Introduction

Between the farm and the clinic: agriculture and reproductive technology in the twentieth century

In this paper, we investigate the ways in which a group of scientists in Edinburgh worked across mice and sheep during the last quarter of the twentieth century. With this local episode, we show the utility of an interspecies perspective to investigate recent historical transformations in the life sciences. We argue that the emergence of animal biotechnology was the result of interactions between neoliberal policymakers, science administrators, molecular biologists, agricultural breeders, and the laboratory and farm organisms with which they worked. During the early 1980s, all these actors believed that the exportation of genetic engineering techniques from mice to farm animals would lead to more effective breeding programmes in the agricultural sciences. However, the circulation of people, money, expertise and infrastructures that the experiments required, as well as the practical constraints of working with mice and sheep, resisted a simple scaling-up from one organism to the other. This displaced the goals of the Edinburgh scientists from the production of transgenic sheep to stem cell research and human regenerative medicine. We account for this unexpected shift by looking at the interplay between science policy and its implementation via collective action and bench work across different organisms. The emergence of animal biotechnology in Edinburgh also provides historiographical insights on the birth of Dolly the sheep and, more generally, on the interactions between the molecular and the reproductive sciences at the fall of the twentieth century.

Reproductive technology revolutionized dairy production during the past century. Artificial insemination was first successfully applied to cattle in the early 1900s. The next major developments involved semen extenders, invention of the electroejaculator, progeny testing, addition of antibiotics to semen during the 1930s and 1940s, and the major discovery of sperm cryopreservation with glycerol in 1949. The 1950s and 1960s were particularly productive with the development of protocols for the superovulation of cattle with both pregnant mare serum gonadotrophin/equine chorionic gonadotrophin and FSH, the first successful bovine embryo transfer, the discovery of sperm capacitation, the birth of rabbits after in vitro fertilization, and the development of insulated liquid nitrogen tanks. Improved semen extenders and the replacement of glass ampules with plastic semen straws followed. Some of the most noteworthy developments in the 1970s included the initial successes with in vitro culture of embryos, calves born after chromosomal sexing as embryos, embryo splitting resulting in the birth of twins, and development of computer-assisted semen analysis. The 1980s brought flow cytometric separation of X- and Y-bearing sperm, in vitro fertilization leading to the birth of live calves, clones produced by nuclear transfer from embryonic cells, and ovum pick-up via ultrasound-guided follicular aspiration. The 20th century ended with the birth of calves produced from AI with sexed semen, sheep and cattle clones produced by nuclear transfer from adult somatic cell nuclei, and the birth of transgenic cloned calves. The 21st century has seen the introduction of perhaps the most powerful biotechnology since the development of artificial insemination and cryopreservation. Quick, inexpensive genomic analysis via the use of single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping chips is revolutionizing the cattle breeding industry. Now, with the introduction of genome editing technology, the changes are becoming almost too rapid to fully digest.

Cambridge scientists Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson are best known for their work on the British food tables and wartime food rations, but it is their research on prenatal and early postnatal growth that is today seen as a foundation of the fields studying the impact of environment upon prenatal development and, consequently, adult disease. In this essay I situate McCance’s and Widdowson’s 1940s human and 1950s experimental studies in the context of pre-war concerns with fetal growth and development, especially within biochemistry, physiology and agriculture; and the Second World War and post-war focus on the effects of undernutrition during pregnancy upon the fetus. I relate Widdowson’s and McCance’s research on the long-term effects of early undernutrition to the concern with recovery from early trauma so pertinent in post-war Europe and with sensitive (critical) periods, a concept of high importance across different fields. Finally I discuss how, following a hiatus in which fetal physiology engaged with different questions and stressed fetal autonomy, interest in the impact of environment upon prenatal growth and development revived towards the end of the twentieth century. The new field of “developmental origins of health and disease”, I suggest, has provided a context in which Widdowson’s and McCance’s work has regained importance.

In the history of genetics Arend Hagedoorn (1885–1953) is mainly known for the ‘Hagedoorn effect’, which states that part of the changes in variability that populations undergo over time are due to chance effects. Leaving this contribution aside, Hagedoorn’s work has received scarcely any attention from historians. This is mainly due to the fact that Hagedoorn was an expert in animal breeding, a field that historians have only recently begun to explore. His work provides an example of how a prominent geneticist envisaged animal breeding to be reformed by the new science of heredity. Hagedoorn, a pupil of Hugo de Vries, tried to integrate his insights as a Mendelian geneticist and an animal breeding expert in a unified view of heredity, eugenics and evolution. In this paper I aim to elucidate how these fields were connected in Hagedoorn’s work.

In the early twentieth century, Wilhelm Johannsen proposed his pure line theory and the genotype/phenotype distinction, work that is prized as one of the most important founding contributions to genetics and Mendelian plant breeding. Most historians have already concluded that pure line theory did not change breeding practices directly. Instead, breeding became more orderly as a consequence of pure line theory, which structured breeding programmes and eliminated external heritable influences. This incremental change then explains how and why the large multi-national seed companies that we know today were created; pure lines invited standardisation and economies of scale that the latter were designed to exploit. Rather than focus on breeding practice, this paper examines the plant varietal market itself. It focusses upon work conducted by the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) during the interwar years, and in doing so demonstrates that, on the contrary, the pure line was actually only partially accepted by the industry. Moreover, claims that contradicted the logic of the pure line were not merely tolerated by the agricultural geneticists affiliated with NIAB, but were acknowledged and legitimised by them. The history of how and why the plant breeding industry was transformed remains to be written.