Printed Material Highlights from the Roslin Collection

With phase I of the Towards Dolly project ending for me, the Rare Books Cataloguer, I thought to look back over the material I’ve worked with and to highlight a few of my favourites from the three different mediums – offprints, rare books and glass plate slides. One of the most interesting things I found when cataloguing this material was the range of topics of interest – the geneticists collected a wide-range of subjects from specifically dealing with animal genetics to ethnography and  botany that opens this material to a variety of researchers.

In the offprint series the two – out of thousands – that I’d like to feature are:

RoslinOffprintDollyUpdateFrom the Roslin Institute offprints, Harry D. Griffin’s article, Update on Dolly and nuclear transfer, Roslin Institute, Edinburgh: Annual Report from 1 April 97 to 31 March 98, (GB237 Coll-1362/4/1848) which discusses the advances in nuclear transfer technology a year after Dolly, the sheep’s birth.

 

CrewOffprintWJBryanFrom the FAE Crew offprint series, William Jennings Bryan’s closing argument in the Scopes evolution case in Tennessee from 1925. (GB 237 Coll-1496/33 – General Biology 2). Bryan was the prosecuting attorney in the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ who argued against the teaching of evolution in schools with Clarence Darrow for the defence.

 

 

Two from the rare book collection:

Roslin_S_10

The beautifully illustrated cover contains an interesting map, text and illustrations of the Chinese Langshan fowl in A. C. Croad’s book, The Langshan fowl: history and characteristics from 1899. (Roslin.S.10)

 

 

 

Roslin_S_50-58_7Another beautifully illustrated cover, is a favourite of mine from the nine volume series, The horse : its treatment in health and disease, with a complete guide to breeding training and management, 1905 (Roslin.S.50). Some of the volumes have pop-up style inserts showing the physiology of hooves and mouths layer-by-layer.

 

 

And two from the glass plate slides collection:

Ostriches Pigs and PumpkinsThis is one of my absolute favourites from the Roslin glass plate slides collection simply for its oddity – ostriches and pigs in a field of pumpkins with farm houses in the background in the early 20th century. (Coll-1434/1177).

 

 

Coffee Ranch in Vera CruzCoffee is a passion of mine and so I was thrilled to find this image of a coffee ranch in Vera Cruz, Mexico in the early 20th century. The image shows a family standing in front of their thatched hut, a man on a horse and two men carrying coffee bean baskets on their back with trees and bushes in the background. (Coll-1434/1103.

 

Each of these are personal favourites, as well as being a representative sample of the diversity of the collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

The Hen Who Made History…Nearly

Greenwood photos hen and eggs CROPPED

Edinburgh holds a number of world records in genetics and animal breeding, which, considering its historic significance in the history of the science in Britain, is not all that surprising. Its most famous ‘first’ is of course Dolly the sheep – the first mammal to be cloned from adult cells – although there are many other examples. However, sometimes the ‘almost firsts’ are just as interesting historically, as well as a little poignant, as I found recently when cataloguing the archive of Alan Greenwood, director of the Poultry Research Centre from 1947 to 1962.

Amongst his wonderful collection of photographs is one depicting a hen standing proudly astride crates and baskets of eggs. The caption informs us that the hen is ‘the sister of the hen which laid 1515 eggs in 9 laying years and shared the world’s record.’ This was intriguing enough in itself, but a full explanation wasn’t forthcoming until I came across two typed pages in Greenwood’s collection of draft lectures and articles. Titled ‘So Near and Yet So Far’, this short piece describes the particularly productive life of the chicken named L1641, ‘from which so little and yet so much more was hoped.’

Part of the research carried out at both the Institute of Animal Genetics and the Poultry Research Centre in Edinburgh was concerned with increasing the productivity and economic value of domestic animals by applied genetics and breeding schemes. In the case of chickens, a large aspect of their value clearly lies in the number and quality of eggs they produce. On 10 April 1939 however, a chicken was hatched at the Institute which would push the limits of egg production beyond the expectations of the staff.

Chicken L1641 (as she was wingbanded) laid her first egg soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. From her first year she was a high producer, laying 273 eggs ‘in spite of wartime stringencies’ as Greenwood wryly tells us. Over the next 8 years she produced on average 142 eggs per year. This is high, although not as impressive as the hens which held world records for the number of eggs laid in a single year. In 1915 a white Leghorn hen in Greensboro, Maryland by the name of Lady Eglantine set a record at 314 eggs in one year. A number of Australorp hens in Australia broke this record successively during the 1920s however, with the number of eggs in one year standing at 347 to 354 to 364!

Where Edinburgh’s chicken L1641 excelled, however, was in the total number of eggs produced over a lifetime. By the time she went into moult in the autumn of 1948, she held the joint world record, which stood at 1515 eggs. However, the strain imposed on her calcified and thickened arteries by the moult was too great, and she died before the end of the year. As Greenwood sadly concludes his article, ‘One more egg only and she would have made history.’

