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An excerpt from the beginning of the INTRODUCTION: No other field in biology has within recent years yielded such far-reaching and important results as the field of genetic work. Thanks to the introduction of analytical experimentation, one after another of the central problems in natural science has been solved or brought near to a solution-problems which after so many vain attempts seemed almost beyond the reach of ordinary scientific analysis. The progress has been so considerable that one of the most prominent workers in this field, T. H. Morgan, in 1916 felt justified in stating: I venture the opinion that the problem of heredity has been solved. It scarcely needs to be pointed out that the broad general significance of the hereditary phenomena makes it urgently necessary to determine whether the results obtained through experimental work with animals and plants may be applied to the inheritance of human characters. There was a priori no reason to doubt that this would prove to be the case, and several human characters, physiological as well as pathological, have been shown to be inherited in a way fully accordant with the laws established through experimental genetic work. Human material, however, presents several serious obstacles for genetic analysis. Not only the principal handicap involved in the lack of experiments, but also other special features make man a very poor subject for work in heredity. The number of individuals within each family is very small; intermarriage is comparatively rare; the interval of time between the generations is very long; and the characters studied are rarely amenable to accurate measurements. Only the application of the most general hereditary laws, those of Mendelian inheritance and of sex-linked inheritance, has accordingly so far been possible with human material. Still, the experimental work has shown that even though these laws form the basis of all our knowledge of heredity, their manifestation is far more complicated than it would seem from many earlier investigations, where the case seemed closed when it was possible to demonstrate the occurrence of Mendelian segregation. In spite of the difficulties and the incompleteness of the data which are due to the nature of this material, it is nevertheless desirable, whenever human characters are observed which are accessible for genetic analysis, to carry out this analysis and determine, if possible, whether or not the principles established through experimental work may be extended so as to include human material. The hereditary character which forms the subject of the following investigation is a symmetrical shortness of a single (the second)phalanx of the second fingers and toes. This character is inherited within a Norwegian family, some members of which have emigrated to North America. Our attention was called to the material by Dr. Frimann Koren, of Christiania, who observed the malformation in some members of the family 15 years ago....

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9781496061676

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