by Noel Kingsbury
Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago Press
Published by The University of Chicago Press

From Chapter 6

BREAKTHROUGH – Gregor Mendel

1899, the very year before Mendel’s work was re-discovered, goes down as a historic year in its own right, for this was when London was the venue for ‘The First International Conference on Hybridization and Cross-breeding’. Organised by the RHS, it was an immensely British affair. The conference report makes clear that this was one of the grand events of the kind at which Victorian England excelled. Bands played, luncheons and dinners were eaten, speeches made, toasts proposed and drunk to. The report even tells readers what music the bands played and gives the menus. A particular feature was the display of hybrid plants – exhibiting plants is something the RHS has always done well, and still does. The plants shown were a tribute to the expertise of British breeders – and those foreign delegates who were able to bring plants or samples with them. There were a great many orchids – reflecting the obsessive interest wealthy gardeners had for these still novel and exotic plants. Rhododendrons featured strongly, along with roses and clematis. There were some surprises amongst the hybrids too: ferns, bromeliads - and nepenthes – a genus of tropical pitcher plant rarely grown today. Remarkably few fruit or vegetables made an appearance, possibly because the event was held in July. It being the RHS, plants were judged and awards given, the list of winners being dominated by the names of aristocratic and wealthy garden owners, men with large estates and teams of gardeners.

Clearly a good time was had by all; one unnamed foreign professor saying that the dinner on the second day reminded him of student days, and that he “did not know the English could unbend so far” another that “as long as I live I shall remember that dinner”. Toasts were proposed by Herbert Webber, Hugo de Vries, Henri de Vilmorin and Walter Swingle; the last honoured Fairchild and his pinks in the first few sentences of his toast. The three-day proceedings concluded at Waddon House, near Croydon on the outskirts of London, in a marquee in sweltering heat, before special trains to London returned the delegates to the capital, seen off by another military band.

In Britain, the key figure in the introduction of Mendel was biologist William Bateson (1861-1926). In 1900 he was on his way from Cambridge to London to deliver a lecture to the RHS, when he read about Mendel in a German journal; he promptly set about revising his notes in order to be able to incorporate the discovery into his lecture. That same year he published an article in the society’s journal entitled G. Mendel: Experiments in Plant Hybridization, which had the effect of launching interest in Mendel across the English-speaking world. He then caused considerable controversy by giving a lecture on Mendelian genetics at Oxford - from this point on, he began to be cut adrift from other, mostly older, biologists who did not believe him or Mendel.

In 1902 Bateson published a book A Defence of Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, and locked horns with two sceptics Walter F.R.Weldon (1860- 1906) and Karl Pearson (1857-1936) in the journal Biometrika. Biometricians were involved in precise statistical descriptions of populations and much complex mathematics, but their work was very largely descriptive and they had little understanding of experimental research – illustrated most clearly by the erroneous belief that there was no difference between sexual and asexual propagation in inheritance. Building on Darwin’s work on natural selection, they believed in a continuous spectrum of hereditary variation - that most variations are very slight. Misunderstanding Mendel’s work when it was first published, they assumed that because he discussed heredity in terms of discontinuous characters then there must be a conflict between Mendel and Darwin. This erroneous belief held up a synthesis of Darwin, Mendel and the biometricians for some fifteen years.

When Biometrika stopped publishing Bateson’s work he had to have it privately printed instead. Bateson and Weldon, who had been at St.John’s College, Cambridge together, then found a particular focus for their disagreements – the origin of the then popular ornamental daisy relative, the cineraria (now classified as Pericallis x hybrida), whose huge dense heads of daisy flowers adorned many an Edwardian conservatory. Weldon, drawing on Darwin, claimed that the cultivated varieties must be the result of accumulation of many small variations over many years, starting from a single original species. Bateson’s theory was that hybridization between several species had occurred, resulting in a much greater level of change. The disagreement between Bateson and Weldon gathered pace with letters to journals, an accusation by Bateson that Weldon had accused him of dishonesty and then a final falling out – never were they to be friends again.

Bateson set out to prove he and Mendel were right by designing a series of experiments, assisted by one of the group of younger people who were gathering around him and the exciting new theories - Miss E.R.Saunders. Saunders went on to become a noted authority on plant genetics herself, publishing work on stocks (Matthiola incana) in 1928. Several other young women worked with Bateson – at a time when women had only just gained the right to university education, were still fighting for the right to use university libraries, and were certainly not expected to engage in controversial research, especially if it concerned reproduction. One of the older scientists critical of Bateson once reduced a tea party hostess to tears when he publicaly upbraiding a woman guest for publicly discussing the crossbreeding of small animals.

Following in the footsteps of Mendel, Knight and others who had used members of the pea family, Bateson carried out extensive trials with sweet peas (Lathyrus odorata). These were initially grown in the family garden despite the appeals of Mrs Bateson who insisted that they needed all the space to grow vegetables to feed the family. When yet more land was needed, Bateson managed to get some space on the university farm. At harvest time, everyone, including Mrs. Bateson, joined in to pull down the peas and record their characteristics.

In August of 1904, Bateson presented his results to his colleagues at a lecture, based on work with poultry, sweet peas and stocks. It was one of those lectures, immensely gratifying to the lecturer, when the turnout was so good that all the windowsills were taken, and latecomers had to stand. Bateson won over many, but not all; Weldon continued to attack him and his colleagues, and Bateson was only free to conduct research on his own terms and be properly funded when in 1910 he took up the directorship of the John Innes Institution. From now on he would not just be proving the validity of Mendelism but would be actively engaged running an independent institution concerned with plant science.

excerpts from chapter 11 >>