Abstract
IN 1923 Paul Kammerer summarised research which he claimed demonstrated the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Since the success of Mendelian genetics had already made Kammerer's work suspect a report of his lecture1 was followed by a long and acrimonious debate. The Kammerer case thereby became a cause célèbre in the biology of that decade. The controversy has recently been resurrected in a popular book by Koestler2 and has gained additional prominence from an internationally televised BBC documentary based on the book. This paper reports a failure to duplicate one of Kammerer's key experiments.
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WHITTAKER, J. Siphon regeneration in Ciona. Nature 255, 224–225 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1038/255224a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/255224a0
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