Two old friends met by chance on the street.
After chatting for some time one said to the other, "I'm terribly sorry, but I've forgotten your name. You'll need to tell me".
The other stared at him thoughtfully for a long time, then replied, "How soon do you need to know?"
August WeismannBorn 17 Jan 1834; died 5 Nov 1914 at age 80. August (Friedrich Leopold) Weismann was a German biologist and one of the founders of the science of genetics, who is best known for his opposition to the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired traits and for his "germ plasm" theory, the forerunner of DNA theory. Weismann conceived the idea, arising out of his early observations on the Hydrozoa, that the germ cells of animals contain "something essential for the species, something which must be carefully preserved and passed on from one generation to another." Weismann envisioned the hereditary substances from the two parents become mixed together in the fertilized egg and a form of nuclear division in which each daughter nucleus receives only half the original ancestral germ plasms. |
