Final answer:
William Bateson coined the term 'genetics' to describe the science of heredity, building on Johann Gregor Mendel's foundational work with pea plants that established the principles of inheritance, which were then connected to chromosomes thanks to the Chromosomal Theory of Inheritance.
Step-by-step explanation:
William Bateson, a British biologist, was responsible for coining the term "genetics" to describe the science of heredity. The field of genetics is deeply rooted in the work of Johann Gregor Mendel, who is often referred to as the father of genetics. His research on pea plants laid the foundation for our understanding of how traits are inherited from one generation to the next. Mendel's experiments conducted in the 1860s focused on the transmission of hereditary traits in pea plants and formed the basis for classical, or Mendelian, genetics.
These scientists proposed that chromosomes are the carriers of genes, the discrete units of heredity. Despite significant progress by early 20th-century scientists like Thomas Hunt Morgan, it took several more decades for DNA to be recognized as the genetic material responsible for heredity. It is now understood that genes, which reside on chromosomes, are the fundamental units of heredity with the capacity to undergo replication, expression, modification, and mutation, thus controlling the traits passed from parents to offspring.