Alan Greenwood’s catalogue can be viewed on our brand new website at: http://www.archives.lib.ed.ac.uk/towardsdolly/

A Sample of the Roslin Institute’s Cloning Research Post-Dolly: 1998 and 2007

Dolly and Bonnie

As mentioned in a previous post, Dolly, the sheep caused a media sensation in 1997 as the first cloned animal using a nuclear transfer process  and so, I thought it would be interesting to highlight several articles that I came across on Dolly and cloning at the Roslin Institute in 1998 and then again in 2006. I wondered what cloning research had developed over the years since Dolly, the sheep’s birth in 1996 and surprisingly, or not, the articles I came across (that evoked Dolly) dealt with the issue of eating cloned animal meat and the ethical debate of cloning humans for medical purposes.

Note:  these four articles are just a sampling of the articles produced by the Roslin geneticists on the  issues, debates and research surrounding Dolly, nuclear transfer, animal and human genetics, cloning purposes (medical, agricultural, genetic conservation, etc..) to illustrate what way being discussed at the time. For more articles on these subject, please consult the Roslin Institute off-prints for 1998 and 2006 at GB237 Coll-1362/4/.

Update on DollyIn the 1998 Roslin off-print bound volumes, I found Harry Griffiths report, ‘Update on Dolly and nuclear transfer’ in the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh: Annual Report April 1, 97-March 31 (GB 237 Coll-1362/4/1848) and Sir Ian Wilmut’s article, ‘Cloning for Medicine’ in Scientific American, December 1998 (GB 237 Coll-1362/4/1897). Griffiths report describes Dolly’s creation by the Roslin geneticists and notes that their breakthrough caused several other groups to ‘take advantage of public interest in cloning to advertise their successes …. Calves cloned from adult animals were reported from Japan and from New Zealand.’ The New Zealand clone was from ‘the last surviving animal of a rare breed’  which highlighted the use of cloning to preserve endangered species. He continues with discussing Intellectual Property issues in relation to Professor Yanagimachi and his colleagues at the University of Hawai’i ‘Honolulu Cloning Technique’ and closes with a couple of paragraphs on human cloning. He notes the UK Human Genetics Advisory Commission and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s report ‘Cloning  issues in Reproduction, Science and Medicine’ from 7 December, 1998 which recommends that ‘there should be a continued ban on all ‘reproductive  cloning’ – the cloning of babies – but gives cautious support  to the cloning of human cells for therapeutic purposes.’

IMG_4359Wilmut’s article in Scientific American reports on the how biomedical researchers are developing ways to use genetically modified mammals for medical purposes.  He mentions the sheep, Megan and Morag who were the first mammals cloned from cultured cells. A technique that allows cloned sheep to carry human genes and such animals produce milk that can be processed to create therapeutic human proteins. The sheep, Polly, is a transgenic clone of a Dorset sheep and ‘a gene for a human protein, factor IX, was added to the cell that provided the lamb’s genetic heritage, so Poly has the human gene.

In the 2006 Roslin off-print bound volumes, I found two fascinating articles:– Sir Ian Wilmut’s  ‘Human cells from cloned embryos in research and therapy’ in BMJ Vol. 328, February 2004 and J. Sark, et al.’s  ‘Dolly for dinner? Assessing commercial and regulatory trends in cloned livestock’ in Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 25, No. 1, January 2007.

IMG_4371Sir Ian Wilmut’s article ‘Human cells from cloned embryos in research and therapy’ in BMJ Vol. 328, February 2004 is one of the more contemporary papers in the collection that discusses stem cell technology and human cloning issues. He cites studies of human genetic diseases and how cloned cells ‘will create new opportunities to study genetic disease in which the gene(s) involved has not been identified’, specifically describing work with motor-neurone diseases. Then, Wilmut notes how stem cells could be used in treatments for a variety of degenerative diseases, i.e. cardiovascular disease, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease and Type I diabetes. Finally Wilmut discusses the differences in regulation of nuclear transfer and human cloning in various countries, noting that in the United Kingdom, ‘project to derive cells from cloned embryos may be approved by the regulatory authority for the study of serious diseases. By contrast human reproductive cloning would be illegal.’

Dolly for DinnerThen, in 2007, the article by and J. Sark, et al’s ‘Dolly for dinner? Assessing commercial and regulatory trends in cloned livestock’ in Nature Biotechnology, ‘reviews the state of the art in cloning technologies; emerging food-related commercial products; the current state of regulatory and trading frameworks, particularly in the EU and the United states and the potential for public controversy.’

As you can see by these four examples there are a range of issues and concerns that have been discussed over the years. While advances are made in cloning and genetic modification, there are still ethical debates to be had and more research to be done. In reading over these and other similar articles in the Roslin off-prints, I enjoyed learning about the different uses of transgenic animals.