Leonard Doncaster
Leonard Doncaster was an English geneticist and a lecturer on zoology at both Birmingham University and the University of Liverpool whose research work was largely based on insects.Early life
Doncaster was born on 31 December 1887 in Sheffield, England.Career
After education at Leighton Park School and King's College, Cambridge he became an academic at Cambridge University. He was a Quaker and served as a bacteriologist in the Friends Ambulance Unit during the First World War. He was an early Mendelian geneticist who discovered sex linkage, while writing up the results of the Reverend G.H. Raynor on the magpie moth Abraxas grossulariata. He later wrote a number of books on Mendelian genetics and on sex determination. He was appointed assistant to the Superintendent of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology in June 1902, and himself filled this position from 1909 to 1914. He was elected to the Royal Society of London on the strength of these achievements in 1915. He died of sarcoma in 1920, and William Bateson wrote his obituary in Nature.
His book Heredity in the Light of Recent Research, is notable for explicitly dismissing Lamarckian inheritance.Publications
