Search

In this second article on Greek science, E M Pantelouris, assesses the effort put into non-university research.

MICE homozygous for the mutation, nude (nu) have been reported to have no thymus1, although they retain a prelymphoid thymic rudiment2. Here, I report the occurrence of individuals that are by external signs (including hairlessness) a nude mutation but possess an apparently normal thymus.

THE controversy about the identity of the European eel was started by Tucker in 19591. Contrary to the theory of Schmidt2, which assumed that both European and American eels return for spawning to the Sargasso Sea, Tucker argued that it is unlikely that the eels from the European waters manage to return, and that the eels which spawn in the Sargasso Sea are therefore all American. If this were true, the European eel should originate from the same gene pool as the American eel, and have identical gene frequencies, unless differential mortality changes these frequencies.

ONE of the most fundamental problems, both for genetics and embryology, is that of whether the genes in the nuclei of differentiated tissues retain their full range of capacities, or whether some irreversible alteration affects them. The most direct method of investigating this is to develop techniques which permit the transplantation of nuclei from differentiated cells of one kind into enucleated cells of different developmental potentialities. Briggs and King1 have reported some attempts in this direction, in which nuclei from blastulae or early gastrulae of frogs were injected into uncleaved but fertilized frogs' eggs from which the zygote nucleus had been removed. Nuclei from blastulae permitted the full differentiation of a normal embryo in a fairly high proportion of cases, those from early gastrulae in a smaller proportion, whereas those from determined (but not yet differentiated) tissues gave little success, though it remained uncertain whether this was due to technical difficulties or to an incapacity of the genes.

Thymus and Self: Immunobiology of the Mouse Mutant Nude †. By Jorgen Rygaard. Pp. 193. (Wiley-Interscience: London and New York, March 1975.) £6.50.