This lecture of the British Society for Human Genetics commemorates Cedric Carter. Cedric was born in Port Said, educated at the Institution de Sainte-Marie, near Toulon, and at Winchester, Oxford, and St. Thomas’ Medical School in London, and this mixed cultural background served him well. His many scientific contributions are in the study of part-genetic conditions, such as some common illnesses and abnormalities of development, as well as the normal variation of socially important qualities. He was a practical man. Practical was his founding of the Clinical Genetics Society and his fight for the recognition of its activities by the authorities: Government, the National Health Service and the Royal Colleges. He was a clear communicator, both in the spoken word, in the use of which he was parsimonious, and in writing: his Penguin on Human Heredity was a real gem and a genetic best seller. We all owe a great dept of gratitude to Cedric’s industry and endeavour, and he is remembered fondly.

I shall start the lecture in reverse and talk about the impact before I develop the themes on: why the impact. And, too, I shall start by setting the stage of human genetics before and around the time of the cytogenetic explosion. Between 1930 and 1940, human genetics was being freed from the fettle and chains that had tied it to the main-line eugenic movement and had been gravely detrimental to its scientific image and practical aspirations, as Kevles shows in his scholarly analysis in: In the Name of Eugenics [1]. Indeed Bateson had cautioned already in 1919, against the confusion between eugenics and genetics. The severance was important and had to be made obvious. In 1945, Penrose was appointed to the Galton Eugenics Chair at University College in London and had its title modified to that of Human Genetics; and the Annals of Eugenics were renamed Annals of Human Genetics. In the United States, Davenport had retired from the directorship of the Eugenic Office at Cold Spring Harbor, and a Scientific Committee of the Carnegie Institution declared that the records in the Eugenics Office were unsuitable for human genetics research, which in any case, should not be done under the guide of eugenic principles. In 1948, the American Society of Human Genetics was formed and H.J. Muller, the 1946 Nobel prize winner for his experiments on radiation mutagenesis, was elected its first president. With the virtual demise of eugenics and the example of its failings and failures, the scientific development of human genetics was a prerequisite for a future in which its knowledge could be applied to practical uses. At this time the moving scientific spirit was Haldane. In 1948, writing on the formal genetics of Man, he was setting as a priority the study of gene linkage [2]. From this there would emerge the holy grail of genetics, the ‘enumeration and location’ and function of all human genes. Loiking at human genetics in the mid-forties, it can be said that it had made sound scientific progress in many directions, such as blood group genetics, biochemical genetics, the mathematics of inheritance, the formal approach to human linkage analysis, and mutation rate analysis. However, cytology could even hardly be called primitive, yet its development was important if for no other reason that, as Haldane was remarking in 1932, ‘we might expect cytological abnormality to be reasonably frequent in man’; of course, the questions were how frequent and how important. ‘It seems possible — he was adding — that satisfactory mitoses might be observed in a culture of leukocytes. If so, the development of human cytology in relation to genetics will become possible’ [3]. What Haldane must have had in mind was the 1931 blood culture method of Chrustschoff and Berlin [4].

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