The classical period in chemical genetics, Recollections of Muriel Wheldale Onslow, Robert and Gertrude Robinson and J. B. S. Haldane

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Abstract
The title of this article requires an explanation. It was used during the 1960 Jubilee meeting of the John Innes Institute at Bayfordbury to describe the successful chemical-genetic research of the 1930s. At the time I considered it complimentary but exaggerated. However, recalling those most interesting years, I have come to agree that the description is a fair one. It is not given to many to produce a swan song forty years after shaking the last test tube, scoring the last flower pigment and publishing the last findings. I will attempt to put on record the fascinating results of the collaboration which was achieved between the chemists with their pigment syntheses, isolations and accurate qualitative identifications on the one hand and the geneticists studying the behaviour of the genes involved in flower colour variation on the other. These two advanced lines of research, so fortuitously being undertaken at the same period, complemented each other and were the first systematic uncovering, on an extensive scale, of the biochemical nature of gene action, and thus set in motion the contribution which biochemistry was to play in genetical research from then onwards.

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