Non-Mendelian Genetics in Humans

When rediscovered at the turn of the century, Mendel's laws were found to be applicable to humans, but from the beginning they were fraught with problems. In this book, Harry Ostrer observes that some of these problems can be explained by incomplete ascertainment, typing errors, and modifying genes. He then goes on to systematically explore the evidence for a number of novel genetic processes that were not foreseen by Mendel and his intellectual heirs. He shows that these non-Mendelian processes-gonadal and somatic mosaicism, sex-linked inheritance, mitochondrial transmission, genomic imprinting, accelerated rates of mutation, and viral infection-resolve many of the exceptions to Mendelian inheritance.