Professor Reginald Crundall Punnett, F.R.S. (June 20 1875 — January 3 1967) was a British geneticist.

Biography

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Punnett was born in Tonbridge, Kent. He was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he initially went to study medicine, but graduated in 1898 with a degree in zoology. He stayed on at Cambridge to do research on the physiology of nemertine worms.

Mendelian genetics was rediscovered in 1900. With William Bateson, Punnett helped established the new science of genetics at Cambridge. He and Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage.

Punnett was also the creator of the Punnett square, a tool in genetics which is still used by biologists today to predict the probability of possible genotypes of offspring.

In 1908, unable to explain how a dominant gene would not become fixed in a population, he introduced one of his problems to G.H. Hardy, with whom he played cricket. Hardy went on to formulate the Hardy-Weinberg principle (independently of the German Wilhelm Weinberg).

Bateson and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

Punnett became the first Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge, when Bateson left Cambridge in 1912 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. Punnett received the society's Darwin Medal in 1922.

Punnett retired in 1940. He died in 1967 in Bilbrook, Somerset.

Bibliography

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• Mendelism (1905) with 6 further editions
• Mimicry in Butterflies (1915)
• Heredity in Poultry (1923)

External links

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• http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/concept_5/con5bio.html
• http://www.nahste.ac.uk/isaar/GB_0237_NAHSTE_P1996.html
• A Brief History of the Cambridge University Department of Genetics

1875 births | 1967 deaths | British geneticists | British biologists | Fellows of the Royal Society | Natives of Kent

Reginald Punnett