The Methods and Scope of Genetics

The Methods and Scope of Genetics
William Bateson

William Bateson

The Methods and Scope of Genetics / An inaugural lecture delivered 23 October 1908

PREFATORY NOTE

The Professorship of Biology was founded in 1908 for a period of five years partly by the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, and partly by the University of Cambridge. The object of the endowment was the promotion of inquiries into the physiology of Heredity and Variation, a study now spoken of as Genetics.

It is now recognized that the progress of such inquiries will chiefly be accomplished by the application of experimental methods, especially those which Mendel's discovery has suggested. The purpose of this inaugural lecture is to describe the outlook over this field of research in a manner intelligible to students of other parts of knowledge.

    W. B.

28 October, 1908

THE METHODS AND SCOPE OF GENETICS

The opportunity of addressing fellow-students pursuing lines of inquiry other than his own falls seldom to a scientific man. One of these rare opportunities is offered by the constitution of the Professorship to which I have had the honour to be called. That Professorship, though bearing the comprehensive title "of Biology," is founded with the understanding that the holder shall apply himself to a particular class of physiological problems, the study of which is denoted by the term Genetics. The term is new; and though the problems are among the oldest which have vexed the human mind, the modes by which they may be successfully attacked are also of modern invention. There is therefore a certain fitness in the employment of this occasion for the deliverance of a discourse explaining something of the aims of Genetics and of the methods by which we trust they may be reached.

You will be aware that the claims put forward in the name of Genetics are high, but I trust to be able to show you that they are not high without reason. It is the ambition of every one who in youth devotes himself to the search for natural truth, that his work may be found somewhere in the main stream of progress. So long only as he keeps something of the limitless hope with which his voyage of discovery began, will his courage and his spirit last. The moment we most dread is one in which it may appear that, after all, our effort has been spent in exploring some petty tributary, or worse, a backwater of the great current. It is because Genetic research is still pushing forward in the central undifferentiated trunk of biological science that we confess no guilt of presumption in declaring boldly that whatever difficulty may be in store for those who cast in their lot with us, they need fear no disillusionment or misgiving that their labour has been wasted on a paltry quest.

In research, as in all business of exploration, the stirring times come when a fresh region is suddenly unlocked by the discovery of a new key. Then conquest is easy and there are prizes for all. We are happy in that during our own time not a few such territories have been revealed to the vision of mankind. I do not dare to suggest that in magnitude or splendour the field of Genetics may be compared with that now being disclosed to the physicist or the astronomer; for the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. But I will say that for once to the man of ordinary power who cannot venture into those heights beyond, Mendel's clue has shown the way into a realm of nature which for surprising novelty and adventure is hardly to be excelled.

It is no hyperbolical figure that I use when I speak of Mendelian discovery leading us into a new world, the very existence of which was unsuspected before.

The road thither is simple and easy to follow. We start from a common fact, familiar to everyone, that all the ordinary animals and plants began their individual life by the union of two cells, the one male, the other female. Those cells are known as germ-cells or gametes, that is to say, "marrying" cells.

Now obviously the diversity of form which is characteristic of the animal and plant world must be somehow represented in the gametes, since it is they which bring into each organism all that it contains. I am aware that there is interplay between the organism and the circumstances in which it grows up, and that opportunity given may bring out a potentiality which without that opportunity must have lain dormant. But while noting parenthetically that this question of opportunity has an importance, which some day it may be convenient to estimate, the one certain fact is that all the powers, physical and mental that a living creature possesses were contributed by one or by both of the two germ-cells which united in fertilisation to give it existence. The fact that two cells are concerned in the production of all the ordinary forms of life was discovered a long while ago, and has been part of the common stock of elementary knowledge of all educated persons for about half a century. The full consequences of this double nature seem nevertheless to have struck nobody before Mendel. Simple though the fact is, I have noticed that to many it is difficult to assimilate as a working idea. We are accustomed to think of a man, a butterfly, or an apple tree as each one thing. In order to understand the significance of Mendelism we must get thoroughly familiar with the fact that they are each two things, double throughout every part of their composition. There is perhaps no better exercise as a preparation for genetic research than to examine the people one meets in daily life and to try in a rough way to analyse them into the two assemblages of characters which are united in them. That we are assemblages or medleys of our parental characteristics is obvious. We all know that a man may have his father's hair, his mother's colour, his father's voice, his mother's insensibility to music, and so on, but that is not enough.

