Coined 1909 by Wilhelm Johannsen, shortened from German 'Pangen,' from Greek 'genos' (birth) — from PIE *ǵenh₁- (to beget).
A unit of heredity that is transferred from a parent to offspring and determines some characteristic of the offspring.
Coined by Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909, extracted from Hugo de Vries's earlier term pangene (1889), which derived from Greek pan- (πᾶν, all) + genos (γένος, birth, race, kind, offspring), from PIE *ǵenh₁- (to beget, to give birth, to produce). Johannsen deliberately shortened pangene to Gen (German) to strip away the theoretical baggage of Darwin's pangenesis hypothesis, which incorrectly proposed that cells shed tiny particles (gemmules) that collected in the reproductive organs. The PIE root *ǵenh₁- is one of the most prolific in the family, producing Latin genus, genius, generate, gentle, and ingenious; Greek génesis, genealogy, and goné (seed); Sanskrit
Wilhelm Johannsen explicitly chose the short word 'gene' because he wanted a term free from any particular theory of heredity. He wrote that it was 'completely free from any hypothesis' — ironic, given that the word's Greek root *ǵenh₁- has been generating theoretical terms for millennia.
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