In Pursuit of the Gene

NOTES TO PAGES 154–156 © 317
on the history of genetics he gave at Caltech on Apr. 12, 1962 (lectures by A. H.
Sturtevant on audiotape, Archives, California Institute of Technology).
29. Baltzer, Theodor Boveri, 66.
30. Observation made in 1877 (Thomas Hunt Morgan, The Development of the Frog’s
Egg: An Introduction to Experimental Embryology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1897), 30.
31. We now know that the centrosome is continually shooting out rays
(microtubules) in an exploratory fashion in different directions and retracting
them in a process that can be compared to a fisherman casting a line. If there is no
bite at the end of the line, the line is quickly withdrawn and a new cast is made
(Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith
Roberts, and Peter Walter, Essential Cell Biology: An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of
the Cell [New York: Garland, 1998], 523).
32. Theodor Boveri, “On Multipolar Mitoses as a Means for the Analysis of the
Cell Nucleus,” Verhandlungen der Physikalische-medizinischen Gesellschaft zu Würzburg 35
(1902): 67–90, translated in B. R. Voeller, ed., The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 93. See also Baltzer, Theodor Boveri, 86–95. In
“On Multipolar Mitoses” Boveri gives the probability that each of the poles in a
quadripolar egg inherits a complete set of chromosomes as (.4) 9 , which is .026%, not
.0026% as he wrote in the text.
33. Boveri, “Multipolar Mitoses,” 93.
34. From descriptions of wheat harvests collected by the Kansas State Historical
Society.
35. Walter Stanborough Sutton, April 5, 1877–November 10, 1916 (published by his family,
1917), 57, 66.
36. Elof Axel Carlson, Mendel’s Legacy: The Origin of Classical Genetics (Cold Spring
Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004), 80; A. Baxter, “Edmund
Beecher Wilson and the Problem of Development: From the Germ Layer Theory to
the Chromosome Theory of Inheritance” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1975), 280.
Baxter also agrees that it was Henking who named the X. Crow says the X got its
name because of McClung’s habit of labeling it that way in drawings (Ernest W.
Crow and James F. Crow, “100 Years Ago: Walter Sutton and the Chromosome
Theory of Heredity,” Genetics 160 [2002]: 1). McKusick says both McClung and
Sutton labeled it X in their drawings, and Wilson coined the name (Victor A.
McKusick, “Walter S. Sutton and the Physical Basis of Mendelism,” Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 34 [1960]: 488 n. 1).
37. C. E. McClung, “A Peculiar Nuclear Element in the Male Reproductive Cells
of Insects,” Zoölogical Bulletin 2 (1899): 187.