1910s Timeline - John Innes Centre

Students receive a regular
programme of lectures during
their two-year course; in 1932
these are on soils and manures
(Daniel Hall), Systematic Botany
(E J Collins), Plant Physiology (F
W Sansome), Plant Breeding (J
Philp), Fruit (M B Crane) and
General Horticulture (W J C
Lawrence and J Newell). The
lectures are supplemented by
demonstrations, and students
gain practical experience by
working in rotation in the
various ‘departments’ of the
gardens. However, the scheme
by which students spend three
months of their training each
year learning to grow
ornamental plants ‘in good
style’ is dropped and the
ornamental plants are sold. This
remains a very intensive course.
JIHI’s prestige as a training
establishment is reflected each
year in the healthy competition
for places.
The JIHI gardens continue to be
used for the practical
examination in Horticulture for
the B.Sc. (Hort.) of the
University of London.
1932 C D Darlington publishes
Recent advances in Cytology
and develops cytogenetics
Darlington’s book makes an
impact that is ‘immediate and
world wide’. At the fifth
International Genetics Congress
at Ithaca, New York (1932) the
leading cytologists John Belling,
Curt Stern, Harry Federley and
C. L. Huskins devote substantial
parts of their addresses to trying
to disprove Darlington’s
theories. Darlington ‘was given
just five minutes to defend his
views, and was shouted down
by a storm of critics’ (Harman,
2004, p. 84). Across the
cytological departments of the
United States Darlington’s book
is met with hostility.
Darlington’s scheme of
chromosome behaviour is
imperfect; he has to make a
priori predictions because
technical difficulties mean that
no preparations are available to
him to test the facts directly.
Leading critics, like Karl Sax at
Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum,
have many objections to
Darlington’s generalisations and
will not allow him the room to
speculate without meeting their
high standards of observational
truth. His book is regarded as
‘poison for students’. Gradually
the objections are retracted and
by the end of the thirties
Darlington’s scheme has
become scientific orthodoxy
(Harman, 2004, pp. 90-94, 102-
4). His innovative book
ultimately secures him a world
reputation as a scientist
‘converting the chaos of the cell
into the science of cytology’
(Lewis, 1982, p. 162), and his
ideas become for a time the
backbone of cytogenetics, with
many more geneticists adding
cytological methods to their
work. Darlington’s contribution
also means that the evolutionist
can begin to use cytogenetic
work. Darlington provides
powerful arguments in the last
chapter of his book, ‘The
evolution of genetic systems’,
for placing chromosomes at the
centre of evolutionary enquiry.
See:
A. Sturtevant and G. Beadle, An
introduction to genetics,
Philadelphia: W. B.
Saunders,1939.
D. Lewis, ‘Cyril Dean Darlington
1903-81’, Heredity, 48, 2 (1982):
161-7.
Harman, O. S., The man who
invented the chromosome: a life
of Cyril Darlington, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2004.
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