Bateson & Darlington Archives

On 7th June I shall be presenting a talk titled ‘Giants of Genetics History: William Bateson and Cyril Darlington in the JIC Archives’, here at the John Innes Centre.  It will be at 2pm – the venue is Conference Centre, Room G34/35.  The talk will be accompanied by exhibited documents from the Bateson and Darlington [...]

On 1st May I presented a talk about my project at the Wellcome Library, London, with visual material (on Powerpoint) from the Bateson and Darlington archives.  Staff from various departments attended and, I believe, a few external people.  The talk served as a useful means of giving direct feedback to the organisation which funds the project (under [...]

Darlington’s ‘The Facts of Life’, published in 1953, was the first of his books to explore, in depth, mankind and society.  He trawled through history and philosophy, presenting his genetic theories of human variation in an eloquent and forceful style.  But his claims for the differences between race and class to be almost entirely the result of genetic factors soon embroiled [...]

Featured here are some pages from one of Darlington’s notebooks.  It was compiled during the period 1931-1933 which saw the culmination of his early career at John Innes.  His work on Oenothera in the late 1920s opened the door to the possibility of a new theory of chromosome behaviour.  Early in 1931 he began work on his [...]

  Idiosyncratic, abrasive, brilliant and aloof, Cyril Darlington possessed an independence of character that tended to court controversy.  He was appointed Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1939, only sixteen years after arriving as a volunteer.  Establishing himself as a cytologist, he published a ground-breaking work in 1932, Recent Advances in Cytology.  This [...]

Further material relating to Bateson’s interests in human genetics are found in the archive (see the post on 31 October 2012 for the disease alkaptonuria).  There are many letters to him from the opthalmologist Edward Nettleship on various eye diseases, especially cataract and colour blindness.  In addition to these are letters from the economist and mathematician, John Maynard Keynes, [...]

Bateson held strong views about education and found many faults with the British private school system of which he was a product.  In an address to the Salt Schools (at Saltaire, Shipley, Yorkshire) in 1915 he expressed his faith in ‘natural knowledge’.  He defined this as ‘something wider and more inclusive than is commonly denoted by the word [...]

The career of a leading geneticist of this era almost inevitably came into contact with the thorny and complex question of eugenics.  The idea of the possible application of genetic principles as a means of ‘improving’ the human race began to be more widely debated during the early 20th century.  Bateson always approached eugenics with caution.  In his 1909 book ‘Mendel’s Principles [...]

  Six letters from Sir Archibald Garrod to Bateson survive in the archive.  They principally relate to the rare disease, alkaptonuria, from studies of which Garrod made a major breakthrough in the understanding of inherited disorders of metabolism.  The earliest letter is dated January 1902. View the whole letter. From the first page we can see that [...]

Bateson’s plant-breeding work for improvements in agriculture explored many crops and scientific problems.  The problem of ‘bolting’ (flowers being produced at the wrong time) is one example.  During a visit to Holland in 1923 Bateson observed sugar beet crops containing 30-40% of bolters – a statistic that he regarded as ‘scandalous’.  He was convinced that almost all the waste from bolting could be eliminated by simple [...]