Bateson gives the science of heredity a name: 'genetics'

1905–1906 Life and health institution

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The word 'genetics' and the definition of the subject as 'the physiology of descent', that is heredity and variation together. By the same time the new science had acquired its own terms: allelomorph, homozygote, heterozygote.

The word and the definition were proposed in 1905 in a letter by the Englishman William Bateson, printed in June 1906 and put to the horticulturists' conference in July of that year. By the traditional account he had already given the first English account of Mendel on 8 May 1900 before the Royal Horticultural Society (Olby in 1987 reassesses that dating); within six years he turned Mendelian crossing into a science of its own, with the defensive book of 1902. Recognition for the new discipline came not from academic botany and zoology but from horticulturists and breeders: the Royal Horticultural Society had held conferences on hybridisation since 1899.

Bateson meanwhile scorned both the biometricians' statistics and chromosome cytology, so that 'his' genetics was a science of crosses and ratios, not of a material carrier.

Why this date

The axis year is the first recorded use: Bateson's letter to the Cambridge zoologist Adam Sedgwick in 1905 (Olby 1997). In print the word appeared on 14 June 1906 in Bateson's review of the first volume of Lotsy's 'Vorlesungen über Deszendenztheorien' in Nature 74, 146-147, under the heading 'A text-book of genetics' (Edwards 2013), and it was proposed publicly on 31 July 1906 in the presidential address to the Third International Conference on Hybridisation and Plant Breeding in London; when the proceedings were published the Royal Horticultural Society's secretary W. Wilks renamed the conference a conference on genetics retrospectively (Olby 1997, Edwards 2013). The definition from the 1906 address is taken from Olby, citing the Report of the Third International Conference on Genetics, pp. 90-97, published in 1907. Bateson's books 'Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence' (1902) and 'Mendel's Principles of Heredity' (1909) enter the node as context but do not fix its date. Wikidata is left empty: the name of the discipline has no entity of its own, and 'genetics' in general (Q7162) is too broad; the candidates under the work rule, Q51503768 (the Defence, 1902) and Q51380697 (the 1909 book, BHL edition item), do not match the node's date.

What it grew from

• 'Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden': segregation of characters and numerical ratios

  influenced · Confidence: high

  Bateson read Mendel's paper in 1900, at once accepted the hypothesis of germinal segregation, and found in it support for his long-held idea of discontinuous variation; genetics as the science he named grew out of the reading of this very paper, which he also translated into English.

  Dispute: Olby (1987) questions the family legend of reading the paper on the train on 8 May 1900 and examines whether Bateson learnt of Mendel earlier through de Vries's Berichte paper; either way his source was the 1866 paper, not experiments of his own.

  Link sources

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    When Bateson read Mendel's paper in 1900 he gladly accepted the hypothesis of germinal segregation expressed therein. The determinants for differing character pairs separated and passed into different germ cells.

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    Mendel thus supplied Bateson with further ammunition for his near decade-long campaign to convince biologists that it is the non-blending variations that are significant for evolution.

  • Robert Olby, William Bateson's Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment, BJHS 20 (4), 399-420 (1987) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    He had already prepared this paper, but in the train on his way to town to deliver it, he read Mendel's actual paper on peas for the first time. As a lecturer he was always cautious, suggesting rather than affirming his own convictions. So ready was he however for the simple Mendelian law that he at once incorporated it into his lecture.

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    Explaining to the uninitiated what the Mendelian hybridists were doing had proved difficult and cumbrous, he remarked, yet the new science born of Mendel's work was still nameless. Therefore he offered the conference the term 'Genetics'

  "Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.

• Three papers of 1900: de Vries, Correns and Tschermak bring back Mendel's laws

  prerequisite for · Confidence: high

  It was the publications of 1900 that brought Mendel to Bateson and gave him the independent evidence he was seeking: in that same year 1900 he was expounding Mendel before the Royal Horticultural Society (the traditional date of 8 May is questioned by Olby), and the name 'genetics' of 1905-1906 was given to the science 'born of Mendel's work' after its rediscovery.

  Dispute: Davis (PLoS Genetics 2022) is not a historian by profession and her text contains factual slips (de Vries is called Austrian, Tschermak's name is misspelt), so her quotation is taken as support for Olby rather than as an independent basis. As to through whom exactly Bateson learnt of Mendel, de Vries or Correns, Olby (1987) argues against Beatrice Bateson's family version.

  Link sources

  • Robert Olby, William Bateson's Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment, BJHS 20 (4), 399-420 (extract) (1987) Verified 20 Sep 2026, quotation assembled from fragments

    The recognition of Gregor Mendel's achievement in his study of hybridization was signalled by the 'rediscovery' papers of Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich Tschermak. ... It has long been accepted that the first account of Mendel's work in English was given by the Cambridge zoologist, William Bateson, to an audience of Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society in London on 8 May, 1900.

  • Lea K. Davis, Weldon, Bateson, and the origins of genetics: Reflections on the unraveling and rebuilding of a scientific community, PLoS Genetics 18 (10), e1010379 (2022) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    The year 1900 marked the "rediscovery" of Mendel's laws by De Vries, Correns, and Tschemark, and gave Bateson the independent evidence that he was seeking (Box 3). He became a huge supporter of the "mendelian" theory

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    The name itself was first publicized in 1906, twenty-two years after Mendel's death. The occasion was the third international conference on plant hybridization, the first to carry the name genetics in an alternative title. The speaker was William Bateson, and his theme was the need to establish this new discipline.

  "Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong. "Assembled from fragments" means the words do not stand together on the page: we found each fragment separately and joined them with an ellipsis.

