Robert Heath Lock

Robert Heath Lock (19 January 1879 – 26 June 1915) was an English botanist and geneticist who wrote the first English textbook on genetics.

Life

Robert Heath Lock was the son of John Bascombe Lock, a priest and Eton College schoolmaster who was later bursar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His younger brother was C. N. H. Lock. He was born at Eton College on 19 January 1879, and educated at Charterhouse School, where he was a member of a winning 8 at Bisley. He was Frank Smart Student of Botany at Gonville & Caius, where he graduated with a first class degree in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1902. While still an undergraduate, he accompanied William Bateson abroad. From 1908 to 1913 he was Assistant Director to Willis at Peradeniya, serving as Acting Director in 1909 and 1912. He also created a new strain of rice, "Lock's paddy".

In 1910 Lock married Bella Sidney Woolf, the sister of Leonard Woolf. They had no children. He is buried with his sister and brother-in-law in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge. His parents are also buried there. In 1908, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote supportively about the textbook:

In conclusion, I would suggest to those of my readers who are interested in the great questions associated with the name of Darwin, but who have not had the means of studying the facts either in the field or the library, that in order to obtain some real comprehension of the issue involved in the controversy now going on they should read at least one book on each side. The first I would recommend is a volume by Mr. R. H. Lock on “Variation, Heredity and Evolution” (1906) as the only recent book giving an account of the whole subject from the point of view of the Mendelians and Mutationists.

A. W. F. Edwards suggested Ronald Fisher was inspired by the book, writing: it brought together (to quote from its chapter headings) evolution, the theory of natural selection, biometry, the theory of mutation, Mendelism, cytology, and eugenics, all in a single volume. Nowhere else could the young Fisher have found such a guide to the subjects that fascinated him over and above his student work for the Mathematical Tripos.

Works Studies in Plant Breeding in the Tropics, 1904 Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 1906 Rubber and Rubber Planting, 1913