025 - When 'Becky' met Bateson: Edith Rebecca Saunders, the mother of British plant genetics
Kat: Hello, and welcome to Genetics Unzipped - the Genetics Society podcast, with me, Dr Kat Arney.
The history of genetics has a few famous partnerships - such as James Watson and Francis Crick or Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod. But there’s one pair without whom this podcast wouldn’t exist at all, and that’s Edith Rebecca Saunders and William Bateson, who founded The Genetics Society one hundred years ago.
But while Bateson tends to get the glory, particularly for his popularisation of Gregor Mendel’s ideas about heredity, much less is heard about Saunders - the ‘mother of British plant genetics’. It’s time to tell her story.
I was lucky enough to go to Cambridge University in the late 1990s to study natural sciences, staying on for a PhD in developmental genetics. And while I worried that I wasn’t working hard enough or that my bicycle might get stolen – along with some general low-level sexist nonsense – there was never really any suggestion that I wasn’t welcome there because I was a woman.
More than a hundred years earlier, life for women wishing to study science at Cambridge at the end of the 19th century was very different. Only two colleges – Newnham and Girton - were prepared to admit women. But there was no guarantee that you’d actually be allowed into lectures, as this was dependent on the personal whims of each lecturer.
Gaining access to practical classes was even harder – there was hardly enough lab space for all the male undergraduates, so of course the ladies went to the bottom of the queue.
For example, despite having built a fancy new botany lab, the man in charge – the aptly named Professor Vines – declared that there was no room for women, making it difficult to gain the knowledge and skills required to excel in the subject.
After all that, there was still a good chance that women might not be allowed to sit their exams, known as the Tripos. And even if a woman got through all the obstructive bullshit, she still wouldn’t be awarded a degree, instead getting a rather patronizing ‘Certificate of Completion’.
Cambridge didn’t actually award degrees to women until 1948 – this is remarkably slow when you consider that even Oxford got its equality act together and was giving degrees to women by 1921.
By the 1870s, the leaders of Newnham College realized that the University couldn’t be depended on to allow women access to lectures, laboratories and libraries, and decided to take matters into its own hands. In 1879, the College built its first science lab within the grounds, but it hit capacity in just four years.
So Eleanor Sigdwick, the Vice-Principal of Newnham, leveraged her connections to wealthy families and pulled together the money to buy a redundant chapel in the middle of Cambridge. It cost £1,400 – that’s around £160,000 in today’s money – of which £200 was raised from the students themselves.
The result was the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women, named after Sidgwick’s brother, Francis Balfour, who had recently been killed in an accident just weeks after securing a position as Professor of Morphology at the University. Balfour had been a member of the Committee negotiating to secure the building and was a powerful advocate for women’s education at a time when there were few male allies to be found.
Money for the new facility was tight, and much of the work setting it up was carried out by volunteers. The chapel fittings were repurposed for science and it was stocked with donated equipment.
The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women. Photo courtesy of Newnham College Cambridge
As well as being strapped for cash, the Balfour Laboratory was also strapped for staff. With very few women having been allowed to take their exams, there was a very limited pool of qualified candidates to choose from. The first Director of the lab was Alice Johnson, a recent graduate who had studied Morphology, though only took the first part of the Tripos exams.
The rest of the teaching staff consisted of one woman, Marion Greenwood, another recent graduate specializing in Physiology. There was also an unnamed 'boy' who acted as the lab technician, carrying out the preparations needed to set up experiments.
Eventually, everything was ready. The lab opened its doors to women studying biological sciences at both Newnham and Girton Colleges in 1884, for a fee of £3 per term, quickly rising to £4. One of these budding biologists was Edith Rebecca Saunders.
Born in Brighton in 1865, young Edith came up to Cambridge in the same year that the Balfour lab opened. Her first year was spent studying for the Higher Local Exams, which would ensure she was fully prepared to face the demands of a Cambridge education.
She won a Scholarship and went on to study Natural Sciences, obtaining the equivalent of a First Class degree in Physiology in 1888. But, of course, only getting that ‘Certificate of Completion.’
After not-graduating, Saunders remained in Cambridge, winning a year’s scholarship to carry out research at the Balfour Laboratory, followed by a permanent position as a demonstrator at the lab for the princely sum of £100 per year, taking some of the weight off Johnson and Greenwood’s shoulders.
