History of the Department

Whittinghame Lodge 590

This section of the website looks at the different history areas of the Department. Below, you will find a list of interesting facts as well as in-depth pages on the history of our Department.

  • We are the oldest Genetics Department in the world - Established in 1912 with Reginald Punnet as the first Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics.
  • The first location for the Department was the Professor's house - Whittingehame Lodge, on Storey's Way (pictured above) which is now part of Churchill College.
  • The Department moved to it present location (formerly the School of Agriculture) in 1976.
  • The first Part II class started in 1951.
  • The Genetics Society (Est 1919 by Edith Saunders, William Bateson) is the oldest in the world. Six Genetics Society Presidents (out of 34) have come from the Department (Punnet, Saunders, Fisher, Thoday, Fincham, Ashburner and Ferguson-Smith), which is more than any other institution.
  • Embryonic Stem Cells first produced in the Department by Martin Evans, Liz Robertson and Alan Bradly, along with collaborator Matthew Kaufman. Martin Evans was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
  • The Department has been home to some incredible developments in data-driven bioscience; FlyBase, The Gene Ontology and the formation of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
  • Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith established the Becky Saunders lecture series in 2018.