• The biometric-Mendelian debate: continuous or discontinuous heredity

  influenced · Confidence: medium

  The break with the biometricians determined what kind of discipline Bateson made: a science of crosses and combinatorial ratios, scornful of population statistics; in Davis's words the division 'had profoundly shaped the new field of genetics'.

  Dispute: Confidence is medium: historians state that the dispute shaped early genetics, but there is no direct sentence that 'the word genetics was coined against the biometricians'; Olby (1997) sees in Bateson's 1906 definition above all a separation from descriptive Darwinian zoology and from embryology and cytology, not from biometry.

  Link sources

  • Lea K. Davis, Weldon, Bateson, and the origins of genetics, PLoS Genetics 18 (10), e1010379 (2022) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    By this time, the division between the Biometricians and the Mendelians was older than Fisher himself and had profoundly shaped the new field of genetics and an entire generation of zoologists.

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    True, Bateson was a poor mathematician, and he was scornful of the statistical theories of the biometric school, but as we have seen in the previous section, once he had read Mendel, he sought solutions to all his breeding data in the manipulation of combinatorial formulae.

  • Robert Olby, The Dimensions of Scientific Controversy: The Biometric-Mendelian Debate, BJHS 22 (3), 299-320 (1989)

    Bateson, W., Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Cambridge, 1909. Bateson gave his readers the impression that biometric methods had been shown to be inappropriate to studies of heredity (pp. 6–7).

  "Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.

What grew out of it

• Johannsen: pure lines, genotype and phenotype

  influenced · Confidence: medium

  Johannsen proposed the words 'gene', 'genotype' and 'phenotype' expressly 'to be used in the science of genetics' named by Bateson, and as a replacement for Bateson's own terms 'unit factor' and 'allelomorph'; Olby calls the two men the architects of the new science.

  Dispute: The link is largely terminological and polemical: Roll-Hansen stresses that Bateson received Johannsen coolly at their meeting in 1904, and that 'gene' was introduced not as a development of Bateson's 'allelomorph' but as a word free of its morphological associations. Hence medium confidence.

  Link sources

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    Therefore I have proposed the words "gene" and "genotype" and some further terms, as "phenotype" and "biotype" to be used in the science of genetics. The "gene" is nothing but a very applicable little word, easily combined with others, and hence it may be useful as an expression for the "unit factors", "elements" or "allelomorphs" in the gametes, demonstrated by modern Mendelian researches.

  • Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    Thus did Bateson and Johannsen as the architects of the new science of genetics formulate their subject. They sought to distance it from embryology and cytology, and to relate it strictly to the genealogical data of Mendelian experimentation.

  • Nils Roll-Hansen, The holist tradition in twentieth century genetics, Journal of Physiology 592 (11), 2431-2438 (2014) Verified 20 Sep 2026

    His target was the various concepts of hereditary units, whether of particulate nature as in Darwin or Weismann or 'unit characters' without a particulate basis as Bateson's 'allelomorphs'.

  "Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.

Node sources

• Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  The term "genetics' was first used by Bateson in 1905 in a letter to the Cambridge zoologist, Adam Sedgwick, and again in 1906, in a public setting. He was delivering the inaugural address at the the third international conference on hybridization for which event he was the president.

• Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  . . . sufficiently indicates that our labours are devoted to the elucidation of the phenomena of heredity and variation: in other words, to the physiology of descent, with implied bearing on the theoretical problems of the evolutionist and systematist, and applications to the practical problems of breeders, whether of animals or plants. (Bateson, 1906, p.91)

• Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  The result of Bateson's action in coining the term 'Genetics' was that the Society's secretary, the Rev. W. Wilks, substituted it for the original title - International Conference on Hybridisation and Plant Breeding - when he edited the proceedings for publication.

• Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  Thus, notwithstanding the growing interest in the proposals and doctrines of the eugenicists at this time, it was this powerful and prestigious society that gave both national and international recognition to genetics.

• A. W. F. Edwards, Robert Heath Lock and His Textbook of Genetics, 1906, Genetics 194 (3), 529-537 (2013) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  Bateson reviewed Lotsy's first volume in Nature of June 14, 1906 under the heading A TEXTBOOK OF GENETICS, this being the first time his word "genetics" appeared in print

• A. W. F. Edwards, Robert Heath Lock and His Textbook of Genetics, 1906, Genetics 194 (3), 529-537 (2013) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  (On July 31 Bateson also proposed "genetics" in his presidential address to the Third International Congress on Hybridization and Plant Breeding 1906, with such success that when the Report was published, the title of the congress was changed to "Genetics" retrospectively.)

• Robert Olby, William Bateson's Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment, BJHS 20 (4), 399-420 (extract) (1987) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  It has long been accepted that the first account of Mendel's work in English was given by the Cambridge zoologist, William Bateson, to an audience of Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society in London on 8 May, 1900.

• Robert C. Olby, Mendel, Mendelism and Genetics, MendelWeb (1997) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  True, Bateson was a poor mathematician, and he was scornful of the statistical theories of the biometric school, but as we have seen in the previous section, once he had read Mendel, he sought solutions to all his breeding data in the manipulation of combinatorial formulae.

• Robert Olby, William Bateson's Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment, BJHS 20 (4), 399-420 (1987) Verified 20 Sep 2026

  It has long been accepted that the first account of Mendel's work in English was given by the Cambridge zoologist, William Bateson, to an audience of Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society in London on 8 May, 1900. This is based on two sources: the paper 'Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation', published in the Society's journal later that year and stated as 'Read 8 May, 1900', and Beatrice Bateson's account of the event over a quarter of a century later.

"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.

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