The Origin of the Term “Junk DNA”: A Historical Whodunnit (2013)

As textbooks would have it, the term “junk DNA” was coined in 1972 by Susumu Ohno as part of his work on the role of gene and genome duplication. In his 1972 commentary, Tim Hunt uses the term “junk DNA” to refer to “the large amount of nucleic acid that never finds its way out of the nucleus, which does not fit in with the old categories of genes and messages.” “The term ‘junk DNA’ became popular in the 1960s (e.g., Ehret and de Haller 1963).

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