| Birth Name: | Imre (Emmerich) Festetics |
| Birth Place: | Simaság, Habsburg monarchy |
| Death Place: | Kőszeg, Austrian Empire |
| Field: | Genetics |
| Known For: | Creating the science of genetics |
Count Imre Festetics de Tolna Germanized as Emmerich Festetics pronounced as //feʃtetɪtʃ// (2 October 1764 – 1 April 1847) was a Hungarian noble landowner, sheep breeder, and a pioneer geneticist. He was the first to use the word "genetics". In 1817 he exhibited a sheep breed called Mimush that he had developed through in-breeding and selection for specific characters and in 1819 he introduced the phrases "künstliche Zuchtwahl" (or artificial selection) and "die genetischen Gesetze der Natur" (the genetic laws of nature).[1]
Festetics was born in noble family of Tolna in the family's castle in Ság (now Simaság). His father Count Pál Festetics (1722-1782) of Tolna was a court councillor. His mother was Júlia Bossányi and took an interest in his education, with home tutor Jeromos Nagy taught him German, Latin and history. His brother Count György Festetics (1755-1819) would later found the Georgikon, a centre for agricultural education, in Keszthely in 1797. In 1782 he served in the Levenehr light cavalry regiment seeing action against Turks. Wounded in Bucharest, he resigned after eight years in 1790. Along with his brother György he travelled to England where he examined sheep breeding. He married Krisztina Boronkay (1774–1807) in 1791 and they had three children. He began to breed sheep from around 1803 and had access to a vast library consisting of nearly 80,000 books. He married Borbála Vízkeleti in 1812 and they lived in a palace in Kőszeg.[2]
Many of the central principles the discipline of genetics were formulated by Festetics through the study of sheep. Festetics formulated a number of rules of heredity and was the first to refer to these as "genetic laws of nature" (Die genetischen Gesetze der Natur). In so doing he used the term genetic for the first time, 80 years before William Bateson did so in his personal letter to Adam Sedgwick. Festetics created this new term to clearly distinguish his rules of heredity, or genetic laws, from the physiological laws of Ehrenfels.[3]
In these ‘‘Genetic Laws,’’ Festetics was the first to recognize empirically the segregation of characters in the second hybrid generation. He also linked heredity (vererbung) with health and vigor independently of external factors, stressing the role of inbreeding (combined with strong selection) in stabilizing character inheritance for preserving or developing new races. To illustrate the concept he used sheep, chicken, cattle and horse breeds as examples, although he also applied it to the human species by considering populations of isolated Hungarian villages, in which he had observed degenerative mental and physical characteristics. Festetics’s observations highlighted important correlations between variability, adaptation, and development. He also noted the consequences of selection and its role in heredity, believing that variability and his postulated laws of genetics were connected, acting together in breeding as well as in the natural processes controlling populations of different animals, including humans.
Festetics, however, was ultimately hindered by the complex nature of his study traits, aspects of wool quality that are now known to be polygenic.
When Gregor Mendel turned his attention to inheritance in peas he was just the latest in a line of Moravian researchers and agriculturalists who had been thinking about inheritance, and many of the principles had already been sketched out by Festetics.[4]
He is also considered the founders of classical ethology,[5] being the first to describe instinctive behaviour, in his ethogram of sheep.
Festetics original publications include: