William Bateson
1861-1926
English Biologist
William Bateson was one of the scientists who, at the turn of the twentieth century, expanded the views of evolution and helped to describe the force of heredity and variation. He promoted the ideas contained in the newly rediscovered paper by Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) about inheritance of characters, and applied those ideas to Darwinian evolution. Bateson also coined the term "genetics," and conducted a wide range of experiments that broadened understanding in this area.
Bateson was born on August 8, 1861, in Whitby, Yorkshire, England. Throughout hischildhood, he maintained a limited interest in the natural world, considerably different from his father, who was a classics scholar at St. John's College in Cambridge. The young Bateson enrolled at St. John's in 1879. His childhood interests came to the forefront three years later when he won an honors examination in the natural sciences. While studying for that test, he became intrigued by the acorn worm, an elongate marine animal, and spent the next two summers in America studying whether it was actually a primitive chordate. (Current classification places it under the phylum Hemichordata, which has some of the characteristics of chordates but lacks a notochord.) After publishing his research, he earned a position as a fellow at St. John's College in 1885.
Bateson's investigations of the acorn worm led him to challenge the then-current biological thought, going so far as to dispute the accepted phylogeny of organisms, which he felt lacked sufficient scientific evidence to back it up. These controversial views stalled his career a bit, but by 1908, he had accepted the position of professor of biology at Cambridge University. In 1910 he became director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution at Merton Park in Surrey, England, a position he held for the rest of his life. In 1912, he also took a two-year appointment as Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution.
Through the years, Bateson continued to investigate variation, or the differences between animals, and the role of heredity in that variation. When Mendel's 1866 paper on inheritance in peas resurfaced in 1900, Bateson began to consider whether the inheritance characters Mendel described were at work in animal variation. He felt that these characters, or genes, could explain his view that evolution is discontinuous, or proceeds by sudden jumps, rather than gradual and minute changes as Darwinian evolution proposed. He also felt that Mendel's paper helped explain how some characters—those traits associated with recessive genes—might disappear for a generation or two, then reappear. In all, he believed Mendel's paper, which Bateson ultimately translated into English, filled what he perceived as gaps in the current ideas about evolution.
He continued his studies by conducting a series of experiments in which he discovered that some genes were inherited together. That phenomenon is now known as "linkage," and occurs when certain genes are linearly arranged on the same chromosome. During his work on variation and heredity, Bateson in 1909 introduced the term "genetics" for this dynamic and growing research area. The word quickly caught on.
He continued his studies of variation, frequently challenging widely accepted concepts along the way. He was honored with the Darwin Medal in 1904, and the Royal Medal in 1920. Bateson died on February 8, 1926.
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