This past December, science writer David Dobbs published an essay (2013) in the online magazine Aeon (aeon.co/magazine/) that purports to explain why the ‘selfish gene’ concept is outmoded and should be retired. It elicited a good deal of commentary, and in...
The term “genetic code” is associated with a measure of ambiguity. For molecular biologists, “genetic code” has historically referred to a table that provides for each messenger RNA ribonucleotide triplet the corresponding amino acid that is incorporated into the...
An assumption fundamental to medical genetics is that the DNA sequence of an allele at a particular locus will (in the vast majority of instances) be faithfully transcribed into RNA and translated into protein. This assumption has been largely accepted in spite of...