Science and Representation: the case of genetic maps.

Ana Barahona
UNAM, Evolutionary Biology, School of Sciences

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/15/2005 9:00 AM in ROZH 102
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Abstract
Science and Representation: the case of genetic maps.

Ana Barahona
Departamento de Biología Evolutiva
Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM
Zapata 6-9, Col. Miguel Hidalgo
Tlalpan 14410, México, D.F.
México
abe@hp.fciencias.unam.mx


Maps are abstractions of some physical reality, a reality that precedes its representation in maps. Genetic mapping, on the contrary, started with an abstract notion and provided a map that gave this notion a virtual reality, of how we inferred reality to be. In the case of Genetics, linkage maps preceded the demonstration of physical, chromosomal reality. A fundamental question since the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900 was if the Mendelian “factors” actually had any material basis in the living cells. The relation between the behaviour of the chromosomes in reduction and the Mendelian factors in segregation was first pointed out independently by Sutton and Boveri in 1902. By 1910 Morgan´s theory of inheritance proposed the union of two kinds of thought: the knowledge about how chromosomes behave during reproduction, and the Mendelian laws. The “Drosophila group” put its efforts on characterizing the genes in order to understand how they split and align in the chromosomes. The next phase was to localize each gene along each chromosome. This project constituted one of the most important ones developed by Morgan´s group, leading the to the construction of the “genetic maps”. In this paper I will try to show the main events that lead to the construction of the firsts genetic maps using linkage as an analytical tool.


Session´s title: Endless Variety: Representations in Biology/Edna Suárez

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
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Representing radioisotopes: experiments and instruments in the visualization of life sciences in the post-WWII era
What do we get from visual access?
Standardisation and abstraction: two ways to model Arabidopsis thaliana
The role of two different but related graphs in the expansion of molecular biology between 1960 and 1980: the regulatory gene network and the intra-cellular signalling pathway