Bateson, William

William Bateson (born August 8, 1861, Whitby, Yorkshire, England; died February 8, 1926, London), was a biologist who founded and named the science of genetics, and whose experimental and theoretical studies provided the basis of our modern understanding of heredity. A dedicated evolutionist, he cited embryo studies to support his contention in 1885 that chordates evolved from primitive echinoderms, a view now widely accepted. In 1894 he proposed in his major study - Materials for the Study of Variation - that species could not originate through continuous character variation (as proposed by Darwin), since distinct features often appeared or disappeared suddenly in plants and animals. Realizing that discontinuous variation could be understood only after something was known about the inheritance of traits, Bateson began work on the experimental breeding of plants and animals.

In 1866 an article had appeared describing experiments with plant hybrids carried out in Moravia (part of today’s Czech Republic) by a monk, Gregor Mendel. Sadly, the article was overlooked until discovered in 1900 by three continental botanists who had been carrying out similar studies (Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg). Bateson found that his own breeding results were explained perfectly by Mendel’s paper and that the monk had succinctly described the transmission of elements governing heritable traits (today’s genes).

With the assistance of Charles Druery, Bateson translated Mendel’s paper into English and introduced much of the terminology now familiar to geneticists. Then began a long, hard, struggle, to gain an acceptance of Mendelism against the fierce opposition of the mathematical biologists (“biometricians”). He published, with Rebecca Saunders and Reginald Punnett, the results of a series of breeding experiments that not only extended Mendel’s principles to animals (poultry), but also showed that certain features were consistently inherited together. This phenomenon, which came to be termed “linkage,” is now known to be the result of the occurrence of genes located in close proximity on the same chromosome. Bateson’s experiments also demonstrated a dependence of certain characters on two or more genes. He was initially sceptical of the above interpretation of linkage advanced by the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. However, his own incorrect linkage theory does explain aspects of certain inherited diseases (e.g. dwarfism).

Bateson was appointed Professor of Biology at the University of Cambridge in 1908. He left this chair in 1910 to spend the rest of his life directing the John Innes Horticultural Institution at Merton, South London (later moved to Norwich), where it was the major national centre for genetic research. His books include Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: a Defence (1902), Mendel’s Principles of Heredity 1909) and Problems of Genetics (1913).