Michael Ragland  quoted:

> "The gene for" does, of course, have a real meaning: the enzyme or
> control element that the unmutated gene, the wild- type allele,
> specifies. But often, as yet, we do not know what the normal gene is
> for. ... Pleiotropy. Polygeny. Perhaps these terms will not easily
> become common parlance; but the critical point never to omit is that
> genes act in concert with one another - collectively with the
> environment.

....but that's stating the obvious.  /Everyone/ knows that.

Biologists are supposed to add that qualification /every/ time they talk 
about the function of a gene?  That program is never going to get off the 
ground.

You have to assume a minimal level of competence in your audience to
be able to communicate at all - and the possibilty of interactions
between genes, other genes and the environment is surely rather common 
knowledge.

> Sydney Brenner, writing in the special Drosophila genome issue of
> Science made a similar observation "Old geneticists knew what they were
> talking about when they used the term "gene", but it seems to have
> become corrupted by modern genomics to mean any piece of expressed
> sequence, just as the term algorithm has become corrupted in much the
> same way to mean any piece of a computer program. [...]

A deliberate change.

> I suggest that we now use the term "genetic locus" to mean
the stretch 
> of DNA that is characterized either by mapped mutations as in the old 
> genetics or by finding a complete open reading frame as in the new 
> genomics.

Very catchy.
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