Presented by John Maddox
For two decades molecular biologists and geneticists have been working out the mechanisms of inheritance in bacteria in painstaking detail. Do the mechanisms they have found apnly to human genetics? Does molecular biology have any clinical pay-offs?
Professor David Weatherall , Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, the Radcliffe Infirmary. Oxford, describes how the detailed molecular structure of both normal and abnormal haemoglobin, the blood's oxygen carrier, has been determined. He also reveals how clinicians have been able to understand some of the commonest genetic disorders of the blood in terms of molecular mistakes. Editor MICHAEL BRIGHT