A dozen years ago, I borrowed Mendel’s original paper in the Proceedings of the Research Union of Brno (1865) to see why it had attracted so little attention when it was published in 1866. For a week, I read the turgid German prose during my one-hour trips to and from London. There was no abstract, experimental section, results or discussion, just 47 pages of narrative. I found it difficult, despite familiarity with German, to make out quite what Mendel was driving at. Clearly others must have felt the same; in any case, as other papers in the same volume of the Proceedings testify, biologists at that time were still hung up on Darwin’s Origin of Species - more than enough to keep their minds occupied. Ironically, had Darwin known of Mendel’s researches on plants, he would never have published his theory of pangenesis two years after Mendel’s paper appeared; it was left to Galton, after whom the eponymous Institute is named, to show the fallacy of pangenesis in 1871.

John Timson’s introduction to this small book, and the opening paper by Peter Bowler on the rediscovery of Mendelism, are a mine of information on all this (apart from a mis-citation of Mendel’s original paper); many eminent biologists such as De Vries and Bateson conceded that Mendel had a point but never believed in Darwinism. The mantle of these sceptics has now been assumed in the USA, the Middle East and elsewhere by the unscientific proponents of “creationism”, who might yet take us into a new dark age.

Mark Ridley looks to a different future and provides a masterly account of error in DNA replication, concluding with a fascinating idea of the late, and much missed, WD Hamilton. In some fish, and other cold-blooded animals, sex may be determined by the temperature during development. Pursuing this idea, Hamilton concluded that life might well evolve into a single flexible form, whose ultimate destiny would be selected by environmental cues which it received early in life. HG Wells, thou should’st be living at this hour!

Apart from the paper by Sandy Raeburn, below, which was added later, the papers are a record of the 2000 Galton Institute Conference in London which included the Galton Lecture on Genetic Counselling: Its Scope and Limitations by Robert Resta. This account by Resta, who is the director of a genetic counselling centre in Seattle, is heavily biased towards the USA. There is no mention of the late CO Carter, who could claim to being one of the earliest clinical geneticists, and who worked inter alia on multifactorial inborn errors such as pyloric stenosis, nor of the late Sir Cyril Clarke, who solved the problem of Rhesus haemolytic disease of the newborn. How complicated it has all become! In 1971, I helped set up the second amniotic fluid cell culture lab in the UK, dealing in a small number of recessive storage diseases for pregnancies “at risk”, i.e. mum, or a very close relative, had had an affected offspring before. Of the 40 samples investigated, about a dozen proved positive (one wrongly so); on being given the results of these, all the potential mums opted for abortion. As Professor Resta notes, “a sizeable portion of the population must believe that it is undesirable and difficult to raise a physically and mentally impaired child”. Yet when we offered screening for heterozygosity for one of the more common of these diseases, no one came. Attempting to influence people’s reproductive behaviour is hardly worth the candle. But then, should it be?

Professor Raeburn’s article Genetic Issues in Insurance and Employment: How to Prevent Unfair Discrimination, presented at the 1999 Galton Institute Conference but updated for this book, is an authoritative account of this difficult area. Professor Raeburn is the Genetics Advisor to the Association of British Insurers (ABI). Whether a useful purpose is served by having an ABI Genetics Committee, a Human Genetics Advisory Commission (HGAC), a Genetics and Insurance Committee (GAIC), itself consisting of nominees of the ABI, the Institute of Actuaries, the British Society of Human Genetics and the Genetic Interest Group, and finally a Human Genetics Commission (HGC) is a moot point. Professor Raeburn’s comment that genetics has always been mired in controversy rings very true: a century ago the Royal Society set up an Evolution Committee, yet another group of doubtless well-meaning and appropriately qualified people giving a performance of which Canute - who also possessed 23 pairs of chromosomes - would have been proud. Those hauled before it saw their careers blighted – one such was Archibald Garrod. There is a popular feeling that the use of genetic data for the purpose of deciding insurance premiums is wrong, but the disabilities resulting from faulty genes can be very real. They are the downside of life’s rich pattern. As Robert Resta points out in his contribution, nowhere do human societies make adequate provision for the disabled. The danger of denial is that it gives governments - mostly very hard-pressed on the health front - an excuse to ignore the real needs of a persistently unfortunate segment of society.

This is a small book at a very small price. It is worth every penny and then some.

John Marsden

Dr John Marsden is Executive Secretary of the Linnean Society of London.