The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril ...

Highly original and brilliantly accomplished, this is the first scholarly biography of Darlington and a richly effective one. Harman has based it on Darlington's diaries, letters, and other papers, on extensive reading in other primary sources, and on authoritative knowledge of the secondary literature. The author wears his learning lightly, deftly integrating his research into a highly readable, engaging, and lucid narrative. It will surely find an appreciative audience among geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and cytologists as well as among historians of those fields and of eugenics.pIntroduction/ppbI. Adventures in Lancashire/bbr /br /1. An Improbable Birthbr /br /2. A Rising Tidebr /br /3. Auspicious Beginningsbr /br /4. In Search of Tulips and Truth/ppbII. Science/bbr /br /5. From Cytology to Evolutionbr /br /6. Roots of a Scientific Controversybr /br /7. Method, Discipline and Character/ppInterlude/ppbIII. Politics/bbr /br /8. The Lysenko Affairbr /br /9. Marxism and the Slaying of a Mentorbr /br /10. Science in a Changing World/ppbIV. Man/bbr /br /11. The Conflict of Science and Societybr /br /12. On the Determination of Uncertaintybr /br /13. The Breakdown of Classical Geneticsbr /br /14. On the Uncertainty of Determinationbr /br /15. One Final Hurrah/ppConclusion: Paradoxes/ppBibliographybr /br /Index/ppBorn 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 origin