CD Darlington FRS (1903-1981), biologist, geneticist and eugenicist

Cyril Dean Darlington Director of the John Innes, 1939-1953, was devoted to the study of chromosomes, the gene, evolution and man, and contributed immensely to our knowledge of chromosomes, the centromere and meiosis. He was the founder of the journal Heredity in 1947, and published prolifically stating that "research unpublished was research not done". He was a man of many ideas and hypotheses and secondly a man of observation and experiment.

Darlington began his career at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, as it was known then, in 1923, working unpaid, under it's first Director, William Bateson. When the second Director, Sir Daniel Hall resigned, Darlington was offered the post having progressed to full time paid employment, working with a stream of co-workers from many disciplines, establishing the Department at JIHI as a world wide centre of cytology. Working on chromosomes from Oenothera he proposed the concept of a structural hybrid and the theory of fertility of polyploids. He later used the chromosomes of the Dropsophila salivary gland to investigate mis-divisions of the centromere.

During his Directorship, he oversaw the move of the JIHI from it's initial location in Merton, London to Bayfordbury in Hertfordshire, exchanging a 19 acre site for a 32 acre site with more favourable soil and climatic conditions. He resigned as Director in 1953 when he was elected to a chair in Botany at Oxford and also became Keeper of the Botanic Garden. Introduced to the realities and to him the frustrations of academic life he began teaching but continued to write. When he died in 1981, he was in the middle of writing a book, which was to examine the notion of determinants in the cell, the individual and populations, especially when acted upon by natural selection and evolution. If finished, it would have rivalled his earlier masterpieces, "Recent advances in Cytology", "The Evolution of Genetic Systems" and "Genetics of Man".

The painting below produced by artist Leonie Woolhouse illustrates the scientific career of Cyril D Darlington. It is possible to 'zoom' in and around the image via your mouse or the controls at the bottom of the image.

Reproduced from an original painting by Leonie Woolhouse