Tomorrow (2^nd March) marks the birthday of Professor F.A.E Crew (1886-1973), who was the first Director of what became known as the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh from 1921 until 1944. It would be a long blog post indeed to try and do justice to this remarkable man. Crew, medically qualified but with a lifelong interest in breeding fowl, steered the Institute from its penniless early days into its heyday as a world renowned research centre, attracting such individuals as Nobel winner H.J Muller. The image above shows Crew (second from the right in the natty cravat) with a group of similarly renowned visitors to the Institute including Dame Honor Fell (Director of Strangeways Laboratory, Cambridge) and zoologist/medical statistician Lancelot Hogben. However, Crew’s influence was by no means confined to the sphere of genetics. He fought in both world wars, attaining the rank of Major in the First War, then Brigadier in the Second. By the time the Second War was at a close, Crew gave up the Directorship of the Institute in order to take up the Chair of Public Health and Social Medicine at Edinburgh University. He also established the Polish School of Medicine in Edinburgh (which awarded medical degrees recognised by the Polish government in exile until its closure in 1949), wrote the impressive six-volume official Army Medical History of the War, was World Health Organisation Visiting professor at Rangoon and Bombay (he also set up the first medical genetics clinic in India) and was happily driving around Turkey in a caravan well into his seventies.

Charismatic, handsome, a beautiful writer and renowned as a public speaker (his friend Hogben remarked that ‘he had a histrionic talent worthy of a Shakespearean actor’) Crew nevertheless remained self effacing all his life, always claiming that his career moves were down to ‘pure luck’ and that ‘mine has not been a very distinguished career’. Crew left no traceable personal archive, but treasures such as a photocopied draft of an autobiography and an endlessly colourful 8 hour interview recording with Margaret Deacon of the Science Studies Unit helps to fill out the picture. The latter recording captures Crew’s wry humour, compassion and humility perfectly whilst also providing such memorable anecdotes as his keeping of tame goats in his office at the Institute (whose constant grazing apparently saved him from having to be bothered by any official correspondence) and the experimental cocks which Crew trained to walk down to the cellar each night so as not to disturb the neighbours!

He remained eloquent and witty right up until his death aged 87.  As he was also a committed humanist, his conclusion to his essay ‘On the Meaning of Death’ published in A.J Ayers’ The Humanist Outlook (1968), is a fitting epithet: ‘In a world so organized that everyone equipped to do so would be able to enjoy life at least as much as I have done, there would be very few who would hanker after an existence beyond the grave for the life lived on this earth would be complete in itself.’

Cataloguing the correspondence of zoologist/animal breeder James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), I have been intrigued by the various ‘life stories’ which emerge from the letters. Periodically I will be including some highlights in a series of posts entitled ‘letters in the limelight’ .

E.A.  Clemens (d. 1924) is perhaps one of Ewart’s more ‘exotic’ correspondents – not least due to his being the nephew of Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). Earnest Allen (‘Al’) Clemens owned a ranch in Magdalena, New Mexico, and so owned a fair number of horses, which were Ewart’s primary focus of study at this time. In a letter dated 21 June 1902, Clemens tells Ewart that he would happily supply him with any horses from his own herd for experimental purposes, as well as any required skulls and other anatomical parts for analysis. One important motive behind breeding and cross-breeding at this time was the production of animals hardy enough to cope with heavy work or difficult conditions. In a letter to a mutual friend, American naturalist Theo Cockerell, Clemens reports that he was aiming to set up an experimental breeding station on his ranch to breed hardy ponies adapted for life in the prairie or desert. Whether or not he achieved this is as yet unknown (maybe this will emerge in later correspondence), but he was clearly a man with ambition.

Fascinated by this exchange of letters between a ranch in New Mexico and a rural bungalow south of Edinburgh, I did a bit of rooting around for any more information on Clemens. And what a story! His home, now named Clemens Ranch House, is now a registered cultural property and the current owners have created this informative website:

http://clemensranchhouse.com/briefhistory.html

It is interesting to read about how Clemens’ personality manifested itself in the building of his ranch house. He was obviously a perfectionist: he reputedly ordered stonemasons from Italy to cut the locally quarried stone for the ranch house and ordered his back porch to be ripped out and remade three times before he was happy with the height. He was also cautious: after apparently being held hostage for three days by desperados, Clemens designed numerous trap doors, tunnels and escape routes from each room of the house!

 Join us again for more ‘letters in the limelight’…

Last week the Dolly team enjoyed a trip out to King’s Buildings, the main campus for the University of Edinburgh’s College of Science and Engineering. Bustling with students – not to mention architectural styles – the site is a chessboard of history, not least where animal genetics is concerned. King’s Buildings was home to, for instance, the Institute of Animal Genetics, the MRC Epigenetics Unit and the Poultry Research Centre. We were fortunate enough to have for our guide Professor Grahame Bulfield (former Director of the Roslin Institute and a University genetics student during the 1960s), who is also a valued adviser on the Dolly project board. Grahame’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the roll-call of each building’s previous occupants meant that we were able to visit the habitats of many of the individuals that Kristy and I have been ‘getting to know’ through our cataloguing. It was fascinating to be able to put, if you like, ‘places to names’, and gave us a sense of the social geography of animal genetics at Edinburgh. Here are a couple of our highlights:

This building, now called the Crew building and used by the School of Geosciences, was formerly known as the Institute of Animal Genetics. Frances A.E Crew, Director of the Department in Animal Breeding since 1920, had worked to raise funds partly to pay for a designated building for the Department. Designed by John Matthew, the building was opened in 1930.

This oak panel contains the names of those who obtained higher degrees from the Department up to the year 1950. It used to hang in the entrance hall of the Institute building (above) but has now been moved to the Ashworth Laboratories (also built in 1929), now used by the School of Biological Sciences. Note also the wonderful chairs carved with various farm animals!

The majestic staircase in the Ashworth building displays portraits of many key scientific figures within the University. F.A.E Crew can be seen on the right next to the wooden-framed picture, with his successor as Director, C.H Waddington, two pictures up.

Not quite so visually grand as the two preceding buildings, this used to house C.H Waddington’s Epigenetics Laboratory. Funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Foundation and the Distillers Company, the building was opened in 1965, with Waddington moving his office from the Institute of Animal Genetics building into the top floor here. Aesthetically perhaps a far cry from John Matthew’s creation, but also a bold statement of the continuing expansion of genetics at the University.

With thanks to Professor Grahame Bulfield.

I have recently begun cataloguing the papers of James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), who was Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1882 to 1927. Cossar Ewart was a pioneering zoologist and animal breeder who is probably best remembered for his work on cross-breeding zebras and horses. This work, written up as The Penycuik Experiments (1899), was instrumental in disproving the long-held theory of telegony, which held that the a sire could ‘infect’ the dam he serves by influencing the genetic inheritance of the offspring of subsequent sires.

To disprove this, Ewart cross-bred a zebra stallion with various mares of different breeds, which produced foals with zebra-like stripes. The mares were afterwards mated with horses of their own breeds, but these offspring never showed any evidence of having been affected by the previous zebra sire.

Cossar Ewart was also the driving force behind the establishment of a lectureship in genetics (1911) at the University, the first in the UK. He is pictured above with one of his prized zebras – an image which has already proved to be one of our most popular, as seen here! 

More about Cossar Ewart and his zebras to follow…