A newly cloned gene in corn will help explain how unusual interactions between a parent's genes can have lasting effects in future generations. The finding has implications for breeding better crop plants and unraveling complex genetic diseases.

By Ben Hirschler BRNO, Czech Republic (Reuters) - The walled garden of Brno's 14th-century Abbey of St. Thomas seems an unlikely birthplace for the gene revolution, which gave the world biotech drugs and genetically modified crops.

bobschwarz@wvgazette.com Darwin got it right. Although he lived too early to have any understanding of how genes controlled heredity, Charles Darwin had sufficiently keen powers of observation and deduction to put together the theory of evolution.

Forgotten Prophet of Genetics The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington. Oren S. Harman. xii + 329 pp. Harvard University Press, 2004.