Wallace on War: WWI Images in the Roslin Glass Slides Collection

Posted on November 18, 2013 by kdavis

In a previous post, I wrote about Professor Robert Wallace, (1853 – 1939), who taught Scientific Agriculture and Rural Economy at the University of Edinburgh and how many of the glass slides in the Roslin Collection seem to belong to him. While many of these images focused on his teaching interests, there were quite a few on World War I concerns. Professor Wallace was passionately concerned about the treatment of war prisoners and hostages in Germany and Belgium during the war and wrote to the President of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson between 1914 and 1917 with his concerns and urging him to send American troops to Europe to fight. These letters can beound in the Centre for Research Collections, Main Library, University of Edinburgh (Reference number: GB 237 GB 237 Coll-87 / Location Gen. 554-555; Gen. 867F).

Here are a selection of images from the Roslin Glass Slides Collection featuring – animals during and after WWI and political cartoons:

Remembering Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire (1879-1915)

Posted on November 11, 2013 by towardsdolly

As today is Remembrance Day, it seems a fitting time to commemorate an early geneticist whose achievements were cut short by war. Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire (1879-1915) was appointed to the Lectureship in Genetics at the University of Edinburgh (the first of its kind in Britain). Had he lived, it is likely that Darbishire would have been offered the post of director of the newly formed Animal Breeding Research Station (later known as the Institute of Animal Genetics) in Edinburgh; the position that in 1921 was filled by F.A.E Crew.

Darbishire was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied zoology. He soon became absorbed in problems of heredity and in the first few years of the twentieth century he began a series of breeding experiments with mice (known informally as the ‘waltzing mice’ experiments). At this point, his interests lay in the biometric rather than a Mendelian approach to heredity (ie that heredity relies on continuous rather than discontinuous variation), but when he became Demonstrator in Zoology at the University of Manchester in 1902, he began to reassess the Mendelian approach. He continued his experiments with mice in the light of his earlier biometric position, and concluded that the supposed contradiction between the two theories was due more to differences of opinion rather than inherent theoretical incompatibilities. He therefore cut himself adrift from both schools of thought, maintaining an independent and critical distance.

After a spell as Senior Demonstrator and Lecturer in Zoology at the Royal College of Science, in 1911 Darbishire accepted the newly created post of Lecturer in Genetics at Edinburgh, where he had the run of the University’s Experimental Farm at Fairslacks for breeding experiments. By 1914, Darbishire was delivering lectures at the University of Missouri, Columbia and was so successful that he was offered professorships from two American universities. However, Darbishire could not leave England after the outbreak of war. Upon returning, he was pronounced unfit for the Army (due to ‘physical delicacy’) but in July 1915 he tried a second time at a recruiting office, where he was accepted and enrolled as a private in the 14^th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. His sister Helen wrote that ‘[h]e devoted himself to his duties as a soldier with the same zest and the same meticulous attention to detail that marked his work in other spheres, and he won the love and admiration of his comrades.’ However, within less than six months, Darbishire contracted cerebral meningitis whilst in military camp at Gailes. He died on Christmas Day 1915. Three days after his death, he was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery.

Page from Notebook of Arthur Darbishire (c.1902), Edinburgh University Library Special Collections, EUA 1N1/ACU/A1/3/6

By the time that a young medic with an interest in animal breeding returned to Edinburgh after the war, he found that his two mentors at the University, Darbishire and F.H.A Marshall, were no longer there (Marshall had accepted a post in Cambridge). These two absences meant that, when it came to appointing a director of the new Animal Breeding Research Station, F.A.E Crew was ‘on the spot’ and duly appointed to the post in 1921. As we have seen, Crew made a great success of the Institute, but one wonders what differences Darbishire might have made to the development of genetics in Edinburgh. As it is, there is little concerning Darbishire in the archival and printed collections of ‘Towards Dolly’, although we do have one of his research notebooks and some of his collected offprints.

Helen Darbishire, who was later Principal of Somerville College Oxford, wrote of her brother in 1916:

All who knew him will keep in memory a personality alive and young to a rare degree, fulfilling itself in a passion for music, much laughter, a perfectly disinterested love of truth, a delight in producing delight in others, and the keenest possible interest in life itself whichever way it led him.

