Edmund Brisco "Henry" Ford FRS FRCP[1] (23 April 1901 – 2 January 1988) was a British ecological geneticist.

He was the only child of Harold Dodsworth Ford (1864–1943), a classics teacher turned Anglican clergyman, and his wife (and second cousin) Gertrude Emma Bennett.

[7][8][9] Ford was educated at St Bees School, Cumberland (now Cumbria), and read zoology at Wadham College, Oxford, (where his father had also studied),[10] graduating B.A.

[15] By the time Ford had developed his formal definition of genetic polymorphism,[16] Fisher had got accustomed to high selection values in nature.

He was most impressed by the fact that polymorphism concealed powerful selective forces (Ford gave human blood groups as an example).

It was as a result of Ford's work, as well as his own, that Dobzhansky changed the emphasis in the third edition of his famous text from drift to selection.

[21] He laid much of the groundwork for subsequent studies in this field, and was invited as a consultant to help set up similar research groups in several other countries.

[16] Polymorphism in natural populations is frequent; the key feature is the occurrence together of two or more discontinuous forms of a species in some kind of balance.

The entomologist Michael Majerus discussed criticisms that had been made of Kettlewell's experimental methods in his 1998 book Melanism: Evolution in Action.

In her controversial book Of Moths and Men, Judith Hooper (2002) gave a critical account of Ford's supervision and relationship with Kettlewell, and implied that the work was fraudulent or at least incompetent.

Haldane, were known to have shocked Ford by catching live moths as they flitted around a light, popping them in their mouths, and eating them whole.

[28] Haldane, who did not like Ford, was of the opinion that Ford and Kettlewell had attempted to capitalise on the supposed evolutionary adaptation of the main two variants of the peppered moth, for which Haldane, as early as 1924, had predicted the statistical probability of rate of change from light to melanic forms as an example of classic Mendelian genetics.

[29] Botting already regarded the case of the peppered moth as tantamount to belief in Lamarckian evolution, and was of the opinion that some genetic mechanism other than bird predation was at work.

[32] He could be markedly generous to his friends: it was "an open secret" that he made a handsome contribution to the grant of £350000 given by the Nuffield Foundation for the establishment of a Unit of Medical Genetics at the University of Liverpool; this greatly boosted the research of Cyril Clarke and Philip Sheppard.

Ford was on good terms with Theodosius Dobzhansky, who did ground-breaking work on ecological genetics with Drosophila species: they exchanged letters and visits.

[34] Bryan Clarke wrote Ford's obituary in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society,[1] but there are few other sources on his life.