Most histories of livestock disease in Britain treat the development of control policy as a government responsibility, to which farmers made little constructive contribution. Similarly, farmers rarely appear in accounts of disease research. This paper uses the example of contagious abortion at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal that state-farming collaboration in research and policy did in fact occur, and that it operated in various ways, with often unexpected outcomes. The collaborative approach to contagious abortion is partly attributed (...) to its clinical and epidemiological features, which made it an unsuitable candidate for the existing, state-led policy of stamping out disease. It is claimed that such collaboration has been overlooked by historians on account of their focus upon diseases that were amenable to stamping out. This focus needs to change if history is to inform present-day disease governance in Britain, which is founded on the concept of ‘partnership’ between farmers and the state. (shrink)

This paper explores the wartime creation of veterinary expertise in cattle breeding, and its contribution to the transition between two very different types of agriculture. During the interwar period, falling prices and steep competition from imports caused farmers to adopt a ‘low input, low output’ approach. To cut costs, they usually butchered, marketed or doctored diseased cows in preference to seeking veterinary aid. World War II forced a greater dependence on domestic food production, and inspired wide-ranging state-directed attempts to increase (...) agricultural output. However, the weak connection between veterinary services and livestock productivity meant that the drive for greater milk yields did not automatically translate into a demand for improved veterinary health care. Rather veterinary expertise had to be actively created and made relevant to the new context. Leaders of the profession secured this goal through establishing a government-backed ‘scheme for the control of certain diseases of dairy cows’. Drawing on pre-existing but rarely applied reproductive technologies, the scheme provided the opportunities and education necessary for more extensive veterinary interventions in cattle breeding. I show how its operation transformed understandings of fertility, raised veterinarians to the status of experts, won them the patronage of farmers and the state, and facilitated the shift to a productivity-oriented agriculture. (shrink)

Drawing from contemporary social science studies on the shifting regime of research governance, this paper extends the literature by utilizing a metaphoric image—research is a game—observed in a field engagement with 82 American, British, and Danish crop and plant scientists. It theorizes respondents’ thinking and practices by placing the rules of the research game in dynamic and interactive tension between the scientific, social, and political-economic contingencies that generate opportunities or setbacks. Scientists who play the game exploit opportunities and surmount setbacks (...) by adopting strategies and reinventing tactics in order to maximize their winnings and to minimize their losses. Winners become superstars who decree what is open, closed, or doable science for the majority of the scientific community. (shrink)

From the 1980s onwards, the Roslin Institute and its predecessor organizations faced budget cuts, organizational upheaval and considerable insecurity. Over the next few decades, it was transformed by the introduction of molecular biology and transgenic research, but remained a hub of animal geneticists conducting research aimed at the livestock-breeding industry. This paper explores how these animal geneticists embraced genomics in response to the many-faceted precarity that the Roslin Institute faced, establishing it as a global centre for pig genomics research through (...) forging and leading the Pig Gene Mapping Project (PiGMaP); developing and hosting resources, such as a database for genetic linkage data; and producing associated statistical and software tools to analyse the data. The Roslin Institute leveraged these resources to play a key role in further international collaborations as a hedge against precarity. This adoption of genomics was strategically useful, as it took advantage of policy shifts at the national and European levels towards funding research with biotechnological potential. As genomics constitutes a set of infrastructures and resources with manifold uses, the development of capabilities in this domain also helped Roslin to diversify as a response to precarity. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief comparative overview of the development of the reproductive sciences especially in agriculture in the UK and the US. It begins with the establishment by F. H. A. Marshall in 1910 of the boundaries that framed the reproductive sciences as distinct from genetics and embryology. It then examines how and where the reproductive sciences were taken up in agricultural research settings, focusing on the differential development of US and UK institutions. The reproductive sciences were also pursued (...) in medical and biological settings, and I discuss how the intersections among all three allowed the circulation of both ideas and scientists’ careers. Across the twentieth century, scientific leadership in the reproductive sciences alternated between the UK and US, and these patterns are elucidated. I conclude with thoughts on future research that might emphasize the elaboration of industrialization processes in agriculture and new capacities to transform both reproductive processes and their products—life itself—as biopower comes to be more ambitiously understood as extending across all species. (shrink)

In 1919 the Animal Breeding Research Department was established in Edinburgh. This Department, later renamed the Institute of Animal Genetics, forged an international reputation, eventually becoming the centrepiece of a cluster of new genetics research units and institutions in Edinburgh after the Second World War. Yet despite its significance for institutionalising animal genetics research in the UK, the origins and development of the Department have not received as much scholarly attention as its importance warrants. This paper sheds new light on (...) Edinburgh’s place in early British genetics by drawing upon recently catalogued archival sources including the papers of James Cossar Ewart, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh between 1882 and 1927. Although presently a marginal figure in genetics historiography, Ewart established two sites for experimental animal breeding work between 1895 and 1911 and played a central role in the founding of Britain’s first genetics lectureship, also in 1911. These early efforts helped to secure government funding in 1913. However, a combination of the First World War, bureaucratic problems and Ewart’s personal ambitions delayed the creation of the Department and the appointment of its director by another six years. This paper charts the institutionalisation of animal breeding and genetics research in Edinburgh within the wider contexts of British genetics and agriculture in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

The Animal Breeding Research Organisation in Edinburgh (ABRO, founded in 1945) was a direct ancestor of the Roslin Institute, celebrated for the cloning of Dolly the sheep. After a period of sustained growth as an institute of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), ABRO was to lose most of its funding in 1981. This decision has been absorbed into the narrative of the Thatcherite attack on science, but in this article I show that the choice to restructure ABRO pre-dated major government (...) cuts to agricultural research, and stemmed from the ARC's wish to prioritize biotechnology in its portfolio. ABRO's management embraced this wish and campaigned against the cuts based on a promise of biotechnological innovation, shifting its focus from farm animal genetics to the production of recombinant pharmaceuticals in sheep milk. By tracing interaction between government policies, research council agendas and local strategies, I show how novel research programmes such as genetic modification could act as a lifeline for struggling institutions. (shrink)