Bateson, William (redirected from Bateson)

Bateson, William

William Bateson, drawing by Sir William Rothenstein, 1917; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

(credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(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 chromosomes. Gregory Bateson was his son. See also Carl Erich Correns; Hugo de Vries; Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg.

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Bateson, William 

Born Aug. 8, 1861, in Whitby; died Feb. 8, 1926, in Merton. English biologist; one of the founders of genetics, the name of which he proposed in 1907.

Bateson graduated from Cambridge University and was a professor there from 1908 to 1910. In 1910 he became director of the Institute of Horticulture in Merton. His first studies were devoted to the phylogeny of chordates (1884-86). Bateson energetically disputed the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the discontinuous nature of variation, and the doctrine of the purity of gametes. In 1905 he proposed the “presence-absence” theory in an attempt to explain the appearance of new characteristics in organisms by the suppression of inhibiting factors. Bateson founded the English Journal of Genetics in 1910.

WORKS

Materials for the Study of Variation. London, 1894.
Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, 3rd ed. Cambridge, 1913.
Problems of Genetics. London, 1913.