A digital archive of William Bateson

This project is to catalogue and digitise the papers and notebooks of biologist William Bateson (1861–1926). He was a pioneering figure in the early history of genetics, the first director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution and at the forefront of the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work. The database of images, descriptions and background information will be publicly accessible through Cambridge Digital Library. The collection consists of approximately 60,000 catalogued images, including correspondence, field journals, lecture notes and draft publications, plus notebooks recording Bateson’s experiments breeding poultry and sweet peas.