The Differentiation Of Cells
Norman Maclean
Genetics Principals And Perspectives
This book is intended to provide an introduction to one of the most
exciting problems known to man-the differentiation of living cells.
How do the diverse types of cells in the same organism, all arising from
the same fertilized egg cell, come to be so different? This question, put
casually br,' an unsuspecting lecturer in my undergraduate days, has
intrigued me ever since. I hope that this book may help to arouse in
some of its readers a similar interest and curiosity.
I have been deeply conscious, while writing the book, of constant
oversimplification. Hardly one experiment or observation which has
been cited is, on reading the original publication. as definitive or un-
complicated as it has been made to appear. But that is, I suppose, the
nature of science. Certain attempting a synthesis in a general area
such as differentiation is somewhat analogous to building a house with
bricks all made from different materials from very different localities.
That is, pieces of evidence which are put side by side in order to yield
a model may be drawn from very dissimilar systems, the one a virus-
infected liver cell perhaps. and the other a marine alga. And as I have
remarked elsewhere in the text, the areas in which theorizing is easiest
but least profitable are those which are very poorly understood. It seems
to me that biological science has now moved to a stage where a synthesis
of differentiation can be usefully attempted. Thus the book. But since
this is a fairly recent development, it would be still very easy to draw
inappropriate conclusions, or to use quite irrelevant evidence.
The other difficulty has been a temporal one. I haven't written this book
over a period of two years and much has changed in that time in the
field of cellular genetics. Despite occasional revisions, certain parts of
the text will be out of date on publication. But most, I trust, will have a
slightly longer useful life.
Thank You For looking
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