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ABSTRACT Wilhelm Weinberg (1862-1937) is a largely forgotten pioneer of human and medical genetics. His name is linked with that of the English mathematician G. H. Hardy in the Hardy-Weinberg law, pervasive in textbooks on population genetics since it expresses stability over generations of zygote frequencies AA, Aa, aa under random mating. One of Weinberg's signal contributions, in an article whose centenary we celebrate, was to verify that Mendel's segregation law still held in the setting of human heredity, contrary to the then-prevailing view of William Bateson (1861-1926), the leading Mendelian geneticist of the time. Specifically, Weinberg verified that the proportion of recessive offspring genotypes aa in human parental crossings Aa × Aa (that is, the segregation ratio for such a setting) was indeed .... We focus in a nontechnical way on his procedure, called the simple sib method, and on the heated controversy with Felix Bernstein (1878-1956) in the 1920s and 1930s over work stimulated by Weinberg's article.
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MORE than a decade after the rediscovery of Mendelism, there was controversy over whether human inheritance actually followed Mendel's laws. Wilhelm Weinberg (18621937) was a prominent member of the German "school" of genetics in the first third of the 20th century. In his article of 1912 Weinberg gave as stimulus Bateson's remark that human data seemed not to be in accord with Mendel's principles.
William Bateson (1861-1926) is often called the founder of genetics, a term that he is said to have coined and a discipline for whose acceptance at the University of Cambridge he was primarily responsible. He quickly became the leading promoter of Mendelism after its rediscovery, not least on account of his book Mendel's Principles of Heredity (Bateson 1909; Fisher 1952).
The first sentence of Weinberg (1912) reads in translation: "In Bateson's book Mendel's Principles of Heredity it is stated repeatedly that the distribution of recessive and dominant types are not in accord with the classical numbers." While he was critical of Bateson, with Mendel in mind, Weinberg was motivated by Bateson to carry research into inheritance in humans to a new level. Weinberg (1912) is his successful attempt to adapt Mendel's experimental approach to human data, where there were no experimental data, and thereby to verify...