Genetics and the animal cell / Mario Terzi.

  • Terzi, Mario.
Date:
[1974]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Genetics and the animal cell / Mario Terzi. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/280 (page V)
    Preface The title of this book has been dehberately kept vague in order to cover a number of topics I wanted to discuss. In fact, another poss¬ ible title could have been 'Towards a molecular biology of the animal cell', with the emphasis on the 'towards' since it is my conten¬ tion that a molecular biology of the animal cell as such does not yet exist. There are, however, increasing numbers of molecular biologists who are switching their interest from E. coli to the cells of higher organisms and they might perhaps appreciate the views of someone who has made a similar move. Whether it is obligatory to study the cell in order to obtain a better understanding of the biology of Metazoa, in the same way perhaps as the shift to cell-free extracts was obligatory for the understanding of microbial systems, need not concern us here. It is a fact, however, that we know more about organisms as genetic systems than we know about their constituents, the cells. The cell, even when it is explanted in vitro, is not an autonomous unit in the same sense that a bacterial cell can be considered autono¬ mous. The cell is made to interact : it does so, and its programme cannot be understood unless we consider its logic within an orga¬ nism. Therefore, the study of the cell as an autonomous unit and its social behaviour cannot be taken separately. It is here the difficulty lies : the problem is far from solved but knowledge is sufficiently advanced to provide material for a dis¬ cussion—which I am setting out to give. In this light several experi¬ mental results will be mentioned without entering into too much detail. The references at the end of each chapter will list original papers or, more often, recent reviews to enable interested readers to find a justification for the assertions made in the text.