Reference:
Helen Darbishire, Preface to An Introduction to Biology and other papers by A.D Darbishire (Cassell and Company Ltd, 1917)

ASCUS talk: Genetics in the Archives: Inspiring New Art

Posted on November 4, 2013 by kdavis

Another way we promote the project is by giving talks and last Wednesday we had the exciting opportunity to collaborate with both ASCUS: the Art and Science Collaborative and Dr. Mhairi Towler and Paul Harrison of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. Our part of the talk was to introduce the collection to a wider audience and to show the wealth of material on offer to researchers; then, the artists, Dr. Mhairi Towler and Dr. Paul Harrison spoke about their current project sand how they used some of the material from the Conrad Hal Waddington Collection in their work.

Our talk: ‘Towards Dolly: Edinburgh, Roslin and the Birth of Modern Genetics’ is based within Edinburgh University Library’s Centre for Research Collections and is generously funded by the Wellcome Trust’s Research Resources in Medical History grants scheme. The project archivist, Clare Button, and rare books cataloguer, Kristy Davis are cataloguing the archival records of the Roslin Institute, the Institute of Animal Genetics, the papers of James Cossar Ewart and Conrad Hal Waddington, glass plate slides, rare books and scientific offprints.

And Dr. Mhairi Towler and Dr. Paul Harrison of Duncan Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee spoke on their artwork based upon the C.H. Waddington collection who presented aspects of their work in progress: ‘Epigenetic Landscapes’. This research they said ‘explores and celebrates the ideas of developmental biologist, philosopher and visual thinker, C.H. Waddington.’ http://www.designsforlifeproject.co.uk/ Afterwards there was a brief question and answer session before people left or moved on to discuss it further.

We would like to thank Dr. Mhairi Towler and Dr. Paul Harrison for speaking; ASCUS for collaborating with us to make this event possible; the Art and Science Library at Summerhall for letting us use their space and all those who braved the weather and attended the event.

Alan Greenwood’s ‘Mexican Misadventure’

Posted on October 28, 2013 by towardsdolly

Many of the scientists who feature in our collections were extremely well-travelled, and their archives abound with information about the conferences, congresses and conventions which they attended all over the world. However, it’s not often that we come across a real-life adventure story which very nearly didn’t have a happy ending…

Among the papers of Alan Greenwood (director of the Poultry Research Centre in Edinburgh from 1947 until 1962) there is a press cutting from the Poultry World & Poultry magazine, dated 13 November 1958 under the headline ‘Mexican Misadventure: Full Story of Missing Congress Delegates is Disclosed’. The article goes on to tell the harrowing experience of Alan Greenwood and his colleague, veterinary surgeon James Ebeneezer Wilson, whilst journeying to a congress on poultry in Mexico City. Writing a personal account, Greenwood paints a vivid picture of the severe floods in Mexico which hit the country after a seven-year long period of drought. Arriving at El Paso ready to cross the Rio Grande to Juarez by train, all seemed to be going swimmingly: with the Chief Customs Official at the railway station providing them with free Mexican beer. The train departed at 10.30 on 18^th September carrying 1,200 passengers, but got stranded at Jiminez the next morning when the rains hit. The delay was supposed to be around 10 hours, but as Greenwood reports: ‘in reality we spent four nights and four days on that train under circumstances which were not in the least bit comfortable.’ This is an understatement: with no hot water or light, limited sanitation and an infestation of cockroaches, the enforced confinement on the train was hardly pleasant. An attempt to cross a bridge by foot was aborted when it was discovered that the bridge in question had been swept away in the floods, so the confinement continued with the food situation growing ‘desperate’. At last, Greenwood and his colleague were able to get seats on a two-coach train trying to get from Jiminez to Chihuahua, but the drama continued:

It was a nightmare journey in many ways with the raging river torrents covering the trestle bridges over which we crawled at the rate of about a yard per minute. It was raining heavily all the time, and electrical storms were continuous. At times the carriages were jumping up in the air and leaving the tracks.

Greenwood and Wilson finally arrived in Chihuahua at 1am four days after they had left El Paso. After some days of rest and recuperation, the pair began the return journey to Houston. They continued to travel throughout America before returning to Scotland, and the Greenwood archive contains a book of postcards which Greenwood collected from around Mexico and America on this trip.

