Over a century ago, a botanist named Daniel Trembly MacDougal injected salt solutions into plant ovaries and reported that the procedure changed the hereditary material passed on to offspring. Both MacDougal’s results and his interpretation of his findings were challenged, and this promising research, now largely forgotten, had only a muted impact on the subsequent flowering of experimental genetics. Dr. Eric Richards intends to find out what was really going on, using both archival research and a modern DNA sequencer.
Richards, a professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), occupies rare ground in modern science: he is equally at home in a genetics laboratory and in an archive. That unusual dual identity has helped him earn an appointment to the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The announcement, made April 14, named Richards among 223 fellows selected from nearly 5,000 applicants spanning 55 fields of study – among the most competitive applicant pools in the foundation’s 101-year history.
The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded to individuals who have demonstrated both significant career achievement and the promise of important work ahead. For Richards, that work sits at the intersection of experimental biology and the history of science.
His proposed project centers on MacDougal (1865–1958), whose ovarial injection experiments at the New York Botanical Garden and the Carnegie Institution of Washington placed him briefly at the forefront of early mutation research. At a time when inducing inheritable changes in organisms was considered an urgent but elusive goal, MacDougal’s reported results commanded serious attention. Yet the work stalled – and when Hermann Muller produced mutations in fruit flies using X-rays in 1927, MacDougal’s earlier chemical approach faded from view entirely.
Richards will pursue MacDougal’s story through two parallel tracks. Archival research at the New York Botanical Garden, Carnegie Institution, and the Arizona Historical Society will allow him to reconstruct how MacDougal’s experiments were conceived, carried out, and received – and how they shaped his subsequent contributions to plant ecology. In the laboratory, Richards will repeat the injection experiments under conditions as close as possible to MacDougal’s, then use next-generation DNA sequencing to detect and characterize any resulting genetic alterations.
The underlying question is deceptively simple: could MacDougal’s protocol actually create mutations? Depending on the answer, those mutations might align with what the field later came to favor – small-scale point mutations – or might represent chromosomal-level alterations that the emerging emphasis in classical animal genetics was inclined to dismiss. Either way, the answer matters for understanding how the early field made its choices and what it may have left behind.
This dual methodology, combining historical scholarship with experimental replication, has already proved its value in Richards’s hands. His investigation of 1950-60s flax experiments on inherited environmental effects, combining archival work with modern sequencing, opened new research directions while clarifying a long-standing historical puzzle. His 2024 paper in the Journal of the History of Biology , examining the controversial evolutionary claims of William Lawrence Tower, received the 2025 Everett Mendelsohn Award.
Richards completed his PhD at Harvard Medical School and built a distinguished research career in epigenetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Washington University in St. Louis before joining BTI in 2008. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004. A sabbatical at Harvard’s Department of the History of Science in 2019 formalized his commitment to historical methods.
For BTI, an institute founded in 1924 and dedicated to advancing plant science for a sustainable future, Richards’s fellowship reflects the intellectual range its scientists bring to the most enduring questions in biology. For Richards, the fellowship provides the time and support to ask questions that neither pure experimental science nor pure history can answer alone.