. By the late 1950s, his high-resolution maps helped geneticists accommodate the perspective of molecular biologists, who regarded genes as speci6c sequences of nucleotides.