Prunet Nathanaël, Meyerowitz Elliot M
Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
C R Biol. 2016 Jul-Aug;339(7-8):240-6. doi: 10.1016/j.crvi.2016.05.003. Epub 2016 May 26.
There are only three grand theories in biology: the theory of the cell, the theory of the gene, and the theory of evolution. Two of these, the cell and gene theories, originated in the study of plants, with the third resulting in part from botanical considerations as well. Mendel's elucidation of the rules of inheritance was a result of his experiments on peas. The rediscovery of Mendel's work in 1900 was by the botanists de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak. It was only in subsequent years that animals were also shown to have segregation of genetic elements in the exact same manner as had been shown in plants. The story of developmental biology is different - while the development of plants has long been studied, the experimental and genetic approaches to developmental mechanism were developed via experiments on animals, and the importance of genes in development (e.g., Waddington, 1940) and their use for understanding developmental mechanisms came to botanical science much later - as late as the 1980s.
细胞理论、基因理论和进化理论。其中两个理论，即细胞理论和基因理论，起源于对植物的研究，第三个理论也部分源于植物学方面的考量。孟德尔对遗传规律的阐释是他对豌豆进行实验的结果。1900年，植物学家德弗里斯、科伦斯和切尔马克重新发现了孟德尔的著作。直到后来的几年，人们才发现动物的遗传因子分离方式与植物完全相同。发育生物学的情况则有所不同——虽然植物发育的研究由来已久，但发育机制的实验和遗传学方法是通过对动物的实验发展而来的，基因在发育中的重要性（例如，沃丁顿，1940年）以及利用基因理解发育机制，直到20世纪80年代才很晚才进入植物科学领域。