We probably all have travel ‘horror stories’, but probably none quite so hair-raising as this!

Avian Genome Mapping Advances at the Roslin Institute in 1995

Posted on October 21, 2013 by kdavis

In 1995 David W. Burt the Chair of Comparative Genomics at the Roslin Institute, Midlothian, Scotland, wrote several articles on the successes of mapping the avian genome through the project the International Poultry Genome Mapping Project and the creation of the public database, ChickGBASE (http://archive.is/DCn2c) that was established at the Roslin Institute to ‘provide access to a summary of chicken gene mapping data.’

In the article, ‘Chicken genome mapping: a new era in avian genetics’ by Burt, Bumstead, Bitgood, Ponce de Leon and Crittenden, Trends in Genetics (May 1995, Vol. 11, No. 5), they note that the ‘first linkage map of the chicken, which was also the first linkage map reported for any domestic farm animal species, was published in 1936 by Hutt’ and there were updates by other scientists over the years.

There are multiple articles by Burt and others on the progress made with avian gene mapping in the Roslin Institute’s 1995 offprint series and what’s fascinating to see is how the advances in biotechnology has aided their efforts.

According to Burt’s report in the Roslin Institute’s Annual Report 1994-1995, the next challenge that they faced was to ‘locate and identify the defective gene in this (talpid3) mutant’ and that ‘a “positional cloning” approach could be used in which the talpid genetic locus itself is cloned and genes within that DNA are tested.’

Stefan Kopeć in the Alan Greenwood archive

Posted on October 14, 2013 by towardsdolly

The Alan Greenwood archive contains a variety of material, from degree certificates and correspondence to copies of lectures and scientific papers. However, one of the most fascinating parts of the archive is a collection of photographs which not only contains some nineteenth-century portraits of Greenwood’s ancestors, but also visually documents the work done at the Institute of Animal Genetics Poultry Research Centre from the period Greenwood was director (1947-1962), as well as some earlier photographs from the Institute of Animal Genetics, where Greenwood worked from 1923. The photographs have been mounted on around 100 pages of paper which look to have at one time been fixed inside a folder or album, and are annotated in Greenwood’s hand. The photographs consist mainly of official portraits and photographs taken for publicity and press purposes, informal snaps of conferences and social events and also more personal, intimate pictures of scientists and members of their family. The first page of photographs in the collection is from the latter category, and depicts Polish biologist Stefan Kopeć (1888-1941) and his daughter Maria. When I first came across these pictures whilst cataloguing, I was struck by the intimacy of the shots: Kopeć sits, his spectacles lying on one side, looking frankly at the camera. The second picture shows Maria tenderly embracing her father. I thought these pictures were remarkably domestic and personal for a collection which mainly consists of pictures of scientists ‘at work’, and it piqued my interest in finding out more about Kopeć and his daughter.

It proved to be quite a story. Stefan Kopeć was a pioneering insect endocrinologist, publishing papers in academic journals in Polish, English and German. After receiving his PhD at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1912, he joined the Pulawy Agricultural Research Station in Poland and was made director there in 1929. His most important contribution to science was his discovery of the role of the insect brain in the production of hormones, and this study laid the groundwork for what is now called neuroendocrinology. As for Kopeć’s connection with Alan Greenwood, I was aware that they had published a joint paper, ‘The Effects of Yolk Injections on the Plumage of an Ovariotomised Brown Leghorn Hen’ (Development Genes and Evolution, 121:1-2, 87-95) in 1929-1930, so it seemed likely that Kopeć visited the Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO) at some point around this time. Records in the Institute of Animal Genetics (as the department became known) collection are scanty from this period, but I was delighted to come across a message from Kopeć in the Institute’s visitors’ book dated January 4^th 1928, along with another photograph. Kopec writes:

The seven months I spent in the ABRO have been most profitable for me. I gained there some valuable methods and many important suggestions. I was very sorry to have to leave the place where I also got many good friends. Ladies and gentlemen! (both from the laboratories and poultry houses and from the office!) Please accept many thanks for all your kindness, all advice and help and be sure of my gratitude. Do not miss any opportunity to visit me in Pulawy. In the name of myself and my colleagues, of my wife and my F1-generation (♂ and ♀), of my rabbits, mice, fowls and other laboratory creatures I assure you of a very warm welcome…“

The rest of the story, however, is not so positive. In 1940, Kopeć was arrested and imprisoned in Poland by the Gestapo along with his daughter Maria and son Stanislaw for their involvement in a Polish underground university. In 1941, Stefan and Stanislaw were executed at Palmiry, near Warsaw, in reprisal against an action of the Polish underground army.

