No one was sure how animals or plants passed down traits. And Darwin knew that the lack of an explanation for heredity left a big gap in his theory of natural selection. In one of the great ...

With every new advance in prenatal genetic screening, the ability to prevent suffering has also sparked difficult questions about what should count as “a disease” versus “a difference ...

Gregor Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments with pea plants, long before the discovery of DNA and genes. Mendel was an Augustinian monk at St Thomas’s Abbey ...

A gene is a fundamental unit of heredity, consisting of a specific sequence of DNA that encodes the instructions for making a particular protein or set of proteins. Genes are passed down from parents ...