Her salary soon went up to £150, in recognition of her laborious workload, and she eventually became director of the laboratory on a salary of £170 – around £21,000 a year, accounting for inflation.
It’s notable that Saunders was always employed by Newnham College, never the University, which still wasn’t at all on board with the whole ‘Women In Science’ thing. Thanks to Newnham, Saunders was able to secure a permanent academic position and funding for her research, which was extremely rare at the time.
Ironically, she only got the position as director of the Balfour Laboratory when Marion Greenwood had to step down in 1899 after getting married. Women working in a lab was bad enough, but married women? Hell no.
Life for the staff of the Balfour laboratory was busy and tough, and their achievements are especially remarkable considering none of them was a member of a University Department and they had virtually zero support from the wider university. They had little contact with the male faculty, yet they were supervising experiments following on from subjects taught in lectures.
And if women weren’t allowed into those lectures, then the Balfour team had to make up for it, teaching to the level required by exams and providing extra coaching for students whose background in science was lacking when they first came to Cambridge.
By the turn of the century, the Balfour lab was providing lectures as well as practical classes in subjects such as Morphology, Zoology, Physics, Geology and Crystallography, as well as Saunders’ specialist subjects of botany and physiology.
In some years there were six or more staff, including some men, and by 1910 the lab had spread into the building next door, encompassing a lecture room, greenhouse, and space for sample preparation, as well as labs on two floors.
Most importantly, some of this space was allocated for independent research at a time when women had almost no hope of finding bench space in any of the University departments. Up to three women at a time were researching there, often helping out with practicals and demonstrations.
Yet despite the stresses and strains, it sounds like it was a fun and inspiring place to be. Edith Saunders' obituary of Greenwood reveals that after lunch they often played cards, or – somewhat adventurously – a badminton-like game known as battledore and shuttlecock, avoiding the stove, tables and chairs around the lab.
Saunders and Her Science
Although Saunders’ initial studies focused on physiology, she was also required to cover botany – the study of plants. The number of students signing up for Botany rose steadily over the years and there were always considerably more women studying the subject that any other.
Partly, this is because botany was considered to be a more befitting biological focus for ladies, who could potter elegantly about in a garden rather than deal with the blood and guts of more medical or veterinary matters.
As English botanist Sir Harry Godwin wrote in his biography, Cambridge and Clare, ‘… during the opening decades of [the 20th] century, botany was particularly well served by an abundance of able women scientists. …
‘In girls’ schools botany was taught to serve the need now being accepted, to import science teaching into the curriculum: Botany was less demanding of laboratory space and technical assistance than the physical sciences and more readily acceptable than zoology with its daunting dissections …
‘Botany went a good way towards eliciting major biological principles, not least those of reproduction; gave familiarity with the techniques of comparative morphology and elementary physiology; and offered some familiarity with what is implied by adaptation and by evolution …. Many able women pursued further botanical studies in the universities.’
Saunders at work in her experimental garden. Photo courtesy of Newnham College Cambridge.
Alongside her teaching workload, Saunders found time to pursue her own scientific research, initially focusing on plant morphology and physiology. She published her first paper in 1890 - 'On the structure & function of the septal glands in Kniphofia' (that’s Red-Hot Poker plants, for any gardeners out there).
It was shortly after this that she met William Bateson – a man we’ve mentioned in a few of our previous episodes – taking a turn from what’s slightly unfairly been described as a ‘somewhat obsessive botanist with a 'fetish for carpal polymorphism'’, who was isolated from the wider scientific community due to her sex, into the exciting new world of heredity research, which would eventually become known as genetics.
It’s not known exactly how they first met, but it’s likely to have been through Bateson’s sisters, who were both contemporaries at Newnham. Mary Bateson began her studies at the same time as Saunders, specialising in mediaeval history, while Anna, a botanist when eventually joined Saunders at the Balfour Laboratory, was two years ahead.
Another connection could have come through Dorothea Pertz, a friend of Saunders, who was assisting Bateson in some plant breeding experiments and might have recommended Saunders because of her expertise and scientific skills.
If Edith Saunders was an outsider because she was a woman, William Bateson was also a misfit who didn’t slot neatly into the scientific cliques in Cambridge at the time. Even his appointment as Assistant to the Professor of Zoology in 1899, 16 years after he graduated, was more to do with filling a teaching gap than recognition of his scientific talents.
