Recent work on gene concepts has been influenced by recognition of the extent to which RNA transcripts from a given DNA sequence yield different products in different cellular environments. These transcripts are altered in many ways and yield many products based, somehow, on the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA. I focus on alternative splicing of RNA transcripts (which often yields distinct p...

The origin of genes is one of the most enigmatic events in the origin of life. It has been suggested that noncoding (nc) RNA was probably a precursor in the formation of the first polypeptide, and also at the origin of the first manifestation of life and genes. ncRNAs are also becoming central for understanding gene expression and silencing. Indeed, before the discovery of ncRNAs, proteins were...

Despite several decades of research, the epigenesis of behavioural and brain lateralization is still elusive, although its knowledge is important in understanding developmental plasticity, function and evolution of lateralization, and its relationship with developmental disorders. Over the last decades, it has become clear that behavioural lateralization is not restricted to humans, but a funda...

Proto-organisms probably were randomly aggregated nets of chemical reactions. The hypothesis that contemporary organisms are also randomly constructed molecular automata is examined by modeling the gene as a binary (on-off) device and studying the behavior of large, randomly constructed nets of these binary “genes”. The results suggest that, if each “gene” is directly affected by two or three o...

Dramatic gains in knowledge have been made in the fields of neuroscience, human development, and developmental psychopathology during the past quarter of a century. Despite the advances that have been achieved in each discipline separately, considerably less progress has occurred in understanding the relation between neurobiological and behavioral development in normal and atypical populations....

In the postgenomic era of cancer biology, it is becoming increasingly evident that epigenetic controls of gene expression play an important role in determining the phenotype of cancer cells, also indicating the possibility of restoring epigenetically a normal phenotype in cancer cells. Related to these mechanisms of control and their dynamic changes during carcinogenesis and tumor progression a...