science · 24 September 1999 · 25 years ago
death
Died 24 Sep 1999 at age 91 (born 29 Nov 1907).
Italian geneticist who discovered the process of genetic recombination in the common soil fungus Aspergillus, and as a result of the discovery of the parasexual cycle, the originator of genetical studies in many other fungi. This cycle gives rise to genetic reassortment by means other than sexual reproduction and its discovery provided a method of genetically analyzing asexual fungi. Pontecorvo also put forward the idea of the gene as a unit of function, a theory substantiated by Seymour Benzer in 1955. He made significant contributions to modern genetics in elucidating the divisibility of the gene by recombination, and in his later years in the application of parasexual techniques to mammalian cell cultures.
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