Flatiron Seminar Series: Stas Shvartsman

Title: Back to the future of genetics

Abstract: As a young science, genetics was initially viewed with suspicion by Darwinists—an attitude that now seems unfathomable, given the central role of genes and genomes in evolutionary research. A key criticism held that mutants, the main tools of genetics, were laboratory artifacts and thus irrelevant for understanding natural selection. In the 1920s, a Russian biologist Sergei Chetverikov and his students dismantled this criticism in a series of papers proving that natural populations are rich with mutant gene variants. This seminar will examine the lasting impact of these largely forgotten works and focus on the “genotype-to-phenotype” problem, clearly articulated by Chetverikov’s group. This problem is still largely unsolved and drives our computational and experimental studies of organism development.