GENOME: Chromosome 3: History

Archibald Garrod was a medical saint. He took a risk and proposed a question: what is a gene? He went on to examine "chemical sports" After close examination, Garrod came up with a bold hypothesis of these "inborn errors of metabolism". He thought that a catalyst, must be an enzyme that was made of protein, in afflicted people, the gene produced a defective enzyme. His assumed that genes were there to produce chemical catalysts, one gene per catalyst. He thought that genes were "devices for making proteins". Inborn errors of metabolism, Garrod believed, "were due to the faiulre of a step in the metabolic sequence due to loss or malfunction of an enzyme." Along with the many other histories of the gene, Garrod's was particularly interesting because I felt that he truly was ahead of his time. I believe that these errors of metabolism are indeed because of a malfunction in the enzyme's part. Diseases like alkaptonuria, that aren't very dangerous, could have been solved.