As well as being dissed for what other researchers described as ‘low science’, he could be contentious and vituperative, often engaging in scientific arguments in letters and at meetings.
But Bateson also possessed a powerful personal magnetism and a way of expressing his ideas which engaged his listeners and attracted followers, even being regarded as a ‘genius’ by his research associate Reginald Punnett (he of the Punnett square, which we covered back in episode 16)
By the mid-1890s, Bateson and Saunders were firm collaborators. At the time, the so-called ‘blending theory’ of inheritance predominated the field, suggesting that the characteristics of both parents were inseparably mixed together in their offspring.
Yet even before he rediscovered the work of Mendel, Bateson was starting to think that this wasn’t the case, and that traits remained distinct – so-called discontinuous variation.
Saunders was on his wavelength straight away and set about designing a series of experimental plant crosses to test these ideas. Bateson had found a scientific soulmate in Saunders – someone who could be completely trusted to design and carry out experiments on plants without supervision, leaving him to focus on his breeding experiments with animals.
She was the first person to present her results together with his at meetings and continued to work with him on and off until his death in 1926, making her his longest-serving colleague.
Mr Bateson and Miss Saunders
Unlike most other men in science at the time, Bateson was a feminist ally who was willing to stand up and be counted in support of women. Unusually, he had been raised to appreciate women's intellectual powers as fully equal to those of men.
His mother Anna was an active campaigner for women's rights, a prime mover in establishing lectures for women at Cambridge, and a member of the governing body of Newnham College, and three of his sisters were also academically gifted.
Bateson became one of the foremost male advocates for women's rights at Cambridge, most notably as Secretary of the Committee for Promoting the Admission of Women to Titles of Degree from 1896 to 1897.
His support was vital not only during the campaign, which did ultimately fail, but even more so afterwards, when there was a further backlash against women by the Cambridge establishment, who believed there was some kind of lady-coup going on.
As a result, it became virtually impossible for women to get scientific jobs in the city. Bateson wasn’t prepared to let all that talent go to waste, and he was a keen employer of women as research assistants.
Yet Saunders was never an assistant to him – her scientific expertise meant that she was always fully acknowledged as a colleague from the outset. And, of course, it helped that she had her own funding….
Novelist Virginia Woolf talked about the importance of having a ‘Room Of One’s Own’ – and their own money – in order for women to be able to write.
For a scientist like Saunders, having her own research grant and a laboratory in which to work was essential, and highly unusual. It was also helpful in her relationship with Bateson as he often struggled to secure funding so Saunders’ Newnham salary meant that he didn’t have to find extra cash for her.
This independence is also reflected in how the pair referr to each other in their correspondence. She was always ‘Miss Saunders’ and he ‘Mr Bateson’. But while some documents refer to Edith Rebecca Saunders as ‘Becky’, this nickname appears to have been restricted to her teaching colleagues at Newnham (and possibly her students, behind her back).
Theirs was a robust and direct relationship. Her letters to him are abrupt, with no idle chit-chat or niceties. And she was confident of her position as his intellectual equal, comfortably proposing her own theories and challenging his views, memorably pointing out that one of his ideas is ‘absolutely out of the question!’
While Saunders was a scientific asset to Bateson, he provided help in other ways, most notably by gaining access to funding and spaces to work, which would have been impossible for her to obtain in her own right.
Bateson wrote begging letters asking for funding and space, making it explicit that this included Saunders' research too. He joined committees, also inaccessible to women, which he used to his - and her -advantage.
Biscutella laevigata – the subject of many of Saunders’ important plant breeding experiments. Photo: Atriplexmedia CC-BY-SA 3.0
One very significant example came in 1896, when he became a member of the Cambridge Botanic Garden Syndicate. This brought him access to vital research plots in the 'experimental ground', including a whole acre just for Saunders who continued to use the Botanic Garden’s plots and pits rent free until at least 1924.
Saunders and Bateson’s first research project in the garden dates from 1895, when she planted a mixture of hairy and smooth Biscutella (also known as buckler-mustard), then let them cross-breed the following year.
Rather than seeing plants with an intermediate level of hairiness, which might have been predicted from the ‘blending’ theory of inheritance, Saunders only ever saw hairy or smooth plants – a perfect example of discontinuous variation.
