Alice Elizabeth Gairdner (1873-1954): Cytologist

Alice joined the John Innes Horticultural Institution as a Student in 1919. Little is known of her background, but she had made Bateson’s acquaintance before she came. She knew several of the Cambridge Mendelians and had worked on leaf variegation in Tropaeolum at Cambridge in the early 1910s.

Gairdner was 45 when she applied to Bateson to work at JIHI. She was offered temporary employment as a technical assistant at £125 per year. Alice was quickly promoted and by 1924 earned £300; in 1929 she was given the title ‘Cytologist to JIHI’. She was the first to introduce cytological determinations into genetics. She began working with Cheiranthus, Antirrhinum, Campanula, and Linum usitatissimum. Collaborating first with Bateson and later with J B S Haldane, Alice worked on the inheritance of male sterility in Linum (flax) plants.

In Campanula she worked on tetraploidy, the young Cyril Darlington becoming her collaborator; from the late 1920s to the late 1930s they co-authored papers on the cytology of C. persicifolia.

In Cheiranthus (wallflowers) Alice studied the inheritance of doubleness, leaf and flower colour and height. The pigment problem proved complex and by 1933 Alice was collaborating with Haldane and Rose Scott-Moncrieff, which led to a joint publication in 1936.

In Antirrhinum she studied the inheritance of leaf colours, albinism and height; the work on yellow leaf-colour was published in collaboration with Haldane. She retired in 1937 and later shared a cottage at Kelshall in Hertfordshire with Dorothy Cayley.