Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965.

  • American Philosophical Society
Date:
1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE EARLY MENDELIANS ALFRED H. STURTEVANT Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor Emeritus of Biology, California Institute of Technology {Read April 23, 1965, in the Symposium Commemorating the Publication of Gregor Mendel's Pioneer Experiments in Genetics) When Mendel's principles were rediscovered in 1900 their importance was widely recognized, and a whole series of workers began extending and elaborating them. One question that arises is : what was the background of these early workers that led them to appreciate the new approach ? One property was that they were mostly rather young—and they were considered by their older colleagues as what later came to be called Young Turks. Of the four men who published Men- delian papers in 1900, the oldest were de Vries (fifty-two) and Bateson (thirty-nine). Both of these had been interested in the experimental approach to the study of heredity for some years, and both had views that were unorthodox at the time and that led to their being thought of as mavericks. Of the other two authors who pub¬ lished in 1900, Correns was thirty-six, and Tschermak twenty-nine. Davenport, whose first Mendelian account appeared in 1901, was then thirty-five. Among those who worked actively along Mendelian lines there were several who published results in 1902. Among them may be mentioned Saunders (then thirty-seven), Cuénot (thirty-six). Hurst (thirty-two), Emerson (twenty-nine), Darbishire (twenty-three) and Yule (thirty-one). To this list should be added Garrod (forty-five), who drew Mendelian con¬ clusions from analysis of human pedigrees ; and Wilson (forty-six), Boveri (forty), and Sutton (twenty-five) who discussed Mendelism in re¬ lation to chromosomes. In 1903 we have Johannsen, then forty-six, Morgan (thirty-seven) and Castle (thirty-six). In 1904 came Lang (forty-eight), Doncaster (twenty-seven) and Lock (twenty-five), and in 1905 Biff en (thirty-one) and Punnett (thirty), in 1906 Toyama (thirty-nine), and in 1907 Shull (thirty-three), Baur (thirty-two), and East (twenty-eight). Of the twenty-two workers listed for the period * through 1905, only five were over forty—de Vries, Johannsen, Lang, Wilson, and Garrod. Wilson has recorded that his understanding of the re¬ lation between chromosomes and Mendelism came about as a result of a summer-long ex¬ posure to the ideas of young Sutton, and Garrod's Mendelian interpretation of his results was at¬ tributed by him to Bateson. Lang will be dis¬ cussed below. It is perhaps significant that the other two (de Vries and Johannsen) were both plant phys¬ iologists by training—a background that they shared with Correns and with other more recent geneticists such as Renner. It was evidently this background that gave them an understanding and appreciation of the quantitative, experimental, analytical approach that Mendel first introduced in the study of heredity. De Vries got part of his training in plant physiology with Julius Sachs ; another student of Sachs was Pfeffer, with whom both Johannsen and Correns studied. Both de Vries and Johannsen had already made important contributions to plant physiology—de Vries in connection with the quantitative study of the effects of solutions of various salts on the turgor and plasmolysis of plant cells, and Johannsen on dormancy. De Vries had also published (in 1889) a small book, called Intracellular Pangenesis, in which he developed an interesting theory of inheritance which was in some respects similar to that of Mendel. Both were in the main stream of the biology of their time; but in 1901 de Vries published the first volume of his Mutation Theory, in which he seriously questioned the efficacy of selection, and argued that it could produce nothing new. This was a direct challenge to the views of Darwin and of Weismann and most of the others of the period who were interested in such questions. And one of his first and most vocal followers in this respect was Johannsen, beginning in 1903. These two then—the oldest of the active early Mendelians—were recognized as iconoclasts even without their support of the Mendelian ideas. proceedings of the american philosophical society, vol. 109, n0. 4, august, 1965 199
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