Muriel Wheldale Onslow and the Rediscovery of Anthocyanin Function in Plants

Muriel Wheldale Onslow and the Rediscovery of Anthocyanin Function in Plants 

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has Just discovered an old 

Using the magic of the Internet, a dusty and well-thumbed copy of The Anthocyanin Pigments in Plants was delivered recently to my home in New Zealand from a used bookstore in Northampton, England. Upon pouring through the book, I was struck by two thoughts. First, its contents seemed extraordinarily prescient. Many of the hypotheses for 

Muriel joined William Bateson s lab group in 1903, where she investigated the inheritance of flower color in Antirrhinum. She quickly devised a factorial analysis that could account for variation in the color patterns, and then switched her attentions to her main interest, the biochemical basis for Mendelian genetics. In the preface to The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants, Muriel wrote, For we have now, on the one hand, satisfactory 

2 Muriel Wheldale Onslow in her home laboratory. Photograph courtesy of the Department of Bio-chemistry, Cambridge University. 

---