The Modern Synthesis
In 1942, British zoologist Julian Sorrell Huxley wrote:
During this period of “modern synthesis”, scientists sought to combine two theories from the previous decade. Gregor Mendel’s theory of heredity, laid out in 1866, determined that a child would inherit one allele (or variant of a gene) for each trait from each parent', one of which would determine the physical characteristics of the child. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, first described in 1859, explained how organisms with characteristics adapted to their environmental context were able to live longer and have more offspring, thereby replicating the specialised characteristics throughout the population.
In 1905, William Bateson an English biologist coined the term “genetics”, to refer to this new method of studying biological heredity. With this new methodology, Bateson and his colleagues wanted to uncover all of the secrets of life. What were the enigmatic thread-like chromosomes that appeared during cell division? What was their role in heredity? What were they made of? And where did they go after cell division?
In 1910 Bateson became the first director of a new research centre, the John Innes Horticultural Institution, then based in Merton, London, which became the centre-point for many of the key advances in genetics over the next four decades. The botanist and cytologist Cyril Darlington, who was later instrumental in identifying the structure and behaviour of chromosomes during cell-division, joined the institute in 1923, where he soon befriended John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, a biochemist and statistician, who provided the first mathematical proof of Darwinism. John Innes soon became a training centre for international students, offering summer schools and mentorships in botany and cytology to students from America, Japan, China and India, including A. Haque, B.S. Roy and E.K. Janaki Ammal.
Meanwhile, other genetics laboratories across the UK began to attract Indian students to study in the UK. Most notably, Reginald Ruggles Gates, a Canadian born scientist based in Britain, by his own calculation had more Indian students than any other laboratory in the country, who went on to have illustrious careers in various Indian institutes. His students included S.P. Naithani (University of Allahabad), Syed Hedayetullah, H.K. Nandi (The Bose Institute), T.S. Raghavan, S.I. Ramanujam (Central Potato Research Institute), among others. Some of them attended International Congress of Genetics a five yearly conference for geneticists first held in 1898. Janaki Ammal attended the 7th Congress of Genetics in 1939, which was disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Indian Science Congress, held yearly since 1914, acted as a hub for collaboration between scientists from all over India. Scientists of all disciplines would present their research to hundreds of their peers. In 1938, the Silver Jubilee session was held in Kolkata, with eighty scientists and their wives from the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in addition to other foreign delegates. These included psychoanalyst Carl Jung, statistician Charles Edward Spearman, geneticist R.A. Fisher, Darwin’s grandson and physicist Charles Galton Darwin, as well as Darlington and Ruggles Gates. This conference, for the first time, situated India at the heart of international scientific networks.
By the time that Julian Huxley was writing about the modern synthesis in 1942, the interdisciplinary pattern of scientific collaboration was not only a feature of European science, but also of scientists in the British colonies such as India.
