William Bateson (1861-1926)

The professor and the pea: Lives and afterlives of William Bateson’s campaign for the utility of Mendelism

As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understand ing heredity, the English biolog ist William Bateson (1861–1926) did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening to but articulated a vision of the ideal relat...

Wilhelm Weinberg's early contribution to segregation analysis.

Wilhelm Weinberg (1862-1937) is a largely forgotten pioneer of human and medical genetics. His name is linked with that of the English mathematician G. H. Hardy in the Hardy-Weinberg law, pervasive in textbooks on population genetics since it expresses stability over generations of zygote frequencies AA, Aa, aa under random mating. One of Weinberg's signal contributions, in an article whose cen...

The Mayo brothers (William James Mayo 1861-1939, Charles Horace Mayo 1865-1939): pioneers of group surgical practice.

Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation

Mendel's work from 1865 was largely neglected, until 1900 when it was simultaneously rediscovered by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erik von Tschermak. When Mendel's work came to the attention of William Bateson (who himself had already been advocating controlled crosses as an approach to studying heredity), he was convinced that Mendel's work was of major importance: That we are in the prese...

Creating A More Beautiful World: A Century of Progress in the Breeding of Floral and Nursery Plants

In an intriguing article titled “Horticulture: the Font for the Baptism of Genetics” by Robert C. Olby (2000) suggests that the establishment of genetics as an experimental science should be credited to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). William Bateson was a member of this committee and he was the stimulus for the adoption of Mendelism as a science and for the ac...