The day I went on a field trip with Theodosius Dobzhansky

Genetics is a science almost without a history. There was Gregor Mendel, of course, but his work was ignored for decades. Nowadays, of course, its advances are hailed in daily press releases. Modern biology will cure cancer, fix damaged DNA and uncover hidden talents, if not today then tomorrow (or perhaps in a few decades). The double helix has become the icon of the 21st century.

My own link with its roots was with the Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, born in 1900. He spent his early career looking for useful genes in the semi-wild horses of Central Asia, interspersed with studies of local ladybirds and butterflies. In 1927 he left for the USA and, for the rest of his life, worked on fruit flies across the Americas. On the way he founded the modern science of evolutionary genetics.

Dobzhansky was a character out of Turgenev: passionate and ready to take offence, but with a deep interest in the arts and fluent in half a dozen languages (English, at least when it came to accent, not among them). He was proud of his distant kinship with Dostoevsky, but was even more so of having been given, as a young man, a cigar by William Bateson – the Cambridge academic who in 1904 invented the word “genetics” – on the latter’s visit to St Petersburg.

In modern context he resembles Vladimir Nabokov’s character Pnin, hero of the eponymous novel, which features a Russian émigré and his series of tragi-comic rows with colleagues and officials that ends up with his exile from New York and a forced move to the far west. Just that happened to Dobzhansky, and he too broke several close friendships after blows to his scientific amour-propre. Nabokov was a keen lepidopterist interested in butterfly hybrids, and the two may well have met.

I encountered Dobzhansky in 1975, on a field trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert in California. He had been ill and depressed, and on the drive I sat somewhat overawed as he talked not about genetics but of his quarrels with administrators and of how his own work had never fully been appreciated.

Once at the site, however, the warhorse heard the trumpets (or at least smelled the rotten bananas used as bait) and he shed 30 years, hopping joyfully across the rocks. He was impressed by my own simple trick of trapping the flies not with a small net but with a large plastic bag and said, loud enough for me to overhear: “That young man will become a great biologist.”

He was wrong about that, and about his own reputation, which is even stronger today than four decades ago. It was, alas, his last field trip – Theodosius Dobzhansky died six months later.

Steve Jones’s new book No Need for Geniuses (Little Brown, £25) is out on 6 April. To order a copy for £20 visit bookshop.theguardian.com