A graduate of Williams College, Barton received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which also provided his training in pediatrics. The recipient of many honors, he was highly respected as a visionary geneticist.

Barton developed an interest in genetics while observing pediatric outpatients with congenital anomalies. His reading suggested two ways to study the causes of such anomalies: either study the offspring of rats treated with toxic compounds during pregnancy or study the inheritance of anomalies in families, which seemed to him a far superior approach. To learn genetics, he traveled to London, spending a pivotal year at the Galton Laboratory. There, he came under the influence of Lionel Penrose, a psychiatrist who had established what Barton considered the first full laboratory for human genetics in the world. He also fell in with Harry Harris, a physician and geneticist who pioneered the Garrodian concept that genetic variation is common in man and who showed that no two individuals are exactly alike in their biochemical makeup.

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