Many of the books and papers listed here are available online, free of charge, from Electronic Scholarly Publishing, a collection of source material on the foundations of classical genetics (www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical).

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General

Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. DNA Interactive: Timeline. www.dnai.org/timeline/index.html. This website offers an overview of the major advances in molecular genetics from 1865 to 2000.

Watson, J.D. 1968. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Atheneum Publishers. Watson’s original account of his adventures; a quick and very interesting read, warts and all.

Mendelian Genetics

Bateson, W. 1909. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mendel, G. 1866. Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden. In Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines (Proceedings of the Natural History Society). Brünn. Fewer than 150 copies were produced; Darwin owned one of them, but the evidence from examining his copy indicates that he did not open it to Mendel’s work.

Mendel Museum, Masaryk University. Gregor Mendel. mendelmuseum.muni.cz/en/. This original location of Mendel’s work is undergoing extensive restoration as a museum.

Cytogenetics: Chromosome Movements during Mitosis and Meiosis

Hooke, R. 1664. Micrographia: Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London. Available at www.gutenberg.org/etext/15491.

Sutton, W.S. 1903. The chromosomes in heredity. Biol. Bull. 4:231–251. An outline of the rationale behind Sutton’s proposal that chromosomes carry the material of heredity.

The Chromosome Theory of Inheritance

Creighton, H.B., and B. McClintock. 1931. A correlation of cytological and genetical crossing-over in Zea mays. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 17:492–497.

Morgan, T.H., A.H. Sturtevant, H.J. Muller, and C.B. Bridges. 1915. Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. New York: Henry Holt and Company. This book contains the classic work from Morgan’s lab and illustrates the way in which scientific discoveries were published before scientific journals became the norm.

Foundations of Molecular Genetics

Avery, O.T., C.M. MacLeod, and M. McCarty. 1944. Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types. J. Exp. Med. 79:137–158.

Beadle, G.W., and E.L. Tatum. 1941. Genetic control of biochemical reactions in Neurospora. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 27:499–506.

Crick, F. 1970. Central dogma of molecular biology. Nature 227:561–563. The classic paper in which Crick proposes the central dogma of information flow in biology.

Hershey, A.D. and M. Chase. 1952. Independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage. J. Gen. Physiol. 36:39–56.