Genetics for the clinician / C.A. Clarke.

  • Clarke, Cyril A. (Cyril Astley)
Date:
1964
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Genetics for the clinician / C.A. Clarke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/438 (page XI)
    PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION I have written this book with the sole object of trying to arouse in cHnicians some curiosity about genetics. This I felt necessary partly because not enough of us are aware of how relevant the subject can be to ordinary clirucal work and partly because some knowledge of genetic disciplines is surprisingly useful in assessing more accurately the role of environmental factors in disease. But the trouble with genetics is to get started. The simpler rules seem only to apply to disorders which we rarely see and those more complicated are difficult to understand without an effort. We look around us, are reassured by the observation that many clinicians have risen to great eminence without any knowledge of genetics, and thus comforted we close our books. Nevertheless we should be humble. Our knowledge of v/hy people develop common diseases (and why they frequently recover from them) is most fragmentary and much of medicine remains at the Hippocratic descriptive level, succinctly described by my Professor as the ability to recognize an elephant through having seen one before. To progress further it is essential that the problems of ordinary disease be recognized as an exercise in apphed biology to be tackled on a wide front with little expectation of fmding a single cause but rather in the hope of disentangling subtle combinations of factors some of which may be genetic—and in fact this pattern of multiple aetiologies is beginning to emerge. A few, particularly those mathematically gifted, can take to genetics without difficulty but for the majority the best way of learning the subject is to breed some animal or plant because then it is soon evident why unaccustomed techniques are necessary to deal with the information which accumulates. Medical men in the past have often been good naturahsts and it may in fact be rather a small step to utilize information from an outside interest for the benefit of patients and their families—and for me this happened through an interest in breeding butterflies. A chance observation, together with great good fortune in my friends, led to a rather sudden extension of the work and then the application of the principles I was learning to medical research. The channelling of the knowledge in the right direction was due directly to the E. B. Ford school of genetics at Oxford and the link between insects and Man lay in the understanding of polymorphism; once this had been mastered ready xi