Stefan’s daughter Maria however, went on to be a distinguished radiation scientist, receiving the prestigious Maria Skłodowska-Curie Medal in 1983, while Stefan Kopeć ‘s name lives on in the annual International Conference on Anthropods the Stefan Kopeć Memorial Conference at the University of Wroclaw.

Photographs like these can have enormous power in the ability to open up individual life stories. Kopeć’s story demonstrates the interrelationship between different collections in the ‘Towards Dolly’ project and reflects the sometimes complex but always fascinating story of animal genetics in Edinburgh.

From gene to trait: opening the black box

Posted on October 7, 2013 by kdavis

As I’ve been cataloguing the Rosin Institute’s offprints, I came across a very interesting item by Dr. Grahame Bulfield, the former director and chief executive of the Roslin Institute and vice-principal, University of Edinburgh and who is also consulting with and providing us with his considerable knowledge and insight of genetics in Edinburgh on the Towards Dolly project. This brief abstract of the paper, ‘From gene to trait: opening the black box’ found in the Journal of Endocrinology, Volume 140, Supplement, Abstract S18, 1994 (GB 237 Coll-1362/4/329):

Or here: http://joe.endocrinology-journals.org/content/140/3_Suppl/S18.full.pdf

As you can see, he mentions that while there was little success in 1994 of manipulating ‘commercially important traits’ of various animals there was the increasing potential for success by using the research gathered from the Human Genome Mapping Project to establish similar projects for various animals. There are many other papers in the Roslin Institute offprints that discuss various aspects of research on transgenic animals that I’ve catalogued and you’ll be able to search for them once the online catalogue is available in the near future.

Alan William Greenwood (1897-1981)

Posted on September 30, 2013 by towardsdolly

The ‘Letters in the Limelight’ blog posts from the past few months have drawn from the correspondence part of the James Cossar Ewart archival collection here at Edinburgh University Library Special Collections. However I have recently moved on to catalogue the archival papers of Alan William Greenwood, who was director of the Poultry Research Centre in Edinburgh from 1947 until his retirement in 1962.

As with all of the collections being catalogued under the ‘Towards Dolly’ project, interconnecting stories are never far away. As F.A.E Crew, director of the Institute of Animal Genetics, wrote in his article ‘The Genealogy of the Poultry Research Centre’ (British Poultry Science, 121, 289-295, 1971), it was because of James Cossar Ewart that Greenwood came to Edinburgh in the first place…

Alan Greenwood was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1897. After reading Chemistry and Biology at the University of Melbourne, in 1923 he gained a scholarship to study in the UK. Greenwood’s original intention was to work on poultry genetics under Reginald Punnett (1875-1967) at the University of Cambridge, but Cossar Ewart persuaded him to come to join the Animal Breeding Research Department (later the Institute of Animal Genetics) in Edinburgh, then in its infancy under Crew. In Crew’s article, mentioned above, he also attributes Greenwood’s decision to head north to Mrs Punnett, who ‘actively discouraged her husband from enlarging his university commitments since these would interfere with their tennis and other social activities’! In any case, Edinburgh proved to be a fortunate choice: the influence of Crew, whose special interest was poultry, directed the whole course of Greenwood’s future research on the reproductive physiology of the fowl (particularly the secondary sexual characters and endocrine activity).

Greenwood was to take over as acting director of the Institute when Crew joined up for war service, and in 1947 he became director of the newly formed Poultry Research Centre. In the coming weeks the ‘Towards Dolly’ blog will be drawing on a few stories from the Greenwood archive.

The PRC was to eventually become a part of the number of bodies which formed the Roslin Institute. Now, with the establishment of a new National Avian Research Facility (NARF) in Edinburgh, in a partnership between the Roslin Institute and the Pirbright Institute, avian research is certainly still thriving in Edinburgh with Greenwood’s legacy still very much in evidence.

