born Aug. 8, 1861, Whitby, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Feb. 8, 1926, London
British biologist.
In 1900, while studying inheritance of traits, he was drawn to the research of Gregor Mendel , which explained perfectly the results of his own plant experiments. He was the first to translate Mendel's major work into English. With Reginald Crundall Punnett , he published the results of a series of breeding experiments that not only extended Mendel's principles to animals but also showed that, contrary to Mendel, certain features were consistently inherited together, a phenomenon that came to be termed linkage (see linkage group ). In 1908 he became Britain's first professor of genetics, and in 1909 he introduced the term genetics . He opposed Thomas Hunt Morgan 's theory of chromosome s. Gregory Bateson was his son. See also Carl Erich Correns ; Hugo de Vries ; Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg .
William Bateson, drawing by Sir William Rothenstein, 1917; in the National Portrait Gallery, London
By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London