Bateson first used the word "Genetics" in applying for a newly created university position. (The terms gene and genotype were contributed in 1909 by German scientist Wilhelm Johannsen). In the application letter to Adam Sedgwick, Bateson suggested a name for the area of study that would be directed by this new position. He stated: "Such a word is badly wanted, and if it were desirable to coin one, 'Genetics' might do." (See handwritten note around the word 'Genetics' circled in red). Bateson failed to secure the position (anybody ever said that pioneering was easy?) - but he was hired elsewhere.

Key figure in the radical mutationist backlash against Darwinism beginning in the 1890's. Bateson was one of the first to accept the Mendelian laws that were rediscovered and reinterpreted in 1900. He popularized Mendelian genetics in Britain, discovered linkage, and introduced the term "genetics" itself in 1909. Bateson's beliefs in saltational evolution were influenced by his contacts with Galton England and Brooks in America.

Key publications:

Materials for the Study of Variation (1894)
Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence (1902)
Problems of Genetics (1913)

William Bateson was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, England, 1861, died in Merton, Surrey, England, February 8, 1926.

After graduating from Cambridge University, Bateson did research in the United States on the wormlike marine animal Balanoglossus, then classified as an echinoderm. Bateson recognized that the animal had a notochord, correctly identified it as a chordate, and hypothesized that chordates may have evolved from echinoderms (today a widely accepted theory). Following his return to Cambridge in 1885, Bateson theorized that variations within a species are not related to environmental conditions. The discovery of Mendel's work in 1900 supported Bateson's theory. Bateson also showed that, unlike the characteristics studied by Mendel, some characteristics are governed by more than one gene. He coined the name "genetics" for the new science of heredity.

British biologist who was one of the founders of the science of genetics. He experimentally proved Gregor Mendel's theories on heredity and published the first English translation of Mendel's work in 1900.

Bateson was born in Whitby, educated at Rugby School and St. John's College Cambridge. He popularised the work of Gregor Mendel in the English-speaking world. Bateson became involved in a bitter dispute with the biometricians led by his former teacher Walter Frank Raphael Weldon and by Karl Pearson. The biometricians doubted the generality of Mendel's account of heredity and also believed that evolution proceeded continuously rather than by jumps. These differences were resolved with the modern evolutionary synthesis. See Provine.

Bateson was the first to name research on heredity with "genetics" from the Greek word "genetikos" (the produced) in 1906, three years before Wilhelm Johannsen used the word "gene" for the units of hereditary information. Thus the phenomenon of phenotype was investigated earlier than genes were discovered.

Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

William Bateson demonstrates that some characteristics are not independently inherited (that is, some characteristics are always inherited together), a finding that will be confirmed and explained by Thomas Hunt Morgan. See also 1865 Biology; 1910 Biology. (See biography.)