The Roslin Institute’s Scientific Papers, 1993-2007

Posted on September 23, 2013 by kdavis

Now that the Poultry Research Centre offprints are catalogued, I’ve finally started on the Roslin Institute’s papers. According to the history of the Institute on its website the,

Roslin Institute was established in 1993 as a wholly owned but independent institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council. Its antecedents, however, go back to 1919 and are closely linked to animal genetics research at the University of Edinburgh.

Roslin Institute traces its origins to the establishment in 1919 of the Institute of Animal Genetics (IAG) by the University of Edinburgh. In 1947, the Agricultural Research Council (later the Agriculture and Food Research Council – AFRC) created a series of publicly funded research organisations to help UK farmers produce more food. In Edinburgh the expertise within the IAG was used to create two new organisations, the Poultry Research Centre (PRC) and the Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO). Within the University of Edinburgh a residual presence was maintained in the form of the Unit of Animal Genetics (UAG).

In 1985, a fundamental review of over 30 AFRC Institutes and Units led to the closure of the UAG and PRC and ABRO were combined with the Institute of Animal Physiology based at Babraham to form the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research (IAPGR). ABRO staff were progressively relocated onto the PRC site at Roslin to form the Edinburgh Research Station of IAPGR.

In 1992, the AFRC decided that Roslin and Babraham should be developed into independent Institutes, each with its own clearly defined mission. On 1 April 1993, Roslin Institute (named after the local village) was established as an independent, but wholly owned, Institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). In 1995 Roslin Institute became a company limited by guarantee and a Scottish Charity sponsored by BBSRC. In April 2007, Roslin Institute was integrated with the Neuropathogenesis Unit formerly of the Institute for Animal Health, and in April 2008 the combined organisation became a part of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies (RDSVS) of the University of Edinburgh.

The scientific papers that I’m working on date between 1993 and 2007, so I’m looking forward to finding some about the creation of Dolly, the sheep and more about the other research conducted there over the years. So far I’ve catalouged quite a few on gene mapping and transgenic animals!

Letters in the Limelight: the battle for clean milk

Posted on September 16, 2013 by towardsdolly

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.’

Naturally much of Ewart’s correspondence in the collection is concerned with both the commercial and the purely scientific aspects of animal breeding. However, Ewart was also involved periodically with issues surrounding human health and its relation to agricultural industries. This week’s letter is from a man called William Burgess (although his signature is unclear), who writes from Highwood Hill, Mill Hill, London on 11 July 1917. Burgess writes that he has read Ewart’s article ‘The Saving of Child Life’, which appeared in The Nineteenth Century and After (Vol. 82, Part 1, 1917), and which dealt with the issue of infant mortality arising from the consumption of raw (that is, unpasteurised) milk.

From the 1880s onwards it became known that diseases such as bovine tuberculosis could be spread to humans from cattle through milk, and that children were particularly susceptible to infection. Even though pasteurisation had been discovered in the 1860s, the idea was slow in being put into practice, and the battle for clean milk was a lengthy one. It was 1934 before milk pasteurisation and compulsory tuberculin skin testing of cattle was adopted in the UK (in the 1930s, it was thought that around 40% of dairy cows were infected with TB). However, pasteurisation of milk is still not compulsory in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, although it was made compulsory in Scotland in 1983. Ewart was clearly carrying out practical research into methods for milk cleanliness in preparation for his article; another letter in the collection from February of that year is from John Robertson, Medical Officer of Health in the Birmingham Public Health and Housing Department. Robertson recommends that Ewart visit a certain farm near Basingstoke to see a particular method of cleansing in action.

Burgess writes that the advice Ewart’s article contains would be invaluable if it was ‘boiled down’ into a tract and made comprehensible to ‘ordinary people’, both the farmers who produce milk and the parents who purchase it. He writes that he himself has a small dairy and sells milk to his neighbours, so he will ask the district nurse to keep a watch on new babies. If such a popular tract were written however, Burgess advises Ewart against using such overly ‘scientific’ words as ‘pre-natal’, ‘biometricians’ and ‘heredity’!

This letter demonstrates something of the breadth of applications to which Ewart put his animal breeding work. From investigations into hereditary characteristics to the prehistoric origins of domestic animals to improvements in the wool industry, Ewart was always interested in the wider applications of the natural sciences. The relationship between ‘pure’ biological science, its commercial applications and its implications for human health is something which endures to the present day.