Cyril Dean Darlington (1903-1981): Cytologist and geneticist. FRS 1941.

Darlington spent his boyhood in Chorley, Lancashire where his father was a schoolmaster, and after 1911 in Ealing, London. He attended Mercer’s School, Holborn 1911-17 and then won a scholarship to St Paul’s School, London 1917-20; he had no real interest in science at school. He went on to study at the South Eastern Agricultural College at Wye, preparing for a career in farming in Australia. Here he received a basic introduction to the sciences, graduating B.Sc. London (Agric.) in 1923.

He developed an interest in heredity after reading The physical basis of heredity (1921) by Morgan, Sturtevant and Bridges. A tutor at Wye encouraged him to apply to the John Innes Horticultural Institution, which he did in November 1923. Darlington joined the staff as a volunteer worker, and in March 1924 was appointed to a Minor Studentship at £150 and later, after protest, at £200 a year.

Darlington began cytological research with W C F Newton. Bateson’s death in 1926 left Darlington free of plant breeding ‘chores’ and under the new director A D Hall he was allowed complete freedom to pursue his own interests, apart from being encouraged to study tulips, which turned out to be excellent material for cytological research.

In 1927 J B S Haldane joined JIHI as part-time geneticist and began a friendly dialogue that gave Darlington confidence in handling broad issues. Darlington was appointed Cytologist in 1928, Head of the Cytology Department in 1936 and Director in 1939. He resigned in 1953 to become Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford (until 1971).

During the thirty years he was at the JIHI Darlington built up an international reputation as the ‘Newton of cytology’ and secured the John Innes as the centre of British genetics. His early series of papers culminated in Recent Advances in Cytology (1932) in which he developed an integrated view of chromosome cytology and made it possible for the first time to teach the subject. Darlington’s subsequent fame attracted a stream of workers to the Institution many of whom went on to have great influence on the subject. His lab in the 1930s had an exciting atmosphere of recurring discovery. Darlington pioneered theories of chromosome movement, including the relationship between meiosis and mitosis.

He was a brilliant teacher, both at the John Innes summer courses and to his colleagues. His book The Evolution of Genetic Systems (1939) laid the foundation for the integration of cytology and genetics at population and evolution level. Here Darlington explored ‘breeding systems’, arguing that it is the breeding system as a whole rather than the individual bearers of genes on which selection operates. In the 1940s his interests broadened further to include chromosomes, the cytoplasm, plasmagenes, viruses, and also the history and behaviour of man and society. In 1941 he was elected to the Royal Society and in 1946 was awarded the Royal Medal.

From 1943-46 he was President of the Genetical Society, and with R. A. Fisher he founded the journal Heredity in 1947. From 1948 Darlington began to publish condemnations of the suppression of genetics in the Soviet Union (the Lysenko affair). Darlington also became well-known as an author of popular science, beginning with the bestseller The Facts of Life (1953).

Darlington believed that looking at chromosomes was another way of studying genes, one that would give a richer perspective on the organization of life than the simple mutations and deletions that affect single genes. His controversial exploration of the role of genetics in human affairs was vilified by some as giving support to apartheid. His views, weaving together cultural and genetic evolution, were summarised in The Evolution of Man and Society (1969) and The Little Universe of Man (1978).

Links:

Extracts from interview of CD Darlington with B J Harrison and autobiographical fragments (transcripts, Memory Bank)

CD Darlington on chromosomes (audio clip)

Dan Lewis’s recollections of Darlington’s lab (transcript, Memory Bank)

CD Darlington on race (1952):

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000733/073351eo.pdf