Such an analysis is true, inasmuch as the various characters are transmitted independently, but it misses the essential point. For in each of these respects the individual is double; and so to get a true picture of the composition of the individual we have to think how each of the two original gametes was provided in the matter of height, hair, colour, mathematical ability, nail-shape, and the other features that go to make the man we know. The contribution of each gamete in each respect has thus to be separately brought to account. If we could make a list of all the ingredients that go to form a man and could set out how he is constituted in respect of each of them, it would not suffice to give one column of values for these ingredients, but we must rule two columns, one for the ovum and one for the spermatozoon, which united in fertilisation to form that man, and in each column we must represent how that gamete was supplied in respect of each of the ingredients in our list. When the problem of heredity is thus represented we can hardly avoid discovering, by mere inspection, one of the chief conclusions to which genetic research has led. For it is obvious that the contributions of the male and female gametes may in respect of any of the ingredients be either the same, or different. In any case in which the contribution made by the two cells is the same, the resulting organism – in our example the man – is, as we call it, pure-bred for that ingredient, and in all respects in which the contribution from the two sides of the parentage is dissimilar the resulting organism is cross-bred.

To give an intelligible account of the next step in the analysis without having recourse to precise and technical language is not very easy.

We have got to the point of view from which we see the individual made up of a large number of distinct ingredients, contributed from two sources, and in respect of any of them he may have received two similar portions or two dissimilar portions. We shall not go far wrong if we extend and elaborate our illustration thus. Let us imagine the contents of a gamete as a fluid made by taking a drop from each of a definite number of bottles in a chest, containing tinctures of the several ingredients. There is one such chest from which the male gamete is to be made up, and a similar chest containing a corresponding set of bottles out of which the components of the female gamete are to be taken. But in either chest one or more of the bottles may be empty; then nothing goes in to represent that ingredient from that chest, and if corresponding bottles are empty in both chests, then the individual made on fertilisation by mixing the two collections of drops together does not contain the missing ingredient at all. It follows therefore that an individual may thus be "pure-bred," namely alike on both sides of his composition as regards each ingredient in one of two ways, either by having received the ingredient from the male chest and from the female, or in having received it from neither. Conversely in respect of any ingredient he may be "cross-bred," receiving the presence of it from one gamete and the absence of it from the other.

The second conception with which we have now to become thoroughly familiar is that of the individual as composed of what we call presences and absences of all the possible ingredients. It is the basis of all progress in genetic analysis. Let me give you two illustrations. A blue eye is due to the absence of a factor which forms pigment on the front of the iris. Two blue-eyed parents therefore, as Hurst has proved, do not have dark-eyed children. The dark eye is due to either a single or double dose of the factor missing from the blue eye. So dark-eyed persons may have families all dark-eyed, or families composed of a mixture of dark and light-eyed children in certain proportions which on the average are definite.

Two plants of Oenothera which I exhibit illustrate the same thing. One of them is the ordinary Lamarckiana. I bend its stem. It will not break, or only breaks with difficulty on account of the tough fibres it contains. The stem of the other, one of de Vries' famous mutations, snaps at once like short pastry, because it does not contain the factor for the formation of the fibres. Such plants may be sister-plants produced by the self-fertilisation of one parent, but they are distinct in their composition and properties – and this distinction turns on the presence or absence of elements which are treated as definite entities when the germ-cells are formed. When we speak of such qualities as the formation of pigment in an eye, or the development of fibres in a stem, as due to transmitted elements or factors, you will perhaps ask if we have formed any notion as to the actual nature of those factors. For my own part as regards that ulterior question I confess to a disposition to hold my fancy on a tight rein. It cannot be very long before we shall know what some of the factors are, and we may leave guessing till then. Meanwhile however there is no harm in admitting that several of them behave much as if they were ferments, and others as if they constructed the substances on which the ferments act. But we must not suppose for a moment that it is the ferment, or the objective substance, which is transmitted. The thing transmitted can only be the power or faculty to produce the ferment or the objective substance.