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      The Eighth Day of Creation: looking back across 40 years to the birth of molecular biology and the roots of modern cell biology

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      a , *
      Molecular Biology of the Cell
      The American Society for Cell Biology

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          Abstract

          Forty years ago, Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation was published, a book vividly recounting the foundations of modern biology, the molecular biology revolution. This book inspired many in my generation. The anniversary provides a chance for a new generation to take a look back, to see how science has and hasn’t changed. Many central players in the book, including Sydney Brenner, Seymour Benzer, and François Jacob, would go on to be among the founders of modern cell biology, developmental biology, and neurobiology. These players come alive via their own words, as complex individuals, both heroes and anti-heroes. The technologies and experimental approaches they pioneered, ranging from cell fractionation to immunoprecipitation to structural biology, and the multidisciplinary approaches they took continue to power and inspire our work today. In the process, Judson brings out of the shadows the central roles played by women in many of the era’s discoveries. He provides us with a vision of how science and scientists have changed, of how many things about our endeavor never change, and of how some new ideas are perhaps not as new as we would like to think.

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          A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila.

          E B Lewis (1978)
          The bithorax gene complex in Drosophila contains a minimum of eight genes that seem to code for substances controlling levels of thoracic and abdominal development. The state of repression of at least four of these genes is controlled by cis-regulatory elements and a separate locus (Polycomb) seems to code for a repressor of the complex. The wild-type and mutant segmentation patterns are consistent with an antero-posterior gradient in repressor concentration along the embryo and a proximo-distal gradient along the chromosome in the affinities for repressor of each gene's cis-regulatory element.
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            How life works

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              Horace Freeland Judson, science historian, dies at 80

              W. Grimes (2011)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Monitoring Editor
                Journal
                Mol Biol Cell
                Mol. Biol. Cell
                molbiolcell
                mbc
                mboc
                Molecular Biology of the Cell
                The American Society for Cell Biology
                1059-1524
                1939-4586
                15 January 2020
                : 31
                : 2
                : 81-86
                Affiliations
                [a ]Department of Biology and Curriculum in Genetics and Molecular Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280
                University of Virginia
                Author notes
                *Address correspondence to: Mark Peifer ( peifer@ 123456unc.edu ).
                Article
                E19-11-0619
                10.1091/mbc.E19-11-0619
                6960408
                31935171
                30182875-b8f4-4bf9-947e-b47c5aa934a6
                © 2020 Peifer. “ASCB®,” “The American Society for Cell Biology®,” and “Molecular Biology of the Cell®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology.

                This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License.

                History
                : 12 November 2019
                : 18 November 2019
                : 19 November 2019
                Categories
                Retrospective

                Molecular biology
                Molecular biology

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