The Cells of the Body: A History of Somatic Cell Genetics (review)

The first three chapters of this book contain a thorough and scholarly review of, first, the progress over the past century and a half in our understanding of the significance of the cellular structure of multicellular organisms such as man; then, the acquisition around the turn of the century of the ability to culture such cells outside the body; and next, the gradual establishment of modern-day cytogenetics. The fourth chapter concerns the evolution during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s of our understanding of spontaneous and induced variation in cultures of mammalian cells, mutation, differentiation, transformation, and so forth. A chapter on somatic cell hybridization follows (see below), and then a relatively long but quite readable chapter on the origin and development of molecular genetics and the importance of its incorporation into current somatic cell genetics. The final chapter explicates the author’s long-standing view of malignancy as primarily a recessive character, which he promoted for a number of years on the basis of cell hybridization experiments, before the conclusive molecular studies of Cavenee and others.

The author’s review of research on somatic cell genetics and hybridization is quite thorough, although of course the topics receiving the most attention are those that particularly interest him and upon which he and his colleagues have worked. His analyses of the studies of others are perceptive and accurate—and spiced, of course, with his own enthusiasms and criticisms. There were only a few comments with which I disagreed. For example, in a discussion of the limited lifespan of diploid human fibroblasts in culture, the author states that “the only permanent cell lines that survived the phase of generalized cell destruction proved to be aneuploid” (pp. 45–46)—but the survival of such lines is a very rare event, if indeed it ever occurs. Perhaps he is thinking of spontaneous transformation in primary mouse fibroblasts in culture; the frequencies of transformation in human and mouse fibroblast cultures are of course very different. Also, the statement is made that spontaneous transformation in cultures of mouse embryo cells occurs “before the appearance of any major karyotypic rearrangements” (p. 109)—but publications around 1960 on this point indicate that even with the tools then available there was some (and very likely significant) variation in chromosome number at the time of the acceleration in growth rate, which in retrospect suggests the presence of structural abnormalities by then as well.

The absence in the bibliography of a number of the important reviews, monographs, and summaries of meetings on somatic cell genetics and hybridization written over the years did surprise me. And at times it was difficult to avoid the impression that the important concepts and contributions of some other workers did not receive sufficient acknowledgment. Certainly one could quibble with the statements on the jacket of the book that the author “introduced cell fusion as a general method for studying the genetics and physiology of animal cells” and “developed the first systematic procedure for mapping the order of genes along human chromosomes and determining the distance between them.”

Perhaps for this reviewer, already familiar with most of the research in somatic cell genetics that Harris cites, an especial attraction of this book is the sense it conveys of the steady forward march of research such as this—the differing initial experimental results and inferences drawn, the controversies, the reputations made, or never made, or lost, and the eventual consensus, permitting science to move ahead. I was reminded of the humbling lines in a poem by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, which were brought to my attention by Curt Richter:

Beyond the sundown is tomorrow’s wisdom,

Today is going to be long long ago. ¹