ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Asexual discrimination: A case history in why the lack of interdisciplinary communication can hinder scientific progress

• In Event: Crafts of Microbes: Women and Gender from Antibiotics to Genetic Engineering and the Microbiome

English Abstract

It may be difficult to imagine today, but the idea that DNA could be the material basis of heredity was, until the second half of the twentieth century, a ‘contested science’ to borrow the thematic phrase HSS meeting this year. This paper is a preliminary foray into examining the way in which differences between the objectives and purview of bacteriology and genetics in the early twentieth century posed barriers for experimental findings in one domain to be accepted by the other. As Francois Jacob and Elie Wollman noted in a 1961 review, “For many years both geneticists and microbiologists tacitly agreed that the concepts and the methods of genetics did not apply to organisms devoid of sexual reproduction.” This perceived lack of sex in bacteria had led geneticists to “deny them a nucleus, chromosomes, and genes,” – namely, all the physical and conceptual equipment for carrying out genetic processes. Consequently, when in 1944, a trio of microbiologists led by Oswald Avery put forward experimental evidence to suggest that the specific chemical substance that carried information about certain physical characteristics – specifically, the presence of a capsule outside the bacterial cell which endowed the cell with their ability to cause diseases – was DNA (or desoxyribonucleic acid as it was then called) their ideas were slow to take hold. Bacterial genetics only became a field after discoveries about the genetics of fungi, which were known to exist in both sexual and asexual modes. Subsequently bacteria were shown to "have a sex" at least in a limited sense of the concept. Eventually however, it wasn’t until bacteria were taken seriously as organisms capable of such genetic phenomena as mutations, recombination and conjugation, that biological research was able to demonstrate the fundamental unity of hereditary mechanisms across the entire living kingdom.

Author

• Neeraja Sankaran, Ahmedaband University