Читать книгу The Power Of Youth. How To Tune Our Mind And Body For A Long And Healthy Life - Андрей Фоменко - Страница 11

Even though genetics as a science was formed only in the XX century, our remote ancestors had some understanding of heredity. Even thousands of years ago, people knew that certain traits could be passed from one generation to the next. Considering this, they crossed and bred animals and plants, improving their properties and functions.

The first and simplest assumption of how certain traits are inherited was that the traits of both parents are "mixed" in the children, so the children are something between the mother and the father. However, already ancient Romans knew that this process had to take place differently.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the experiments of the Austrian friar Gregor Mendel made us closer to the modern understanding of the memory of generations. The examples from his observations of plants showed that traits are not mixed, but are transmitted in the form of discrete (isolated) units to the next generations. The scientific community did not attach great importance to his discovery.

Only in 1900 did botanists Hugo de Vries, Carl Erich Correns, and Erich Tschermak obtain similar to Mendel's results and, one after another, published studies that confirmed his hypothesis. In 1909, Danish biologist Wilhelm Johannsen called the discrete units responsible for the transmission of traits "genes", and in 1910 American geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan established that genes are located in chromosomes. Scientists were able to explore the function of chromosomes only in the middle of the twentieth century when it turned out that hereditary information is contained in DNA.

Less than 70 years have passed since James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin deciphered the structure of DNA. Since then, many discoveries have been made on the structure of the human body and using this information to prolong life. And for that, we must take a closer look at what DNA is.