Sri Lanka and the early geneticists

Vinod MOONESINGHE

A seminal episode in the history of evolutionary biology, took place in Sri Lanka, involving my collateral ancestor, the British geneticist Reginald Crundall Punnett (1875-1967), who became the first Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge in 1912.

Following the death of Charles Darwin's acolyte Francis Maitland Balfour, a studentship fund was established in his name at Cambridge University. The second Balfour Student, William Bateson, translated Gregor Mendel's work on heredity into English and invented the term 'genetics'.

In 1902, Punnett, a post-graduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, obtained the Balfour Studentship and came into Bateson's circle of geneticists. In 1905, he published a best-selling textbook on the subject, 'Mendelism'.

Reginald Crundall Punnett

Charles Darwin

Among Bateson's circle was another Balfour Student, Arthur Willey, FRS (1867-1942), an expert on the Amphioxus (lancelets) order and the Balanoglossus (ocean-dwelling acorn worms) phylum. For three years he searched the seas of Papua New Guinea to study the embryonic development of the Pearly Nautilus.

The result of his endeavours was the six-part 'Zoological results' of which Punnett was responsible for the section on Nemertines ('ribbon worms' or 'proboscis worms'). In 1902, Willey was appointed director of the Colombo Museum and marine biologist to the Ceylon government.

Botanical laboratory

Another Bateson disciple was Robert Heath Lock (1879-1915), who had undergone a research studentship at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Peradeniya. He worked at the Cambridge Botanical Laboratory and was the first person to use descriptive symbols for Mendelian genes.

In 1906, Lock published 'Recent progress in the study of variation, heredity and evolution', a Mendelian textbook to which Punnett contributed and scholarly papers on genetics in Peas (the subject of Mendel's original researches). In 1908, he became Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Gardens. In 1909, Punnett travelled to Sri Lanka to meet Willey and Lock, in order further to develop his theories about the mechanism of heredity. He was accompanied by Cecil Clifford Dobell (1886-1949), his successor as Balfour Student at Cambridge. Also in Sri Lanka at the time, collecting butterflies, was Dobell's Balfour successor, John Claude Fortescue Fryer (1886-1948), an entomologist.

Thus it was that, during the three months in which Punnett was in Sri Lanka, the island contained probably the world's biggest concentrations of geneticists outside Cambridge.

Punnett studied Sri Lanka's butterflies, aided by the others, as well as by Government Entomologist EE Green and lepidopterists Lt Col Neville Manders and Mackwoods Director Frank Mitchell Mackwood.

Natural sciences

He duly acknowledged his debt them, in a paper published in the December issue of the Colombo Museum's journal, Spolia Zeylanica, entitled '"Mimicry" in Ceylon butterflies, with a suggestion as to the nature of polymorphism', in which he articulated the Mendelian thesis that sporadic mutations rather than by small, continuous variations were the formative cause of mimic species.

The paper was the opening salvo in a new battle between the Mendelians and the gradualists (who believed that biological change was the result of slow, continuous processes and not catastrophic mutations), fought mainly between Punnet and Edward Bagnall Poulton, Professor of Zoology at Oxford. Both Fryer and Manders came out in support with similar papers. Punnett's research on the topic culminated in his 1915 book “‘Mimicry” in butterflies’. Had this little group remained in Sri Lanka, it might have caused a cusp in the greater development of natural sciences in the country. Unfortunately, it slowly drifted away and apart.

Study of insects

Dobell was appointed Assistant Professor of protistology and cytology at Imperial College, London. During the First World War he studied amoebic dysentery and directed courses in the diagnosis of intestinal protozoal infections.

He went on to a 30-year career as protistologist to the Medical Research Council. His name is commemorated in the nomenclature of several parasites, notably the amoeba Vahlkampfia dobelli. However, he is remembered most for his biographical masterpiece 'Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His “Little Animals”’.

Willey was appointed Professor of Zoology at McGill University, Montreal in 1910. His name lives on in McGill's Arthur Willey award, and in the names of the genus Balanoglossus Willeyia, named by Punnett in 1903; Ramphotyphlops willeyi (the Loyalty Islands Blind Snake); and Kalicephalus willeyi, a nematode parasite in the Tic Polonga (Vipera russelli) and the Trinket Snake (Katakaluwa - Coelognathus helenus).

Lock married Bella Sidney Woolf, author and sister of Leonard Woolf. He continued at Peradeniya for a few more years. He was responsible for some 20 scholarly papers and two books, among them 'Rubber and Rubber Planting'. He also researched into rice, creating a new variety, 'Lock's Paddy'.

After the Botanical gardens were taken over by the Department of Agriculture in 1912, Lock resigned and moved to Streetley in Staffordshire, where he worked as an inspector for the Board of Agriculture. During the war he worked on fruit and vegetable preservation for the War Office. He died at Eastbourne, Sussex in June 1915.

Fryer returned to Britain in 1913, and turned his knowledge of genetics to use in the study of insects and agriculture. For a long time Entomologist to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, he became secretary of the Agriculture Research Council and was knighted shortly before his death.

On his return, Punnett co-founded the Journal of Genetics with Bateson. He succeeded to Bateson's chair at Cambridge on the latter's retirement. In 1911, in the third edition of his book 'Mendelism', he laid out the principles - based mainly on pea genetics - of the 'Punnett Square', a tool used by biologists to predict the probability of an offspring having a certain genetic characteristic. He is commemorated in Cerbratulus punnetti and Punnettia splendia, marine worms.

During the First World War he used his knowledge of genetics to solve the problem of poultry gender determination, thereby contributing greatly to increasing the efficiency of egg production. His 1923 'Heredity in Poultry' remained the standard work for many years; Punnett continued his research into the subject after his retirement in 1940. He died in Bilbrook, Wiltshire, aged 91.