The gene's epitaph is preordained in its definitionlessness. It comes as a surprise that modern medicine, as of today, has no exact definition for heart attack, stroke, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cancer cell, cancer, normality, abnormality or infection. So anything, and everything, goes.
Herbert Spencer called genes as "physiological units," Charles Darwin called them "pan-genetic gemmules," August Weismann talked of "biophors" and "ids." None of the foregoing definitions[17] of the 19th century has been improved upon by the close-of-20th-century talking of "the basic unit of heredity, made of DNA." The reasoning is circular: wherever there is genesis, there ought to be a gene behind it, and vice versa. The reader of this article is requested to peruse all the latest western texts on genetics to look out for a satisfactory definition of gene, to realize the utter futility of such a search.
In 1963, David Smithers[18] of UK generalized that a cancer cell is NO structural entity, but only an organ of behaviour. That means that despite all the microscopic sophistication, a cancer cell as a structural entity is unlocatable for it was never there. From the time of Galen and Vesalius, students have been bored to death by the red and blue lines indicating the origins and insertions of muscles on bone. Now comes a realization[19] that those lines are pure figments of anatomic imagination for bone is attached to nothing, nothing is attached to bone.
Epitaph for Gene
Hic jacet (here lies) the GENE
Oversung, overwrung, overabused
We wish it were really there
Alas it never was nor will be.
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