I feel by discarding years of works by Karl Wilhelm von Nageli and Edouard Van Beneden to credit a fictional character was as bad as what was done to female scientists. There was too much going on in this book and there was no necessity for it. All it did was made the entire book unrealistic. 
 "Chromosomes were first observed in plant cells by Swiss botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nageli in 1842, and independently in Ascaris worms by Belgian scientist Edouard Van Beneden (1846-1910). The use of basophilic aniline dyes was a fundamentally new technique for effectively staining the chromatin material in the nucleus. Their behavior in animal (salamander) cells was later described in detail by German anatomist Walther Flemming, the discoverer of mitosis, in 1882. The name was invented later by another German anatomist, Heinrich von Waldeyer." 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromoso...