Word: plasm
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...pitted in debate against a booming bigwig, Professor Edward Drinker Cope of University of Pennsylvania, who advanced the Lamarckian view that acquired characteristics (e.g., muscular development or manual skill) can be inherited. Conklin defended the opposite view, boldly stated that inherited characteristics are determined solely by the germ plasm. In the course of time biology gave him the palm over Bigwig Cope. Today almost all top-notch biologists have swept Lamarckism under the rug. A Conklin crack...
...whole burden of evolution. Many scientists grew so contemptuous of natural selection that they called it pure fiction. Darwin knew nothing of the Mendelian heredity laws, nothing about the mechanism of mutations (sudden, conspicuous changes in plants and animals which subsequently breed true because of changes in the germ plasm). With the discovery of mutations some biologists decided that nothing else was necessary for evolution...
Pacemaker. Most biologists believe that the evolution of higher organisms works through genes-tiny little somethings (probably protein molecules) strung along the chromosomes in the germ plasm. Thousands of genes controlling various body characteristics have been traced in Drosophila melanogaster, the scientifically celebrated little fruit fly. It is by changes in these genes that evolution of different types of organisms takes place. But last week Dr. Millislav Demerec of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Genetics announced his opinion- based on careful research-that chromosomes contain one gene, which, by affecting all the genes, speeds up the rate...
Their importance to science is that they have a unique hereditary defect of the sort which crops out occasionally in nature but which human investigators cannot produce at will. Some disturbance in the rat chromosomes (heredity carriers in the germ plasm) prevents their soft, prenatal cartilage from developing into a normal skeleton. The young appear normal for two weeks, then become bandy-legged as if suffering from rickets. Usually they die at the age of four to five weeks, with soft, collapsed ribs and emphysema of the lungs (air leakage into the spaces of the connective tissue...
...cultured indoors by Dr. Frank Leslie Howard of Rhode Island State College. Later he turned his molds and his methods over to Dr. Seifriz. Ever since his student days at Johns Hopkins and in England, Germany, Switzerland and France, William Seifriz had hankered for generous supplies of "naked proto-plasm." Physarum polycephalum filled the bill. In a lyrical moment Dr. Seifriz called it a "great big glorious handful...