Donald Wayne Bailey 1926–2010

Abstract

The development of entire fields of science has often beensignificantly modified and advanced by the breakthroughideas of individuals with exceptional vision and foresight.Those withthe capacitytotranslate theiroriginalinsightsintonovel workable tools provide a starting point for dozens andeven hundreds of scientists to exploit areas that had notpreviously been accessible to investigation. This eventuallyresults in speedy and broad advances that yield quantitativeand qualitative leaps in general knowledge.Donald Wayne Bailey was one of those men whoseforesight and originality of thought profoundly influencedand changed the study of mouse genetics for decades. Aftercompleting high school at the age of 17, Don enlisted in theUS Army and saw combat in France during World War II.Following his return to the United States in 1946, heentered the University of California in Berkeley, where heobtained a Ph.D. in genetics; he then spent 4.5 years as apostdoctoral fellow at The Jackson Laboratory. Afterholding subsequent positions at the University of Kansas,the National Institutes of Health, and the University ofCalifornia at San Francisco, he returned to The JacksonLaboratory as a staff scientist. He subsequently becamesenior staff scientist and served 2 years as the interimdirector.To properly evaluate Dr. Bailey’s contribution, we haveto refer back to the not-so-distant past before the genomicsequence was established, before single nucleotide poly-morphisms (SNP), and before microsatellite markers, whenthe search for linkage depended on a very limited numberof physiological mutations and on biochemical markers,each of which required a different method for genotyping.The mapping had been laborious and expensive even forsingle-gene mutations with very large effects, and thequantitative trait loci (QTL) had been entirely beyond thereach of any analysis.The development of the recombinant inbred (RI) strains(Bailey 1971) was the most significant breakthrough in thatsituation, and it is widely recognized as being Don Bailey’sfirst major contribution. The advantages of the RI strainsquickly became obvious: a permanent population with afixed pattern of segregated genes helped avoid the breedingof mapping crosses for each linkage experiment separately;the permanent and cumulative genotype data of the RI setsobviated the need for genotyping of linkage crosses in each