Genetics, as any other science, has its own perennial problems. ‘The main one is the problem of a genetic Janus, resembling in some way the twofaced Janus of the ancient Romans.
One face of the genetic Janus is turned towards eternity where the hereditary continuity of generations is ensured, where the holy of holies of each organisms, its heredity, is being carefully kept in purity and safety. The other face is turned towards the fleeting kaleidoscope of everyday life where the living organism is forced to endure now heat, now cold, change its rhythms of life, meet infectious diseases and where hereditary in formation has to assure its survival and flourishing.
How are genetic systems arranged and how do they work that the hereditary information they enclose is both protected against all outside influences and, simultaneously, gets readily involved in the organism’s adequate response to them?
Penetrating ever more deeply into the secrets of living matter, genetics has, over the years, provided an ever more thorough, fundamental, detailed reply to this question. “Molecularism” now prevails in many fields of biology, and in today’s genetics no advances are possible without it. A molecular structure of genes, molecular mechanisms of protein synthesis in the cell… The list is very long indeed. But here’s the curious thing: attempting to explain on the molecular level the already established work principle of hereditary systems, the geneticists have gradually begun to find their entirely new characteristics, in much the same way as Columbus, looking for a new way to the land of India, discovered a new country America,
The inconsistency of a genome is the brief designation of the new in the image of hereditary systems a new land of modem genetics. And it is not for nothing that Khesin Lurve, the famous Soviet biologists, so named their monograph, as this symbolizes the new frontiers, converges a host of topical problems in the most diverse branches of the science of life: the problems of evolution, oncology, immunity and biotechnology for medicine and production.
Khesin and his team, for the first time, experimentally proved that the genes in a cell do not act all at ‘once, but each works in its own regime, “Inconsistency in the operation of genes” was the conclusion, well supported by experimental data and universally accepted by now that showed scientists the road to this concept of an “inconsistent genome”. Having discovered “inconsistency in the operation of genes”, studies then followed regarding governing genetic systems, the interaction of the genetic material of a cell and the penetrant virus, and in recent years the most extravagant hero of genetics: “jumping genes” or mobile genetic elements.
The movement of the “jumping genes”, acting on the neighbor hereditary structures and triggering their different tunings in and activation, causes marked changes in the work of the genetic machinery of a cell. And it has turned out that the changes sometimes arise from the malignant degeneration of a cell, the work of the immunity system, and flares of hereditary alterations in wild animal or insect populations, The most remarkable discovery in recent years has been the establishment of a fact that the mobile elements can move from one organism to another, from one species to another, even evolutionarily remote, and carry over. Individual genes or group of other genes. Classical genetics could assume nothing like it. It can be said that thanks to mobile elements all organisms’ genofunds are united in the common genofund, of all life. Also, it becomes obvious that this science is now at a fuming point, and the best proof of this is the concept of a genome’s inconsistency.“‘
Article extracted from this publication >> December 2, 1994
