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Abstract

Last year marked the 100th year since the beginning of the research career of the brilliant geneticist and radiobiologist, Nikolay Timofeeff-Ressovsky. In 1934, Timofeeff-Ressovsky published an article in which he not only used the term “genetic engineering” for the first time, but also laid the physical foundation for its future development. It is important to highlight the groundbreaking achievement of Timofeeff-Ressovsky in 1935, as he was the first to estimate the physical size of a gene to be 1 μm. This measurement is equivalent to ∼1,000,000 base pairs of DNA, which was an unimaginable prediction in the pregenomic era. In this communication, we uncover the exciting story of Timofeeff-Ressovsky's physical approach to the foundation of genetic engineering.

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The Physical View of the Origin of Genetic Engineering

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