Tag Archives: reproductive physiology

Frozen: The story of Frostie the calf

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Frostie calf CROPIan Wilmut is best known for his involvement with the team which cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996. However, his scientific career, which spans more than five decades, includes a variety of groundbreaking achievements and discoveries, which are being revealed as his papers are catalogued as part of the continuing ‘Towards Dolly’ and ‘The Making of Dolly’ projects.

Ian Wilmut initially wished to work as a farmer, but he ‘shuffled sideways into scientific research’*, as he puts it, and ultimately won a scholarship as an undergraduate at Nottingham University to work for two months under Chris Polge at  the Animal Research Station in Cambridge. His role was to help out generally with experiments, but he soon became fascinated by embryos, and returned to work with Polge once he graduated. Wilmut’s PhD, awarded in 1971, was on the freezing of boar semen. Copies of Wilmut’s published papers exist in the archive from 1969 onwards, and a glance through the papers which appeared over the next decade reveal Wilmut’s wide-ranging research on the effects of freezing, thawing and warming on embryos and spermatozoa in mice, sheep and cattle.

In 1973, Wilmut was the first scientist to successfully freeze a calf embryo (using liquid nitrogen), thaw it, and transfer it to a surrogate mother. This process led to the birth of a healthy red and white Hereford-Friesian cross calf, which Wilmut wryly named ‘Frostie’. Wilmut’s findings were published within a few weeks of Frostie’s birth in The Veterinary Record as ‘Experiments on the low-temperature preservation of cow embryos’ (June 30 1973, 686-690), and a copy of the reprint survives in the archives. Wilmut has remarked that this was ‘one of the fastest scientific publications ever’. It also led to some considerable interest from the world’s media, with Wilmut appearing on television and newspapers from as far away as New Zealand seizing upon the story. This media attention was a precursor to the storm which Wilmut, Keith Campbell and team would generate two decades later when Dolly the sheep was born. Wilmut’s discovery of the viability of frozen embryos to produce healthy offspring has since been used across many different species in agriculture and also for the conservation of rare breeds. The first human to be born from a frozen embryo was Zoe Leyland, born in Melbourne in 1984.

Wilmut’s work with Chris Polge equipped him with many of the techniques in reproductive physiology which would instruct his later work on cloning, nuclear transfer, stem cell and regenerative medicine in Edinburgh, where Wilmut moved in 1973. Throughout his career Wilmut has been inspired by the possibilities of advances in reproductive physiology and biotechnology for fertility treatments,practical applications to the farming industry and breakthroughs in treatments or cures for debilitating genetic diseases.

*All quotes taken from The Second Creation: the age of biological control by the scientists who cloned Dolly, I. Wilmut. K. Campbell and C. Tudge (London, 2000).
Clare Button
Project Archivist

Science From The Tomb…

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Coll-1364/1/6

Coll-1364/1/6: Papers of R.A. Beatty

It’s nearly Hallowe’en, when spooky subjects are foremost in our minds. An ideal time, then, to look at some rather unusual correspondence from the Richard Alan Beatty archive about Egyptian mummies! At first glance, this might seem an unlikely research subject for a reproductive physiologist, but Beatty had his reasons. Writing from the Institute of Animal Genetics to the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum in July 1977, Beatty asks whether he may have a sample of ‘a testis of an Egyptian mummy’ to enable him to assess whether ‘ certain aspects of chromosome structure and spermatozoan morphology are stable’. In his letter, Beatty realises his request may be a ‘long shot’, but if it worked, ‘it could make an entertaining letter to Nature.’

Beatty was to be disappointed at first. He received a reply three days later from the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum regretting that, as all their mummies were still in their wrapped state, the Museum could not allow any ‘surgical operation’ to take place. In reply, Beatty understands this restriction, but wonders if he could obtain any mummified cats instead, as ‘there would be merit in looking first at a mummy of some mammal other than man.’ He adds: ‘I read that 100,000 mummified cats were sold for fertiliser in the last century, and this made me hope that cats are in plentiful supply!’ However, he learned that those mummified animals in the Department’s collection were wrapped as well, and so also unavailable for study.

However, Beatty was directed to the Museum’s Department of Zoology, where he had better luck. This Department boasted a collection of mummified ‘monkeys, cats, dogs, and mongooses’, and were happy to let Beatty take a testis sample from an adult male dog from the W.M. Flinders Petrie collection, which was in an unwrapped state. He would also be permitted a sample from a human mummy in the Department of Palaeontology. Beatty visited the Museum on 16 December 1977 to take his samples, having been advised that ‘a strong sharp scalpel’ would be needed, the consistency of the mummified tissue being like ‘very hard leather’. Ever prepared, Beatty tested out his scalpel on ‘an old leather boot’ beforehand!

From a report amidst the correspondence, it appears Beatty was eventually successful in getting his samples from the dog and human mummies:

Testis cores taken 16/12/77, wrapped in polythene, placed in tube, tube later maintained in dessicator.

Dog: Consistency very hard – almost rock-like…

Human: Consistency like medium hard cheese, very oily in texture.

It is not clear from Beatty’s archive exactly what resulted from his research on the Egyptian mummies – so we’d be delighted to hear from anyone who may know more about it! In the meantime, you can read more about the strange story, mentioned by Beatty, of the 180,000 mummified cats brought over to England from Egypt in the nineteenth century to be used as fertiliser here:
http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/12/18/tens-of-thousands-of-egyptian-mummies-in-english-soil/

Happy Hallowe’en everyone!

Clare Button
Project Archivist