John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre stands on the Norwich Research Park in Norfolk. Founded in 1910 as the John Innes Horticultural Institution, it moved to its present site in 1967 after earlier stays in Surrey and Hertfordshire. The centre is a registered charity grant-aided by bodies such as the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It houses departments in biological chemistry, crop genetics and microbial science, and trains PhD students awarded by the University of East Anglia. Research is organised under programmes like Genes in the Environment and Designing Future Wheat. The centre’s Germplasm Resources Unit maintains seed collections used worldwide by breeders and researchers. Notable figures associated with the centre include early director William Bateson, who coined the term ‘genetics’, and the present director, Professor Cristóbal Uauy. The John Innes Foundation, created by the centre’s founder, still owns the land and supports graduate studentships and scientific archives. Visitors find laboratories and lecture halls alongside the History of Genetics library. The library holds rare botanical books, original manuscripts and the archives of the Genetical Society. Nearby on the research park, the Sainsbury Laboratory studies plant disease while the Earlham Institute focuses on genomics. The centre’s own archives include a letter in which Bateson first used the word ‘genetics’.