When Mendel's work went public

Abstract

It's 100 years since Mendel's landmark work on geneticinheritance finally achieved a major public exposure: to Britain's society of seriousgardeners. Nigel Williams reports.Although Gregor Mendel published his revolutionary account of inheritance in 1865, his work remained almost unknown until the beginning of the last century. A pioneer in this turn-around was William Bateson, a Cambridge botanist, who had come across the paper and was impressed by the implications of its contents. Spurred by a meeting on plant hybridisation and breeding backed by Britain's Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in 1899, he then went further and presented Mendel's work in a lecture to a meeting of RHS fellows in 1900. This led to the publication of an English translation of Mendel's original paper in the society's journal in 1901 (see right).The work both shocked and amazed gardeners and the scientific establishment and inspired the RHS to back further work to look into Mendel's results. A new laboratory was planned at the society's garden at Wisley, in south-east England, which opened in 1907.But was Bateson's choice of first announcement of Mendel's workMendel's work in English to the RHS a coincidence? Simon Thornton-Wood, the present RHS head of science, advice and archives, thinks not. Practical gardeners “were the most likely of any group of natural scientists to appreciate the ideas of simple, particulate inheritance,” he says.Fig. 1Mendel revealed: Cambridge botanist William Bateson presents Mendel's research on the inheritance of plant characteristics to British gardeners a century ago. Those learning of his results were ‘shocked and amazed’ by his conclusions.View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint Slide