ABSTRACT
The medical discipline of diagnostic pathology is subject to significant changes, which mainly comprise two different developments. These are: a) molecular/biological/gene analysis or so-called information on genotype and related fields, and b) electronic information access, analysis, and extraction, or digitalization and quantitative analysis of morphology, or numerical analysis of the so-called phenotype. Both technologies will probably induce significant changes in the daily work of a diagnostic pathologist. According to our present understanding of function and role of human genes, the analysis of genotype characteristics offers an insight into the development, individual risk, and final outbreak of a disease, and consequently the chance to interfere with gene abnormalities and to potentially correct them. The distinction between genotype and phenotype is somewhat artificial, as all our technologies for identifying and measuring gene properties finally result in visual information, i.e., are a morphology problem. Analysis of genes is primarily not a quantitative measure. To the contrast, it results in terms of expression/nonexpression, or
normal/abnormal, and data of homologies seem only to be a crude tool to estimate distances between normal embedding of a gene and its potential abnormal nonfunction. Gene expressions are supposed to be associated with changes of morphology or function of a biological system. Usually only those can be detected which induce abnormal morphology patterns.
