Molecular biology: from the bench to clinical application.

Many centuries passed without an understanding of why children resembled their parents. People were able to cross animals or plants in order to generate more resistant or stronger offspring without knowing how information could pass from one generation to the other. It took almost 100 years after Gregor Mendel revealed the concept of phenotype inheritance [1] to convince the scientific community that DNA was the molecule responsible for carrying heredity information [2], and to unravel its double-helix structure [3],[4]. Fifty-two years after Watson and Crick's finding, the study of the molecular basis of life, including the role of genes and their evolution, is progressing much faster, which has led to a wider understanding of how organisms function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]