BATESON, WILLIAM

(b. Aug. 8, 1861, Whitby, Yorkshire, Eng.-d. Feb. 8, 1926, London), biologist who founded and named the science of genetics and whose experiments provided evidence basic to the modern understanding of heredity. A dedicated Darwinist, he cited embryo studies to support his contention in 1885 that chordates evolved from primitive echinoderms, a view now widely accepted. In 1894 he published his conclusion (Materials for the Study of Variation) that evolution could not occur through a continuous variation of species, 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 1900, he discovered an article, "Experiments with Plant Hybrids," written by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, 34 years earlier. The paper, found in the same year by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, dealt with the appearance of certain features in successive generations of garden peas. Bateson noted that his breeding results were explained perfectly by Mendel's paper and that the monk had succinctly described the transmission of elements governing heritable traits in his plants. Bateson translated Mendel's paper into English and during the next 10 years became Mendel's champion in England, corroborating his principles experimentally. He published, with Reginald Punnett, the results of a series of breeding experiments (1905-08) that not only extended Mendel's principles to animals (poultry) but showed also that certain features were consistently inherited together, apparently counter to Mendel's findings. 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. Unfortunately, he misinterpreted his results, refusing to accept the interpretation of linkage advanced by the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. In fact, he opposed Morgan's entire chromosome theory, advocating his own vibratory theory of inheritance, founded on laws of force and motion, a concept that found little acceptance among other scientists. Bateson became, at the University of Cambridge, the first British professor of genetics (1908). He left this chair in 1910 to spend the rest of his life directing the John Innes Horticultural Institution, London, transforming it into a centre for genetic research. His books include Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1902) and Problems of Genetics (1913).