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.

    29/316 (page 13)
    THE VALUE OF NEW AETIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS Nevertheless, it will be found that a good many of the inherited diseases of rodents which we are going to describe have no known close counterparts in man. Should we have confined ourselves to those conditions which bear an obvious relation to human diseases and disregarded the rest? It seems to me that such a procedure would be very short-sighted and likely to deprive us of some of the most valuable results which can be obtained from this material. For it will be seen that the analysis of some of these conditions has led to the discovery of new mechanisms of aetiology, and others will no doubt come to light in the future. The history of Science is full of examples where the discovery of a new mechanism in one field has proved to be of far-reaching importance in its application to others. It is thus very likely that new aetiological mechanisms discovered in the study of inherited diseases in animals may help in the understanding of human diseases seemingly very different from them. If I may be permitted to voice a personal opinion, i believe that in the long run the discovery of new disease mechan isms will have more far-reaching effects on human pathology than the exploitation of those conditions whose immediate bearing on medicine is obvious. THE LIMITED RANGE OF AVAILABLE CONDITIONS A rather severe limitation, at the present moment, is the fact that we cannot ask the geneticist to produce the animal counter part of any desired human disease. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that man possesses certain genes which the laboratory rodents lack. But we must not forget that studies of this kind have only recently been begun by a small number of workers, and the rapidly increasing number of genes available for investigation gives reason for confidence that before long the scope for such studies will be greatly widened. At present we are confined to the investigation of what we have got, and to trust to the future and the mutability of genes to produce what we would like to get.