Circulating nucleic acids and Darwin's gemmules

"Circulating nucleic acids and Darwin's gemmules." Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy, 12(sup1), pp. S225–S226

Author's response:

Philippe Anker

We thank Dr Liu for his interest in our article on circulating nucleic acids and evolution. In fact, Yongsheng Liu was the first to bring back Darwin's pangenesis and link it to circulating nucleic acids. His remark that the notion of prepotency corresponds to what we now call dominance inheritance is perfectly correct. One more time, Darwin proves to be more modern than usually thought to be! Our sentence stating that “Darwin did not know anything about DNA and ignored Mendelian heredity” is therefore only true for the first part.