Science: Genes Seen?

In 1922 the foremost scoffer at the gene theory of heredity, England's formidable, bushy-browed Biologist William Bateson, went to the Columbia University laboratories of Thomas Hunt Morgan, examined the data, looked at the jars of fruit flies, stared down the microscopes, announced his conversion. Since then there has been little doubt among geneticists that the chromosomes in the germ cells are the theatres of heredity, that the ultimate agents, called genes, which transmit unit characters, occupy definite and fixed positions along the spindly, crooked chromosomes. Since then fame has come to...