‘Crook’ pipettes: embryonic emigrations from agriculture to reproductive biomedicine1

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Abstract

While cloning, stem cells, and regenerative medicine are often imagined in a futurial idiom—as expectations, hype, hope and promises—this article approaches the remaking of genealogy in such contexts from a historical route. Through a series of somewhat disparate historical connections linking Australian sheep to the development of clinical IVF and the cloning of Dolly at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996, this article explores the linkages through which agriculture, embryology, and reproductive biomedicine are thickly intertwined. Key to this examination is not only the history of experimental sheep breeding, and its somewhat unexpectedly genealogical connections to (Australian) national identity (‘wool in the veins’), but also the re-emergence of a distinctive frontier ethos in the context of assisted conception, and later human embryonic stem cell derivation. I have set this scene of genealogical interconnection against the criss-crossing traffic between Britain and Australia, and the wool trade, to emphasise the importance of global, as well as local, connections in the bloodlines of animals such as Dolly. In sum, this article examines the idea of the ‘biological frontier’ by exploring its histories as a means to offset the assumption that this frequently encountered idiom describes a future that is, or must be, by definition, unknown and unknowable.

Introduction

Following its first successful practice in 1978, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has quickly become established as a routine component of fertility treatment, and more than five million children have been born worldwide through this technique—which is today considered a normal and routine component of reproductive biomedicine. The controversy concerning ‘test-tube babies’ that reached a peak shortly before Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe succeeded in their pioneering experiment in human reproduction has dimmed to a point that many are unaware IVF was ever controversial, still less how intensely it was opposed, even by otherwise sympathetic members of the medical and scientific communities (Edwards & Steptoe, 1980, pp. 106–107). In the early twenty-first century, it is cloning, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and human embryonic stem cell derivation which have become the focus of international debate and sharp division between those for whom they are seen to represent the future promise of scientific improvement, and those who fear they are pushing humanity ‘too far’ into the realms of biological re-engineering (Fukuyama, 2002, Habermas, 2003, Henig, 2004).

Inevitably such debates are overly focused on the future, and on what is ‘new’ about high profile reproductive techniques such as somatic cell nuclear transfer. However, not only are many of the basic techniques of embryology and models of reproductive physiology used in procedures such as IVF more than a century old (Hans Spemann successfully performed nuclear transfer on sea urchin embryos in the 1920s), but these scientific models and techniques are also far more substantially intertwined in the development of reproductive biomedicine than may appear to be the case. As British mammalian developmental biologists such as Graham (2000) and McLaren (1998) have observed, and as Edwards, 2001, Edwards, 2004, Edwards, 2005 has similarly emphasized, the postwar context of experimentation in the embryology of vertebrates was a uniquely productive period, especially in the UK, where many of the theories and techniques out of which human embryonic stem cells, somatic cell nuclear transfer, and human therapeutic cloning—such as embryo biopsy, and precise molecular analysis of the contents of a single blastomere—were derived.

This article attempts to explore yet another dimension of the development of the techniques that have come to define contemporary reproductive biomedicine, namely their connections to agriculture, sheep breeding, colonial pastoralism, and in particular the emergence of the Australian fine-wool trade. By tracking the somewhat unexpected connections between IVF, the Australian outback, and Dolly the sheep, this article follows a meandering path, perhaps suited to its ovine orientation, back in time to the international connections, material transfers, market networks, and symbolic exchanges in which, it argues, contemporary developments in reproductive biomedicine, stem cell science, and ‘cloning’ are usefully situated. These further involve what the article describes as a set of genealogical connections linking Australian sheep and wool to the mythology of the frontier—imagined as both a pastoral and heritable origin of shared substance—and later the emergence of the Australian nation, which still later celebrates its national identity on yet another frontier—that of reproductive biomedicine, where Australian clinicians and scientists have been both prominent and celebrated ‘pioneers’.

This article thus begins by exploring the significance of selectively bred sheep to Australia’s settler economy and the means by which its four-footed frontier came to be seen as the birthplace of a national identity that was repeatedly described as if pastoralism were itself a form of primitive national protoplasm. The idea of ‘wool in the blood’ of contemporary Australians is not only a popular, and widely cited, idiom, but a ‘living legacy’ in the form of sheep stations where the land, people, and animals share the same name (Austin, 2004, Ward, 1978, Perry, 1963). This foundational ovine idiom, whereby a pastoral legacy of sheep-breeding becomes, in the words of Australian anthropologist Wolfe, 1994a, Wolfe, 1994b, Wolfe, 1998, something that is ‘carried in the veins’ of contemporary Australians, adds a useful historical dimension to the frequent depiction of biology itself as a ‘frontier’.

The most challenging process to document, for which this article provides only a descriptive scaffold, is the way in which the Anglo-Australian legacy of shared sheep and wool bonds was ‘transferred’ into human IVF in the 1980s, when the standard protocols for IVF were adapted to include ovulation induction—a technique developed for sheep (Kannegiesser, 1988, Robinson, 1967).2 The rationalization of sheep ovulation acquired human form under the close supervision of Alan Trounson and Carl Wood, widely celebrated as the fathers of Australian IVF. Trounson, who cloned a lamb as a doctoral student at the University of Sydney by splitting a six-day-old morulla in two, with pipettes he shaped to resemble crooks, could be seen to be as much a product of a distinctive Anglo-Australian scientific coupling based on sheep and wool as are Dolly, the Roslin Institute, IVF, or stem cells3 see Fig. 1.

