Professorship

In 1912, Lord Esher endowed a permanent Chair in Genetics at Cambridge University for ‘the experimental study of heredity and of development by descent’. Esher was acting on behalf of an anonymous benefactor (William George Watson, a businessman) who had donated £20,000. The Chair was to be called the Balfour Professorship of Genetics (later renamed the Arthur Balfour Professorship). A condition of the endowment was that the first occupant should be appointed jointly by the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Arthur James Balfour, former Conservative prime minister and leading politician. This was the first Professorship to be established for the study of genetics in Britain and was the culmination of several years of campaigning by Bateson’s supporters at Cambridge. In 1909 the University’s Chancellor Lord Rayleigh took the opportunity of the Darwin Centenary Celebration at Cambridge to appeal for funds. Arthur Balfour was at the meeting and in 1910 drafted and circulated a private petition for money to endow the professorship and a research institute. Assisted by Esher and Asquith, Balfour secured a benefactor. Reginald Crundall Punnett, who was previously the Superintendent of the Museum of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Cambridge, was appointed Balfour Professor in November 1912. Whittingehame Lodge on Storey’s Way was built to house the Professor’s lodge, laboratory, gardens, greenhouses and breeding gardens. This arrangement, near the University farms and away from the other biological departments, mirrored Bateson’s early genetics research at Cambridge which was centred on his Grantchester house and gardens.

http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/About/News/departmenthistory.htm

Donald L. Opitz, ‘”No doubtful or uncertain enterprise”: Balfour, Bateson, and Britain’s first Chair of Genetics at Cambridge, 1894-1914’, Paper presented at the HSS meeting, Minneapolis, November 2005

Marsha Richmond, ‘The 1909 Darwin Celebration: Reexamining evolution in the light of Mendel, Mutation and Meiosis’, Isis, 97 (2006): 447-48