The Man Who Invented the Chromosome by Oren Solomon Harman, Harvard University Press, $49.95/£32.95, ISBN 0674013336 Reviewed by Marek Kohn
LIKE his senior colleagues J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher, the biologist Cyril Darlington was overbearing, fascinated by heredity, evolutionarily minded, drawn to philosophy and inclined to dramatic views about society.
Unfortunately for him, he had a knack for not being where the action was. He explored heredity through chromosomes in the 1930s and 1940s, which were then sidelined by molecular discoveries, and latterly devoted himself to arguing for the existence of human racial hierarchies, just as…
