William Bateson was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 geneticist

Geneticist

A geneticist is a biologist who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a researcher or lecturer. Some geneticists perform experiments and analyze data to interpret the inheritance of skills. A geneticist is also a Consultant or...

 and a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was the first person to use the term genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

 to describe the study of heredity

Heredity

Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...

 and biological inheritance, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...

 following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries

Hugo de Vries

Hugo Marie de Vries ForMemRS was a Dutch botanist and one of the first geneticists. He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term "mutation", and for developing a mutation...

 and Carl Correns

Carl Correns

Carl Erich Correns was a German botanist and geneticist, who is notable primarily for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, and for his rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject, which he achieved simultaneously but independently of the botanists Erich...

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Bateson was the son of William Henry Bateson

William Henry Bateson

William Henry Bateson was a British scholar and, from 1857 until 1881, Master of St John's College, Cambridge. In 1858 Bateson held the position of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is the father of the geneticist William Bateson and the grandfather of cyberneticist Gregory...

, Master of St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....

. He was educated at Rugby School

Rugby School

Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...

 and at St John's College in Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1883 with a first in natural sciences.

Taking up embryology

Embryology

Embryology is a science which is about the development of an embryo from the fertilization of the ovum to the fetus stage...

, he went to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 to investigate the development of Balanoglossus

Balanoglossus

Balanoglossus is an ocean-dwelling acorn worm genus of great zoological interest because, being a Hemichordate, it is an "evolutionary link" between invertebrates and vertebrates...

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