Title
The Man Who Invented the Chromosome : A Life of Cyril Darlington / Oren Solomon Harman.
ISBN
9780674038332
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2009]
Copyright
©2004
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (341 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/9780674038332 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
576.5/092
Summary
Born by mistake, or connivance, to struggling parents in a small Lancashire cotton town in 1903, an uninspired Darlington inadvertently escaped the obscurity of farming life and rose instead, against all odds, to become within a few short years the world's greatest expert on chromosomes, and one of the most penetrating biological thinkers of the twentieth century. Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest questions--how species originate, how variation occurs, how Nature, both blind and foreboding, random and insightful, makes her way from deep past to unknown future. But Darlington did not stop there: Chromosomes held within their tiny confines untold, dark truths about man and his culture. This passionate conviction led the once famed Darlington down a path of rebuke, isolation, and finally obscurity. As The Man Who Invented the Chromosome unfolds Darlington's forgotten tale--the Nazi atrocities, the Cold War, the crackpot Lysenko, the molecular revolution, eugenics, Civil Rights, the welfare state, the changing views of man's place in nature, biological determinism--all were interconnected. Just as Darlington's work provoked him to ask questions about the link between biology and culture, his life raises fundamental questions about the link between science and society.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I FROM CHORLEY TO TABRIZ
1. An Improbable Birth
2. A Rising Tide
3. Auspicious Beginnings
4. In Search of Tulips and Truth
II SCIENCE
5. From Cytology to Evolution
6. Roots of a Scientific Controversy
7. Method, Discipline, and Character
Interlude
III POLITICS
8. The Lysenko Mfair
9. Marxism and the Slaying of a Mentor
10. Science in a Changing World
IV MAN
11. The Conflict of Science and Society
12. On the Determination of Uncertainty
13. The Breakdown of Classical Genetics
14. On the Uncertainty of Determination
15. One Final Hurrah
Conclusion: Paradoxes
Notes
Index
