Who coined the term “gene” to describe the biological inheritance?

Danish pharmacist, botanist, plant physiologist & geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen (1857-1927) is best known for coining the terms gene, phenotype and genotype.

The biological inheritance that Johannsen wanted to describe is called Mendelian inheritance, also known as Mendelism, following the principles proposed by Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician & Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel(1822-1884) in 1865-1866, based on his pea plant experiments that established many rules of heredity. Mendel is regarded as the “father of genetics”.

Johannsen coined the term "gene" to describe Mendelism as well as the terms “phenotype” and “genotype” in his book “Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre” (Elements of the exact theory of heredity), one of the founding texts of genetics. "Gene” traced from the Greek word genos, meaning "birth".

British chemist & X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Elise Franklin (1920-1958), referred to as the “dark lady of DNA”, contributed a crucial part in the discovery of DNA's structure, which led to English molecular biologist & neuroscientist Francis Crick (1916-2004), American molecular biologist, geneticist & zoologist James Watson, and New Zealander-British biophysicist Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) win a Nobel Prize in 1962.

Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866 – 1945), an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist & embryologist won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.