Successful at Second Attempt: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration on Flower Pigmentation and the Emergence of Chemical Genetics

In the course of their study of the heredity of flower color, William Bateson, Edith Rebecca Saunders and Reginald Punnett observed that in Sweet Peas and Stocks, the crossing of two white-flowered strains produced purple flowers. Bateson’s student Muriel Wheldale quickly recognized the potential of this observation for advancing “a chemical basis for Mendelian phenomena”. She assumed that by combining the Mendelian methods for determining the laws of pigment inheritance with chemical methods for the isolation and analysis of these pigments, it should be possible to elucidate the mode of action of Mendelian factors, and at the same time solve the problem as to what chemical processes underlie the production of anthocyanin pigments. In her view, chemists interested in explaining anthocyanin biosynthesis, and geneticists whose goal was to understand the operation of genes were in fact interested in one and the same mechanism. However, Wheldale didn’t make the breakthrough she had hoped for. It was her student Rose Scott-Moncrieff who, in collaboration with chemists Robert and Gertrude Robinson and geneticist William Lawrence, was able to establish in the 1930s that gene action is essentially a control of chemical processes. This second attempt was so successful, I will argue, because Scott-Moncrieff managed to convince the chemists and geneticists that joining forces with researchers from other disciplines would help them to solve their own research problems in an adequate way. Furthermore, I will use the case of anthocyanin research to highlight the significance of interfield objects and interfield practices in cross-disciplinary collaborations.