The British and American Genetics Communities, 1900-1930: A Quantitative Comparison

Although the United States became politically independent of Great Britain in 1776, through much of the nineteenth century its science, like its economy and high culture, remained something akin to a colonial dependency of the original mother country. The development of scientific independence varied with discipline. For evolutionary biology, the stirrings of independence began in the late nineteenth century, and by World War I, American genetics, a child of evolutionary biology, had achieved equal rank with its British counterpart. This paper explores that change, principally via a quantitative assessment of genetics in the United States and Britain. Attention is given to the number of practitioners of the discipline, publication rates, the distribution of publishers in terms of productivity and institutional location, and the type of work done. A major conclusion is that American genetics came to challenge, and in certain ways to surpass, British genetics not only because of superiority in number of geneticists, institutions, and funds for research but because of the pluralist character of the American research system.