ABSTRACT
In her fascinating book The Century of the Gene , sociologist Evelyn Fox Keller (2001) argues that we need to understand the multiple histories and understanding of the word ‘gene’ to make sense of contemporary ‘gene talk.’ More than a century after the word ‘gene’ was coined, biologists still do not agree on what a gene is nor what it does. Keller describes how the term ‘genetics’ emerged in the early twentieth century, when Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist, and his contemporaries rediscovered the rules of inheritance that Gregor Mendel, a solitary Austrian monk, had found 40 years earlier in his investigations of pea plants (Keller 2003). A new and well-developed branch of plant breeding emerged with a focus on the material basis of inheritance patterns; in this context, the English scientist William Bateson (1906), speaking to a congress of botanists, coined the term ‘genetics.’ The term ‘gene’ was introduced three years later by the Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen, who wanted a new word to replace earlier concepts such as ‘genmules,’ the Darwinist unit of pangenesis, and de Vries’s term ‘pangens.’ Johannsen argued “it appears simplest to isolate the last syllable, ‘gene,’ which alone is of interest to us” (1909: 124).
