19 Facts About William Bateson

William Bateson was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns.

William Bateson was educated at Rugby School and at St John's College, where he graduated BA in 1883 with a first in natural sciences.

Between 1900 and 1910 William Bateson directed a rather informal "school" of genetics at Cambridge.

William Bateson's group consisted mostly of women associated with Newnham College, Cambridge, and included both his wife Beatrice, and her sister Florence Durham.

William Bateson conducted independent breeding experiments in rabbits and bantam fowl, as well.

In 1910 William Bateson became director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution and moved with his family to Merton Park in Surrey.

William Bateson was director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution until his sudden death in February 1926.

William Bateson first became engaged to her in 1889, but at the engagement party, was thought to have had too much wine, so his mother in law prevented her daughters' engagement.

William Bateson's work published before 1900 systematically studied the structural variation displayed by living organisms and the light this might shed on the mechanism of biological evolution, and was strongly influenced by both Charles Darwin's approach to the collection of comprehensive examples, and Francis Galton's quantitative methods.

William Bateson was concerned to show that biological variation exists both continuously, for some characters, and discontinuously for others, and coined the terms "meristic" and "substantive" for the two types.

In Materials William Bateson noted and named homeotic mutations, in which an expected body-part has been replaced by another.

But, unlike William Bateson, they were familiar with the extensive plant breeding experiments of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, and they did not cite William Bateson's work.

Critically, William Bateson gave a lecture to the Royal Horticultural Society in July 1899, which was attended by Hugo de Vries, in which he described his investigations into discontinuous variation, his experimental crosses, and the significance of such studies for the understanding of heredity.

William Bateson urged his colleagues to conduct large-scale, well-designed and statistically analysed experiments of the sort that, although he did not know it, Mendel had already conducted, and which would be "rediscovered" by de Vries and Correns just six months later.

William Bateson became famous as the outspoken Mendelian antagonist of Walter Raphael Weldon, his former teacher, and of Karl Pearson who led the biometric school of thinking.

William Bateson first suggested using the word "genetics" to describe the study of inheritance and the science of variation in a personal letter to Adam Sedgwick, dated 18 April 1905.

William Bateson first used the term "genetics" publicly at the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London in 1906.

William Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett and Edith Saunders, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

William Bateson coined the term "epistasis" to describe the genetic interaction of two independent loci.