Blood Group Inheritance

J. Ffoulkes Edwards and Dr. I. M. H. Etherington¹ have continued the discussion initiated by R. Elsdon Dew², who quoted J. S. de Goldfiem's³ figures for the blood group distribution among the French Soussoux. Of these, 89 per cent belong to Group AB, and Edwards and Etherington explain this obvious anomaly by re-advancing their quadruple allelomorph theory of group inheritance. This appears to be entirely unnecessary, nor does their theory fit the figures observed elsewhere, and before enlarging on this hypothesis, it seems pertinent to inquire whether there really are 89 per cent of the population in this group. In the original investigation, Vincent's whole blood technique of grouping was used, which is notorious for its high percentage of false results due to pseudo-agglutination. It would appear far more probable that the error lies in the technique adopted —either in the failure to differentiate between pseudo- and true iso-agglutination, or in a bacterial pan-agglutination from infection of the test sera—than that Bernstein's triple allelomorph theory of inheritance, which fits so well all the known figures, should be at fault.