The long struggle of humanity to understand the underlying principles of heredity took a great leap forward with the publication of the double helical model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). These huge molecules are the common components utilized by all of Earth’s species for sexual and asexual reproduction. However, a recent event based on prejudice and intellectual dishonesty has shown that even one of the Nobel Laureates responsible for this advance can harbor and espouse the coarsest and most irrational racial stereotypes. As a look at some of the history will demonstrate, classical genetics and molecular biology became entwined, in some minds, with the discredited doctrine of eugenics, which holds that, like farm animals, the human race can and should be improved by selective breeding. The result is an insidious and parasitic form of racism, which masks itself in the language and logic of Science.

Before they were called genes, people were aware that factors of some kind were passed from generation to generation, that could cause various traits to be inherited. Even after the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, worked out the algebra of these transfers in the nineteenth century, as visualized by students in tic-tac-toe-like diagrams called Punnit Squares, the molecular structure of genes remained a mystery that awaited advances in analytical technology. The veil was lifted in 1953 as biology and medicine were transformed overnight by the report in the British journal, Nature, written by an American, James Watson, and an Englishman, Francis Crick. They proposed an elegant model for DNA, which simultaneously explained its structure and replication. The molecule resembles a spiral staircase made of repeating units called nucleotides in which the “rungs” are made of alternating sugar and phosphate groups while the “steps” are composed of pairs of complex, flattened bases composed of rings of atoms. A gene carries a sequence of those bases in a code that ultimately relates to the sequence of the twenty possible amino acid building blocks of a protein. Cells synthesize proteins that cause structures to form or functions to be carried out. Thus, DNA carries the information for traits, while proteins do the work of producing them. Later studies showed that there is an intermediate: a single stranded messenger molecule called ribonucleic acid (RNA), such that information in cells flow as described by Crick in his “Central Dogma,” from DNA to RNA to protein. This idea has held up well, except for some viruses, which use RNA as their genetic material.