Hans Winkler
Hans Karl Albert Winkler (23 April 1877 – 22 November 1945) was a German botanist. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, and a director of that university's Institute of Botany. Winkler coined the term 'heteroploidy' in 1916. He is remembered for coining the term 'genome' in 1920, by making a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. He wrote: 
This may be translated as: "I propose the expression "Genom" for the haploid chromosome set, which, together with the pertinent protoplasm, specifies the material foundations of the species ..."
Genome (book)
The book devotes one chapter to each pair of human chromosomes. Since one (unnumbered) chapter is required to discuss the sex chromosomes, the final chapter is number 22. Ridley was inspired to adopt this model by Primo Levi's book "The Periodic Table".The first chapter begins with a quote from Alexander Pope on the cycle of life. The very broad topic "Life" is also the topic of the chapter. Ridley discusses the history of the gene briefly, including our "last universal common ancestor".Ridley discusses the history of human kind as a genetically distinct species. He compares the human genome to chimpanzees, and ancestral primates. He also points out that until the 19th Century, most scholars believed that there were 24 sets of genes, not 23 as known today.This chapter discusses the interplay between early geneticists, including Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Hermann Joseph Muller and Francis Crick.Huntington's Corea is used to discuss the use of a particular sequence on Chromosome Four to cause traumatic health consequences. The search for the chromosomal source of this and other related diseases is discussed through the work of Nancy Wexler, someone who may have inherited the gene but who turns to scientific work to study it in others.The concepts of pleiotropy and genetic pluralism are introduced. A brief history of the study of asthma is used as the case study. Asthma is related to as many as fifteen different genes, many on chromosome five. Specifically, this includes a change from adenosine (A) to guanine (G) at position 46 on the ADRB2 gene. The ADRB2 gene is related to the control of bronchodilation and bronchoconstriction.Robert Plomin's announcement in 1997 of the discovery of "a gene for intelligence" on chromosome 6 is the foundation for this chapter's lengthier discussion of the genetic basis for intelligence. This included gene IGFR on the long arm of chromosome 6, which may also be related to liver cancer. Ridley continues his premise in this chapter that the use of simple genetic markers is inadequate to describe the complete function of the genome, or the causation of disease.This chapter discusses whether the form and existence of language has a genetic component. In particular, "specific language impairment" is possibly related to a gene on chromosome 7. Ridley discusses the scientific disagreement between Canadian linguist Myrna Gopnik and others on whether this disorder relates to difficulties with grammar formulation, or is a broader intellectual disorder.