Alice Blanche Balfour

Alice Blanche Balfour (20 October 1850 – 12 June 1936) was a Victorian naturalist and one of the earliest female pioneers in the science of genetics.

Life

Balfour was the daughter of James Maitland Balfour and was born in 1850 in Dunbar where she died 86 years later in 1936. She lived much of her adult life in London with her brother Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour who was at one time Prime Minister of Britain. Another of her brothers was Francis Maitland Balfour who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 27 for his work on embryology.

She developed a lifelong interest in entomology and later developed an interest in genetics and in particular the way that the patterns in Zebra skins were inherited . She had a lengthy correspondence with James Cossar Ewart Professor of Zoology at University of Edinburgh who himself had a professional interest in the development of the horse. The correspondence relates to the possibility of cross-breeding Zebra with horses to reduce the impact of Tsetse fly on horses in Africa.

In 1895 she published the book Twelve Hundred miles in a Waggon. The journey described in her 1895 book was undertaken by Alice Balfour, H. W. Fitzwilliam, Albert Grey and his wife, and Albert Grey's cousin George Grey.