Francis Galton: His Approach to Polygenic Disease

Gregor Mendel is considered to be the founding father of modern genetics, and his laws of inheritance have led to the successful analysis of rare monogenic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, familial hypercholesterolaemia, and many others. Francis Galton chose multifactorial inheritance as his starting point, and his methods of analysis have withstood the test of time. He used detailed family records to study the inherited tendency of complex traits between parents and offspring, and between identical and non-identical twins to refine the analysis, and devised new statistics to attempt to measure the extent of inheritance. For all these reasons, he can be considered the founding father of quantitative genetics.