William Bateson, the rediscoverer of Mendel.

Abstract

In his paper1 on Mendelian randomization, Dr Davey-Smith once again gives credit to Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg for the rediscovery of Mendel's paper2 on plant hybridization (JRSM 2007; 100: 432–5). These late nineteenth century scientists were principally interested in hybrids; but referring to Mendel's paper in their different ways, each showed an incomplete understanding of his work. The principle Correns considered in 19003 to refer to hybridization was neither the law of segregation nor the law of independent assortment that we know today under Mendel's name. Despite the impression that all three had discovered Mendel independently, knowing that de Vries had started writing on his research, it was a fellow Dutch biologist who had sent him an offprint of Mendel’s paper. De Vries then referred to Mendel in his paper of 19004 – a reference that we cannot be sure Correns and von Tschermak had not seen in advance of their own papers, which were soon also to appear.5 William Bateson saw de Vries’s publication4 while completing a paper on ‘Problems of Heredity’ he had given earlier to the Royal Horticultural Society; he immediately searched out the copy of Mendel’s report in Cambridge University Library. Realizing its importance to the study of heredity, Bateson cited Mendel’s work in full in the printed text of his RHS paper6, which appeared in 1901. Archibald Garrod, who had first written on ‘an inborn error in metabolism’ in 1899,7 discussed Bateson’s paper with him, and – as the term ’genetics’ was only coined by Bateson in 1905 – in 1902 introduced Mendelism8 into what was to become medical genetics. By 1901, William Bateson had fully recognized the importance of the research Gregor Mendel had completed in 1865. Bateson brought Mendel’s concepts further to the notice of the scientific world in his innovative book9 in 1909, which included his own translation of Mendel’s paper from the original German and in its entirety. We contend that this recognition of Mendel in the scientific world by William Bateson, himself the discoverer of epistasis, homeotic mutations and genetic linkage – as well as the true significance of Mendel’s scientific findings – is more telling than any questions of priority relating to the publications of 1900.