William Bateson, Archibald Garrod and the Nature of the “Inborn”I

William Bateson coined the term “genetics” and was the most vigorous promoter of Mendel at the beginning of the twentieth century. His contemporary, Archibald Garrod, first used the term “inborn errors of metabolism” and may be justifiably regarded as the founder of biochemical genetics, which has had such an important role in contemporary medicine. The linking of Bateson and Garrod not only brings together two people whose influence over the next 100 years was enormous, but also links molecular biology together with the study of the whole organism, thereby providing a bridge between the mechanisms of gene expression and the principles of biological inheritance.