Reginald Punnett

Professor Reginald Crundall Punnett, F.R.S. (June 20 1875 – January 3 1967) was a British geneticist who co-founded, with William Bateson, the Journal of Genetics in 1910. Punnett is probably best remembered today as the creator of the Punnett square, a tool still used by biologists to predict the probability of possible genotypes of offspring. His Mendelism (1905) is sometimes said to have been the first textbook on genetics; it was probably the first popular science book to introduce genetics to the public.

Biography
Reginald Punnett was born in 1875 in the town of Tonbridge in Kent, England. While recovering from a childhood bout of appendicitis, Punnett became acquainted with Jardine's Naturalist's Library and developed an interest in natural history.

Attending Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, Punnett earned a degree in zoology in 1898, and a masters in 1902. Between these degrees he worked as a demonstrator and part-time lecturer at the University of St. Andrew's Natural History Department. However, by 1902 Punnett was back at Cambridge working in zoology, primarily the study of worms, specifically nemerteans. It was during this time that he and William Bateson began a research collaboration, which lasted several years.

When Punnett was an undergraduate, Gregor Mendel's work on inheritance was largely unknown and unappreciated by scientists. However, in 1900, Mendel's work was rediscovered by Carl Correns, Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries. William Bateson became a proponent of Mendelian genetics, and had Mendel's work translated into English. It was with Bateson that Reginald Punnett helped established the new science of genetics at Cambridge. He and Bateson co-discovered genetic linkage through experiments with chickens and pea plants.

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

In 1910 Punnett became professor of biology at Cambridge, and then the first Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics when Bateson left in 1912. In the same year, Punnett was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He received the society's Darwin Medal in 1922.

During World War I, Punnett successfully applied his expertise to the problem of the early determination of gender in chickens. Since only females were used for food, early identification of male chicks, who were destroyed, meant that more of the limited food supplies could be given to the females. Punnett's work in this area was summarized in Heredity in Poultry (1923).

Reginald Punnett retired in 1940, and died at the age of 91 in 1967 in Bilbrook, Somerset.

Partial bibliography

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