The Battle over Human Chromosomes

The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

Sam Kean

Arts, Books, History

4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It seems like a simple question: how many chromosomes do human beings have? But getting an accurate count proved surprisingly hard for much of last century. In fact, virtually every textbook once cited an incorrect number, until in 1956, a fiery Indonesian scientist finally determined the true count—and had to battle his boss over who would receive credit for this legacy-making discovery.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Biologist Joe Hinn Chio stormed into his boss's office one day in 1956,
0:07.9	waving a copy of a paper they had recently written. It certainly was not the worst day of
0:12.8	Chio's life. He'd spent three years in a concentration camp being tortured during World War II.
0:18.8	It's hard to get worse than that.
0:22.8	But Chio was still furious.
0:25.7	The paper concerned human chromosomes.
0:29.9	Chio thrust the paper in his boss's face, shaking with rage.
0:34.1	Why are you first author and not me, he demanded?
0:41.0	His boss, Albert Levin, tried explaining, but Chio would not back down, and things escalated quickly.
0:42.3	Chio threatened that if Levin didn't make him first author, he would destroy their lab's research.
0:48.1	He would trash all of the cells they used, all the slides, everything.
0:52.8	Levin sat there stunned.
0:55.4	Was Chio serious?
0:57.5	He was.
0:58.7	Chia was tired of being pushed around.
1:01.2	And if he couldn't be first author on this paper,
1:03.8	he was absolutely willing to go nuclear.
1:06.5	Music From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Kean and the Disappearing Spoon, a topsy,
1:22.5	turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.
1:30.1	To understand what made Joe Chio so angry, we have to go back to the work of another
1:35.2	older biologists named Theophilus Painter. Painter lived and worked in Texas.
1:42.0	At the lab bench, he was known as a tinkerer.
	...

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