Milo Keynes, A W F Edwards and Robert Peel (eds), A century of Mendelism in human genetics: proceedings of a symposium organised by the Galton Institute and held at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, 2001, Boca Raton and London, CRC Press, 2004, pp. ix, 161, US$84.95 (hardback 0-415-32960-4).

Abstract

This book has an attractive title for anyone interested in historical aspects of human genetics, but when I saw from the subtitle that it represented the proceedings of a symposium held three years earlier, I began to have doubts, which close reading unfortunately confirmed. Most of the chapters in the later section (genetics after 1950) are short and may have been good lectures, but are not historical in approach or content, and add little new or relevant for a published volume. The earlier part though, is more consistently interesting. The chapters by Michael Bulmer on Galton's law of ancestral inheritance and that on the biometricians and Mendelians by Eileen Magnello contain material that will certainly interest historians and are fully referenced. Newton Morton's chapter on linkage and allelic association, placed in the post-1950 section, gives a valuable account from the perspective of someone involved throughout the past fifty years, and dovetails well with the chapter by Anthony Edwards, entitled ‘Mendelism and man’, covering the period up to the Second World War. While informally structured, this chapter contains a number of valuable insights on the beginnings of genetic linkage studies in man, which were new to me at least, and which could form the starting point for further study. The same is true for the comments on the Medical Research Council Human Genetics committee, another unexplored area historically. In summary, this book as a whole is patchy in quality and content, by comparison with the standards of previous volumes issued by the Galton Institute. The several valuable chapters might have been better placed and more accessible as review papers in journals since they will not be read by many who would find them interesting. The conference organizers should perhaps have been content to have held a useful conference, or to have planned a more coherent book from the outset.