Sir

In reviewing my book, Master Control Genes in Development and Evolution, William McGinnis and Peter A. Lawrence1 invoke Lewis Carroll's remark that “your view depends on where you're standing”. The remark is only witty if the facts are correct. In this review, they are not.

Like many a discovery, that of the homeobox was sparked by a vague indication that could either be disregarded as irrelevant, or followed up. This was a weak band on a gel of Richard Garber's which most members of my research group considered to be an artefact, but to me this was the first sign of the homeobox. The reviewers claim that “[this band] was attributed to overloading of the gel, lumped into the ‘uninterpretable results’ category and not followed up”. This statement is incorrect. We reproduced this band and documented it in two papers.

The finding of this cross-hybridizing band was first published in Garber's paper2: “Under stringent hybridization conditions, weak homology with both the 903 and 909 probes was detected at position 190 kb⃛ These findings are being investigated further”; and subsequently in McGinnis's paper3 describing the discovery of the homeobox: “Garber et al. found a weak homology between the 903 cDNA and a site to the left of the Antp locus at position 190 on the map in Fig. 1. This site has subsequently been shown to be part of the transcription unit of the fushi tarazu gene (A. K. and E. H. in preparation)”.

Would we have published this finding if I had judged it an artefact “lumped into uninterpretable results”? In fact, it was the first sign of the homeobox that caused me great excitement. It was McGinnis who analysed this weak homology cleanly and determined the sequence of the homeobox. Because of his important contribution, he fully deserved to be first author of the paper describing the homeobox. Michael Levine, Atsushi Kuroiwa and Ernst Hafen were additional key contributors to this important discovery. Why is it so hard for McGinnis and Lawrence to accept that I, too, may have had a share in it?