Tongue Twisters

Can you roll up the edges of your tongue so that the tongue forms a sort of tube? If you can, you are a subject of interest to Researcher Alfred Henry Sturtevant of California Institute of Technology,* and to genetic science. If you can't, you are still pretty interesting.

Last week, in the dignified Proceedings of the august National Academy of Sciences, Researcher Sturtevant announced that he had examined 280 subjects, that his "positives" (tongue-rollers) outnumbered his negatives by about two to one.

A slightly higher percentage of women (67%) can do the trick than men (63%).

Reason for this interest in lingual acrobatics is that tongue-rolling ability appears to be an inherited character. In his family studies, Geneticist Sturtevant found that where both parents were positive, most children were positive, that where both parents were negative, most children were negative. (But the character does not breed true; that is, positive parents sometimes have negative children and vice versa.)

Geneticists know a great deal more about heredity in fruit flies and sweet peas than about heredity in man. They cannot conscript men & women for experimental breeding in laboratories. Thus limited, they grab eagerly at what observable oddments they can--collect evidence on hereditary tongue-twisting, eye color, extra fingers, webbed fingers, hollow or "cobbler's" chest, white forelock, etc.

Researchers try to find out whether such anomalies are passed on as Mendelian "dominants" or "recessives"; also, whether they are carried by a single gene (inheritance transmitter in the chromosomes of the germ cells) or by multiple genes.

Researcher Sturtevant thinks that it is quite possible that the knack of tongue-rolling is transmitted by a single dominant gene. But he adds cautiously, "with the fairly frequent occurrence of additional complications."

*Now at Harvard.

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