Biography:

Dr. Charnley is currently studying for a PhD in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Leeds. His thesis focuses on the relationship between genetics and agriculture from 1880-1930, analysing the ways in which agriculture provided an important context for the development of the then new study of heredity. He graduated from the University of Leeds in 2003 with an international BSC in Genetics, one year of the degree was spent at the University of South Carolina, in the USA. In 2005 he completed a taught MA in History and Philosophy of Science again at the University of Leeds. From 2005-2007 he worked as a temporary module leader for the University delivering courses on the history and philosophy of psychology and the history of genetics. In 2007 he was employed by the University to prepare the project application to the AHRC of which his current Phd is a part. So far he has presented papers on his thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for History of Science and the SHOT meeting in Lisbon, he has also been invited to present papers at the 2009 International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology workshop in Brisbane and the 2009 World Economic History Congress in Utrecht. Finally he is the coordinator of an international network of scholars with interests in IP and the Biosciences known as the IPBIo network (www.ipbio.org). In spring of this year they won funding for an international workshop to be held in Leeds in spring 2010.

Abstract:

From the Origin to Cairo; rogues and purity in British genetics, 1900-1925

This paper seeks to analyse three aspects of British work on rogue (out of type) plants; William Batesons work on rogue peas, Rowland Biffens on rogue wheat and William Balls on Egyptian cotton, all conducted in the 1900s and 1910s. In Bateson, Biffen and Balls work a historical re-conceptualisation of rogues as indicators of varietal contamination (from mixing of seed stocks) rather than varietal instability (from the long reach of ancestry) can be clearly traced. Christophe Bonneuil has recently documented the importance of purity in the work of early Continental geneticists. Bonneuil bases his analysis largely on Wilhelm Johannsen's work which, he argues, helped underwrite genetic consensus on the purity of hereditary unit factors. Under this conception a varietys purity was determined solely by its parents, because hereditary factors were pure, there was no need to take a varietys long run pedigree into account. In order for this consensus to emerge, however, an older Darwinian conception of purity as rarity, evidenced through pedigree, and often disrupted through the influence of ancestry, had to be overturned. Rogues which Darwin conceptualised as a sign of varietal instability proved to be a continuing problem for the new conception of purity, which suggested rogues could not be the result of ancestral influence. Recovering this debate, which has until now been overlooked by historians of science, helps extend Bonneuils analysis of purity to the British case and resituates Darwins influence on studies of heredity conducted in an agricultural context.