By the time Mendel’s research on pea plants had become known, Saunders was busy seeing if the same patterns of inheritance bore up in other plant species. She noticed that some traits tended to be inherited together – a phenomenon she described as ‘coupling’ but would eventually become known as ‘linkage’.
This provided strong supporting evidence for another new theory on the genetics block being touted around by the fruit fly geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. This was the idea that genes for certain traits were linked together on chromosomes, and therefore tended to all be inherited together too.
Mother of ‘the Pack’
Alongside her research work with Bateson, Saunders was busy teaching the growing number of female science students coming up to Cambridge.
She’s described as a demanding but inspiring teacher – and also, perhaps unkindly as draconian – who apparently cherished the opportunity to bring women into the new world of scientific knowledge that was opening up.
She was a formidable teacher for practical classes too. Harry Godwin notes ‘… No one more convincingly proved [the value of examining fresh material] than the formidable ‘Becky’ Saunders, who gathered all the Newnham and Girton students under her care and made certain that they saw for themselves every last bit of evidence the fresh material might yield: the rest of my demonstrators toiled far behind her in assiduity and skill.’
Saunders not only inspired many women students as a teacher, but also introduced some of them to Genetics by bringing them to Bateson’s infamous twice-weekly 'Bible Class' held in his rooms in St John's College, where he delivered lectures on genetics and evolution to a small group of keen students, including many women.
Even more significantly, by bringing women into Bateson’s circle, Saunders was able to help a few of them to embark on a research career, which at the time was almost impossible. Together with Bateson’s male acolytes, including Ronald Fisher, they formed a strange collective sometimes known as ‘The Pack’, which would descend on scientific meetings in a flurry of militant Mendelism.
Alongside her colleagues in Cambridge, Saunders was a big believer in scientific societies. At a time when the social and intellectual activities of women were severely restricted, societies provided a world of opportunities for women to meet others working in the field, establish collaborations, and present and discuss results and ideas.
Societies also published the proceedings of their meetings, which were often duplicated in mainstream scientific publications such as Nature, and even had funds available for travel and small research grants.
Saunders was a member of several societies, including the British Association for the Advancement of Science (today the British Science Association), where she became the president of the botany section. She was also a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.
Section Presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1920). Saunders is fourth from the left. Photo courtesy of Newnham College Cambridge.
However, one of the biggest and most prestigious, the Royal Society, didn’t admit women as fellows until after her death. But as a male fellow of the Royal Society, Bateson was able to present her findings, and Saunders eventually presented her own papers at Society meetings thanks to her connection with him.
A much smaller but more interesting society is The Marshall Ward Society, which ran in Cambridge between 1908 and 1915 with a maximum of 12 members at any time.
It was founded by a very small group of people - seven male undergraduates in the Botany Department, and three women also studying Botany - ‘to promote interest in all departments of botany and by free discussion to stimulate original research’, with women giving talks from the very beginning.
By the time the Society stopped meeting in 1915, mainly due to the outbreak of war, a quarter of the members had been female, and there had been more female presidents than male ones. This wasn’t a case of women being allowed to join and kept on the sidelines, but an exceptional early instance of women being involved in the foundation of a genuinely gender-unimportant society based entirely on common interests.
At a time when women had to sit separately from men in lectures (assuming they were even allowed in) and members of the women's colleges facing expulsion if seen with a man in public or - heaven forbid! - visiting a male student's room, it is remarkable that the founder members were even able to discuss forming such a group.
As one of five Honorary Members, Saunders’ support was critical to the foundation of the Marshall Ward Society. Many meetings were held in male members' College rooms so a College staff member like Saunders was required to attend as a necessary chaperone, meaning that her presence at meetings is carefully documented.
The relatively late start time of 8.15 pm for meetings could also prove problematic, especially if debates got heated. So Saunders would provide another valuable service by using her keys to smuggle Newnham students back into the college after curfew.
Of course, this is The Genetics Society podcast, so we can’t fail to mention the role of Edith Saunders in co-founding the society together with William Bateson in 1919 – hence all our centenary celebrations this year.
In the summer of 1919, Saunders and Bateson held a meeting at the Linnaean Society, based at Burlington House in London, to propose founding a 'Genetical Society'. The first meeting of the Society was held a couple of weeks later in Cambridge.
And although Bateson is on record as being the person who officially convened the first meeting, an article in Nature the following month credits Saunders with coming up with the idea in the first place.
