Animal genetics and medicine / by Hans Grüneberg.

  • Grüneberg, H. (Hans)
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Animal genetics and medicine / by Hans Grüneberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tions and the cause of death in general can be studied in detail; as all the animals in such a line have the same genetical constitution, similarities within lines and differences between lines will reveal to what extent the causes of physiological death are rooted in heredity; controlled changes of the environment may show what factors tend to precipitate or to retard these senile degradation processes. THE USE OF DIRECT METHODS OF INVESTIGATION 'Primum non nocere '—and hence all methods of clinical and laboratory investigation are so designed as not to interfere with the patient's well-being. While many of the methods are highly efficient and ingenious, many of them are of necessity indirect; from a purely diagnostic point of view, it would be preferable to inspect a section of a kidney rather than to infer its pathological state from the urine produced. The animal geneticist is under no such disability. He can afford to kill his patient at any stage of the disease, and hence complete histological series from the beginning to the end are easily obtainable. In clinical medicine, diagnostic insight is not rarely obtained from the therapeutic success (or otherwise) of a given treatment; while this is also open to the animal geneticist, his aetiological studies can also be aided by experiments designed to make the condition worse; as he is not charged with healing his patient, any experimental procedure is open to him. THE STUDY OF INHERITED DISEASES IS ALWAYS 'RELEVANT' There is evidence on natural phenomena which is relevant and hence worth having; but there is also irrelevant information, which can be obtained, and yet is completely nonsensical. An example may make this clearer. The velocity of light is a funda mental cosmical constant, and any amount of observational refine ment is clearly justified to ascertain its numerical value with greater and greater precision. An attempt to measure the speed of a race-horse with similar accuracy would obviously be absurd,