The fact that Trounson was supported by an Australian Wool Board Scholarship4 to study at Cambridge, where his contemporaries included many of the scientists who later contributed to Dolly’s creation (and together comprise one of the world’s most powerful and accomplished scholarly lineages of reproductive biologists), cannot be considered purely coincidental, but rather forms part of a legacy this article tries to begin to unpack—as it does the celebration of Australian achievements in IVF as part of the nation’s centenary (Kannegiesser, 1988).

These genealogical aspects of frontier heritage and national identity, which are both literal and symbolic, and which in Australia have a distinctively sheepish cast, reveal suggestive dimensions of Australian ‘in vitro’ genealogies in the form of stem cells, genomics, and cloning. These explorations, as it turns out, also reveal a distinctively ovine descent pattern, as many of the components of IVF, embryo surgery, and ovulation induction, were perfected in sheep—often under funding from the Australian wool board, and, crucially, through a constant interchange of Australian and British agricultural animals, knowledges, techniques, and scientists. Thus, the bioeconomics of the wool trade can be seen to have laid many of the vital scientific, commercial, and agricultural foundations for contemporary partnerships between Britain and her commonwealth partners in the pursuit of future bio-innovation, while agriculture is also revealed as an important context for biomedical innovation. Together, these linkages offset the connotation of radical novelty that attaches to Dolly, cloning, and stem cells, while also revealing some intriguing historical linkages between pastoralism, the remaking of genealogy, the wool trade, assisted conception, cloning, sheep breeding, and the very idea of a ‘biological frontier’.

United by shared interests of commerce, industry, and science, British and Australian scientists can be seen to share a lineage of vital innovation within the life sciences, bonding them, in Donna Haraway’s terms (Haraway, 1997, p. 7), as kindred offspring of a specific mode of ‘sociotechnical production’ (or, in this case, re-production). If the genealogy (or even protoplasm) that links the sheep experiments of Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell in Britain to those of Alan Trounson and Carl Wood, and back further still to the carefully tended flocks belonging Robert Bakewell and Joseph Banks is historically rooted in a shared commitment to agricultural improvement, livestock industrialization, medical and scientific progress, and the generation of new commercial markets, as this article suggests, so it may be both possible and necessary to consider the history of developments in contemporary reproductive bioscience, biomedicine, and biotechnology to be at least equally important as their imagined futures in our discussions of where they may lead.5

Section snippets

Gaol to wool

Sheep are often considered to be synonymous with the founding of Britain’s last, and largest Antipodean colonial possession, Terra Australis. However, the original colony of New South Wales was not originally imagined in a pastoral idiom. When the First Fleet touched ground at Cape Cove in 1787, the British (‘Home’) Government’s intentions for its new possession were strictly ‘import only’: it was intended that the remote colony become a gaol in order to relieve Britain’s overcrowded prisons of

Wool to wealth

Much dispute predictably surrounds the origins of the fine-wool trade in Australia, and the role of certain prominent Australian ‘forefathers’ within it, but most commentators identify a significant change in the early colonial economy in the period 1803–1804, under Governor King, when the colony began to reach self-sufficiency, and the real possibility of export, or ‘staple’, commodities arose in earnest. Prominent among such export opportunities was fine wool, a product that had already begun

New breeds

One of the most striking legacies of Australia’s national formation on its pastoral frontier, where wool, blood and soil remain so integrated with sheep that in many cases generations of families, their studs (or stations), and their breeds share the same name, is their reincarnation in the context of Australian reproductive biomedicine during the country’s bicentennial celebrations in 1988. These developments not only extend our ability to consider the shaping influence of the frontier effect

Wool to embryos

This excitement belonged to Alan Trounson, one of Australia’s most eminent scientists and the Director of its newly established Stem Cell Bank at Monash. At the age of 16, Trounson accepted a scholarship from the Wool Board of New South Wales to become one of the ‘wool technology students’ pursuing ‘wool technology subjects’ at the New South Wales Institute of Technology in 1963. He went on to pursue a Masters degree at the Agricultural Research Station in Hay in western New South Wales, where

British sheep

That these exchanges, or partner-sheeps, work in many directions is, of course, underlined by the world’s most famous sheep, Dolly, born in 1996 to a distinctive lineage of experimental animal lines, whose connections are as intertwined as those of their scientific authors, or creators. As a final example in this depiction of sheep passages, exchanges, or transfers, in this brief account of what might be described as the history of ovination, it is worth pausing briefly to point out at least a

Conclusion

Trounson’s crook pipettes also serve as a fitting emblem for more than two centuries of continuous trade between Britain and Australia based on sheep experimentation, sheep-breeding, sheep products, and exchanges of actual sheep. Similarly, in spite of her ubiquitous association with either improved or dystopic futures, Dolly is a useful animal through which to consider how viable offspring embody hybrid lineages of science, industry, agriculture and medicine in ways that take their shape not

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sarah Wilmot for keen editorial assistance and Alan Trounson for permission to reproduce a figure from his dissertation.

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    This article is adapted from Franklin (2007).

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