Excerpt: In the 1860s, although nobody paid much attention at the time, a monk pottering around with pea plants established the basic rules of genetic inheritance. Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity say that humans (and most other organisms) inherit two sets of genes unchanged, one from each parent. In modern terms, this means that one's genetic inheritance comes from the DNA that forms these genes. But over time Mendel's rules have been broken, and exceptions to these laws have been discovered. Growing evidence suggests that genetic information comes from places other than inherited DNA.

Minoo Rassoulzadegan and colleagues working at Inserm, a health-research institute in Nice, in France, and the nearby University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis have found a gene in mice that rather spookily seems to express characteristics that are not encoded in the DNA it received from its parents. The gene is called Kit and mice with a mutant Kit gene have white patches on their tails and feet.

The Economist 379(8479): 78US