Impressively, 16 of the original 87 members were women. Saunders herself started off as vice-president and became the Society’s fourth president between 1936 and 1938. She also acted as treasurer from the Society’s founding until her death in 1945. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Will the real Edith Saunders please stand up?
Despite being a respected scientist, and an instantly-recognisable participant at some major scientific events for over 40 years, very little is known about the 'real' Edith Rebecca Saunders.
She was highly focused on her work, and her life centred around Newnham College, which she entered in October 1884, just before her 19th birthday, and never really left. Even after she officially retired from teaching in 1925, she remained closely linked to the College.
Aside from her published papers, little remains. No private letters are known to exist, and those to William Bateson, her colleague of over 30 years, are abrupt and always get straight down to business, with no polite preambles whatsoever.
Because of the highly focused nature and range of detail in her research, her published work and the talks she gave reveal little of her personality, aside from persistence and attention to detail.
Most of her laboratory notes are lost, apart from a few loose sheets kept by Bateson, now in the archive at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. The huge collection of scientifically valuable microscopy slides she made was also destroyed after she died.
For his part, Bateson was always willing to give Saunders credit for her scientific contributions, at least in public, not only to his own work but to the field of genetics more broadly.
For example, in his speech during dinner at the 1906 Royal Horticultural Society meeting where he coined the term ‘genetics’, he said, ‘Had it not been for the work … done by my friends and pupils – first of all by my colleague Miss Saunders, whose name has been so deservedly honoured tonight … I could never have dared … to have asserted that Mendelian research … is of the importance that we now know it must possess.’
And in the preface of his groundbreaking textbook on genetics, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, published in 1909, Bateson writes, 'In the early days of Mendelism, and before, Miss E. R. Saunders collaborated with me. A beautiful series of results, especially relating to the heredity of Stocks, has been the fruit of her labours exclusively.
‘Not only have these results greatly advanced our knowledge of genetic phenomena, but I think that at a time when Mendelism was, in England at least, regarded with suspicion, the obvious precision of her work and the persistence of her advocacy did much to convince the scientific world of the reality of our assertions.’
However, in letters to his wife and other scientists, Bateson was rather less complimentary about his collaborator. He describes her as ‘terribly bent on business’, and in 1904 he writes, ‘Long spell of Saunders today. Her intelligence is certainly much quickened from two years ago but trying moments come. Her voice rings in my head’.
He’s also taken aback when Saunders starts flirting with his distinguished visitor Hugo de Vries at a meeting, possibly trying to reassure his wife that there’s no funny business going on with his female colleague. However, I suspect that Bateson wasn’t Saunders’ type at all, as she remained staunchly unmarried her whole life.
Bateson’s sniping aside, there are a few snippets that shed some light on what Saunders might have been like as a person. One comes from Rona Hurst, wife of geneticist Charles Chamberlain Hurst, describing her first encounter with Saunders in an unpleasantly hot greenhouse.
‘We soon encountered Miss Saunders, very imposing in her dark tailored suit and shirt blouse with stiff linen collar and tie, surmounted by a severe black hat, in fact the Typical Blue Stocking as envisaged in pre-war days, and indeed the fashionable dress of all women who claimed equality with men ... I was left alone with the Gorgon. She nobly started explaining an intricate experiment to me and I did my best to look intelligent ….
‘Suddenly she turned and flashed upon me that wonderful smile which could irradiate her whole face and was so much part of herself. ‘Come on’ she said, ‘Let’s get out of here – I shall be a grease-spot in a minute!’ Her use of the colloquial slang astonished me – she too was human after all … ‘
Newnham student M D Ball, who was taught by Saunders, describes her as ‘…the embodiment of dedicated search for scientific truth. Rather austere in her tweed coat and skirt, with a very masculine collar and tie, yet with such a kindly twinkle in her eye.
‘At dinner her severely plain black silk, with the gold medal on a gold chain her only ornament, might look … forbidding … but an encouragingly kindly remark followed by a somehow friendly silence was most reassuring.’
Saunders’ friend of 20 years, EM Chrystal also notes, ‘When I was a student she was a celebrated but remote figure whom we regarded with awe, so when I returned to take up a resident post ... I came in fear and trembling as to what impression I might make upon the handsome, formidable and renowned scientist.’
