Reginald Punnett

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. Punnett was educated at Clifton College."Clifton College Register" Muirhead, J.A.O. p154: Bristol; J.W Arrowsmith for Old Cliftonian Society; April, 1948

Attending Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Punnett earned a bachelor's degree in zoology in 1898 and a master's degree in 1901.{{acad|id=PNT894RC|name=Punnett, Reginald Crundall}} Between these degrees he worked as a demonstrator and part-time lecturer at the University of St. Andrews' Natural History Department. In October 1901, Punnett was back at Cambridge when he was elected to a Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College,{{Cite newspaper The Times |title=University intelligence |date=29 October 1901 |page=8 |issue=36598}} 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.Dates given in {{cite book | url = http://www.bookrags.com/biography/r-c-punnett-wob/ | title = World of Biology | year = 2005 | publisher = Thomson Gale}}

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 establish the new science of genetics at Cambridge. He, Bateson and Saunders co-discovered genetic linkage through experiments with chickens and sweet peas.{{cite journal |last1=Lobo |first1=Ingrid |last2=Shaw |first2=Kenna |title=Discovery and types of genetic linkage |journal=Nature Education |date=2008 |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=139 |url=https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-and-types-of-genetic-linkage-500/ |access-date=9 February 2023}}

File:Punnett Square (Green Dominant).svg

In 1905 Punnett devised what is now called the Punnett square, a square diagram that is used to predict the genotypes of a particular cross or breeding experiment, described for the first timeThe 1905 first edition of this book does not contain the Punnett square. The third edition (1911) gives a more thorough explanation. in the 2nd edition of his book.{{cite book |title=Mendelism |author-last=Punnett |author-first=Reginald Crundall |author-link=Reginald Crundall Punnett |date=1907 |publisher=Macmillan |place=London, UK |edition=2}}

In 1908, unable to explain how a dominant allele 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. Punnett was Superintendent of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology from 1908 to 1909.{{cite web|title=Cambridge University Museum of Zoology: Histories & Archives|url=http://www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/collections.archives/histories.archives/|access-date=22 March 2013}}

In 1909 he went to Sri Lanka to meet Arthur Willey, FRS, then Director of the Colombo Museum and R H Lock, then Scientific Assistant at the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens and to catch butterflies. The following year, he published a monograph, '"Mimicry" in Ceylon Butterflies, with a suggestion as to the nature of Polymorphism', in Spolia Zeylanica, the journal of the Colombo Museum,[https://archive.org/stream/spoliazeylanica07nati/spoliazeylanica07nati_djvu.txt RC Punnett, '"Mimicry" in Ceylon Butterflies, with a suggestion as to the nature of Polymorphism', Spolia Zeylanica] in which he voiced his opposition to gradualistic accounts of the evolution of mimicry which he later expanded on, in his 1915 book Mimicry in Butterflies.

In 1910 Punnett became a professor of biology at Cambridge, and then the first Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics when Bateson left in 1912.{{cite journal |last1=Edwards |first1=AWF |title=Reginald Crundall Punnett: First Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics, Cambridge, 1912 |journal=Genetics |date=2012 |volume = 192 |issue=1 |pages=3–13|doi=10.1534/genetics.112.143552 |pmid=22964834 |pmc=3430543 }} 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 sex in chickens. Since only females were used for egg-production, early identification of male chicks, which were destroyed or separated for fattening, meant that limited animal-feed and other resources could be used more efficiently. Punnett's work in this area was summarized in Heredity in Poultry (1923). With Michael Pease as his assistant, he created the first auto-sexing chicken breed, the Cambar, by transferring the barring gene of the Barred Rock to the Golden Campine.F.A.E. Crew (1967). [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1967.0016 Reginald Crundall Punnett. 1875-1967]. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 13: 309–326. [PDF]

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

• {{cite book | author = Punnett, R. C. | title = Lineus | year = 1901 | publisher = Williams and Norgate | location = London | url = https://archive.org/details/lineus00punngoog | quote = punnett. | access-date = 2008-05-11 }}
• {{cite book | author = Punnett, R. C. | title = Mendelism | year = 1905 | publisher = Bowes and Bowes | location = Cambridge }}- A scanned copy of the second edition is [https://archive.org/details/mendelism00punngoog here].
• {{cite book | author = Punnett, R. C. | title = Mimicry in Butterflies | year = 1915 | publisher = Cambridge University Press | location = Cambridge | access-date = 2008-05-11 | url = https://archive.org/details/mimicryinbutterf00punn }}

{{Reflist}}

{{wikisource author}}

• [http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/concept_5/con5bio.html A brief biographical sketch of Punnett]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20050315162243/http://www.nahste.ac.uk/isaar/GB_0237_NAHSTE_P1996.html A briefer biographical sketch of Punnett]
• [http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/department/department-history A brief history of the University of Cambridge's Department of Genetics]
• {{Gutenberg author |id=33550}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Reginald Crundall Punnett}}

{{Balfour Professor}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Punnett, Reginald}}

Category:1875 births

Category:1967 deaths

Category:People educated at Clifton College

Category:Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Category:English geneticists

Category:British eugenicists

Category:English statisticians

Category:Fellows of the Royal Society

Category:History of genetics

Category:People from Tonbridge

Category:Arthur Balfour Professors of Genetics

Category:Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Category:Mutationism