Adding to this, an uncredited death notice in the Times highlights two outstanding features of Saunders’ character – ‘her great energy and thoroughness, and the power and lucidity of her mind. These characteristics emerged even in the most ordinary conversation, as did her great kindness and her delightful quiet humour. She was a most stimulating companion, permitting no mental laziness or confusion of thought.’
Outside the laboratory, Edith Saunders was an experienced mountain-climber, accomplished sportswoman and was Newnham College’s ace tennis player for several years.
That’s not the only sport she excelled at, and there’s a charming insight from Saunders’ obituary by her friend EM Chrystal, who writes, ‘She was throughout her life a brilliant skater whose gyrations on the points of the skates round an orange were the wonder and terror of student neophytes.’
Saunders’ energy for sport and science never flagged throughout her life, and in the summer of 1945 at the age of 80 she was looking forward to resuming her research, having given it up to support the Allied efforts in the Second World War. So it was a shock to all when she died as a result of a bicycle accident on the 6th of June that year.
News of her death made it into the national newspapers, and an unattributed report in the Times (most likely written by Sir Harry Godwin) notes that she was one of the first women to take a distinguished place in the scientific world after the opening of university education to women.
However, most obituaries focus on her work on plant physiology and morphology, and not her great contributions to genetics.
The reknowned geneticist JBS Haldane was compelled to pen his own obituary of Saunders to correct the record, writing, ‘It is clear that she and Bateson had independently discovered some at least of Mendel’s laws before his work was known to them. She must in fact be regarded as the ‘mother’ of British plant genetics’.
As for the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women, the lab closed in 1915 when women were finally admitted into the University’s official lectures and practical lessons. Yet social norms hadn’t moved on that much, and women still found themselves resented or even obstructed by male undergraduates.
The building itself still stands in Cambridge today – a Victorian red-brick chapel round the back of the Wetherspoons pub where I used to go drinking as an undergraduate, complete with tie-dye trousers and some very ill-advised blonde streaks.
Looking back on my own experiences of university life, it’s all too easy to forget where we’ve come from in terms of women’s rights and education – but also how far we still have to go. And, of course, the last Cambridge college to admit women, Magdelene, only opened its doors to the fairer sex in 1988.
Women have legally protected employment rights in many countries and no longer have to give up their jobs when they get married or pregnant, but there are still places in the world where girls are unable to pursue an education at all.
The world is still designed mostly for the manly men who run it, built around a straight gender binary that paints boys as geniuses and rebels, and girls as pretty, polite princesses – blue for him, pink for her, and stuff your rainbow.
And while I hope that it would generally be frowned upon today to tell a girl that science is Not For Her, there are still overt and unconscious biases against women – witness, yet again, another crop of Nobel prizes in science going to an all male field.
The example of Edith Saunders and her colleagues at Cambridge shows us that it is possible to make space in science for people who don’t adhere to whatever current society says a scientist should be like. We’ve come a long way since Saunders and Bateson founded The Genetics Society in 1919, and we’re looking forward to an even more diverse, inclusive century ahead.
This episode owes a huge debt of gratitude to Christine Alexander, the former librarian of the Cambridge University Genetics Department, who has spent countless hours piecing together the story of Edith Rebecca Saunders.
She’s also been responsible for cataloguing a fascinating cache of letters mostly written by William Bateson to Reginald Punnett between 1903 and 1925, which recently came back to the Department of Genetics after being unearthed in Australia where they had been forgotten for decades.
I’ve also drawn on a talk about Saunders given by Professor Alison Woollard at the annual Genetics Society Mendel day celebration at the Royal Institution earlier this year – an event we covered in episode 11.
We’ll be back next time reporting from the recent Manova Health Summit in Minneapolis, exploring the latest innovations and cutting-edge research.
You can find us on Twitter @geneticsunzip and please do take a moment to rate and review us on Apple podcasts - it really makes a difference and helps more people discover the show.
Genetics Unzipped is presented by me, Kat Arney, and produced by First Create the Media for the Genetics Society - one of the oldest learned societies in the world dedicated to supporting and promoting the research, teaching and application of genetics. You can find out more and apply to join at genetics.org.uk
Our theme music was composed by Dan Pollard, and the logo was designed by James Mayall and audio production was by Hannah Varrall. Thanks for listening, and until next time, goodbye.
Further reading
"A Lab of One's Own": The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University, 1884-1914. Marsha L. Richmond. Isis. Vol. 88, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 422-455
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