the rediscovery of the work ofGregor Mendel, who had deduced what became known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance in the 1850s and ’60s in
an Augustinian monastery in Czechoslovakia.
At Harvard, Little worked underW. E. Castle at the dawn of the fieldcalled, beginning in 1906, “genetics”; it was Castle who popularized Mendel’s long-forgotten work in the United States. Castle trained Pincus, as well. 45 J. A. Long andE. L. Mark, who also
worked in Castle’s lab and who, in 1911, published
The Maturation of the Egg of the Mouse
, bought their stock of mostly white and brown mice from dealers and fanciers. 46 Little wanted to breed his own mice, to save money and to standardize the stock, allowing for more controlled research. In 1920, he launched theMouse Club of America;
three years later, he started holding meetings in Maine. In 1929, the year afterMickey Mouse was first seen in theaters, Little founded theJackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, and appeared on the cover of
Time.
(Because of Little’s work, the mouse became the standard laboratory animal and Jackson Laboratory the leading supplier of mice for biomedical research, shipping, by the end of the twentieth century, more than two
million mice annually. A mouse gene was the first gene ever cloned; the mouse genome was the first genome decoded.) 47
Still, mice aren’t men. There’s a limit to arguing by homology. Until 1840, no one knew that human females ovulate monthly, the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, and the question of what determines the sex of a human embryo was uncertain. Anatomists inGermany began collecting the products of miscarriages andabortions in order to study ovarian, embryonic, and fetal development in humans. In 1890, an American namedFranklin Paine Mall, who had studied in Germany, began teaching at a new university in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which he sent a circular letter to more than half the physicians in the United States:
My dear Doctor,
During the last few years the kindness of several physicians has enabled me to procure for study about a dozen human embryos less than six weeks old. As a specialist in embryology I ask if you can aid me in procuring more material. It is constantly coming into your hands and without your aid it is practically impossible to further the study of human embryology.… Any material which may come into your possession should not be injured by handling nor
should it be washed with water. Carefully place it in a tumbler and as soon as possible preserve it in a bath of alcohol.… When a specimen is to be sent by express it should beplaced in a bottle completely filled with alcohol, with a very loose plug of absorbent cotton both above and below it.
Thanking you in advance for any aid you may give me in procuring material, I am,
Very Truly Yours,
F. Mall.
Clark University, Worcester, Mass. 48
Mall soon moved from Clark to Johns Hopkins, where he collected specimens from hospitals in Baltimore, a city filled with poor women and in which one out of every three children born out of wedlock diedin infancy. He rarely kept records about the women from whose bodies his specimens came, but his scant notes include stories like this: a twenty-five-year-old woman, childless after four years of marriage, in whose uterus, examined after a
hysterectomy, was found an embryo; a domestic servant who “fell into the hands of an abortionist”; a woman, one month pregnant, who committed suicide by swallowing lye. By 1917, Mall had gathered, into what had become theCarnegie Human Embryo Collection, more than two thousand embryos. 49
Similar collections were made in Europe. All those embryos and fetuses stored in jars made an impression onJ.B.S. Haldane, a Scottish biologist credited with uniting Mendelian genetics with Darwinianevolution and who happened to
an Augustinian monastery in Czechoslovakia.
At Harvard, Little worked underW. E. Castle at the dawn of the fieldcalled, beginning in 1906, “genetics”; it was Castle who popularized Mendel’s long-forgotten work in the United States. Castle trained Pincus, as well. 45 J. A. Long andE. L. Mark, who also
worked in Castle’s lab and who, in 1911, published
The Maturation of the Egg of the Mouse
, bought their stock of mostly white and brown mice from dealers and fanciers. 46 Little wanted to breed his own mice, to save money and to standardize the stock, allowing for more controlled research. In 1920, he launched theMouse Club of America;
three years later, he started holding meetings in Maine. In 1929, the year afterMickey Mouse was first seen in theaters, Little founded theJackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, and appeared on the cover of
Time.
(Because of Little’s work, the mouse became the standard laboratory animal and Jackson Laboratory the leading supplier of mice for biomedical research, shipping, by the end of the twentieth century, more than two
million mice annually. A mouse gene was the first gene ever cloned; the mouse genome was the first genome decoded.) 47
Still, mice aren’t men. There’s a limit to arguing by homology. Until 1840, no one knew that human females ovulate monthly, the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, and the question of what determines the sex of a human embryo was uncertain. Anatomists inGermany began collecting the products of miscarriages andabortions in order to study ovarian, embryonic, and fetal development in humans. In 1890, an American namedFranklin Paine Mall, who had studied in Germany, began teaching at a new university in Worcester, Massachusetts, from which he sent a circular letter to more than half the physicians in the United States:
My dear Doctor,
During the last few years the kindness of several physicians has enabled me to procure for study about a dozen human embryos less than six weeks old. As a specialist in embryology I ask if you can aid me in procuring more material. It is constantly coming into your hands and without your aid it is practically impossible to further the study of human embryology.… Any material which may come into your possession should not be injured by handling nor
should it be washed with water. Carefully place it in a tumbler and as soon as possible preserve it in a bath of alcohol.… When a specimen is to be sent by express it should beplaced in a bottle completely filled with alcohol, with a very loose plug of absorbent cotton both above and below it.
Thanking you in advance for any aid you may give me in procuring material, I am,
Very Truly Yours,
F. Mall.
Clark University, Worcester, Mass. 48
Mall soon moved from Clark to Johns Hopkins, where he collected specimens from hospitals in Baltimore, a city filled with poor women and in which one out of every three children born out of wedlock diedin infancy. He rarely kept records about the women from whose bodies his specimens came, but his scant notes include stories like this: a twenty-five-year-old woman, childless after four years of marriage, in whose uterus, examined after a
hysterectomy, was found an embryo; a domestic servant who “fell into the hands of an abortionist”; a woman, one month pregnant, who committed suicide by swallowing lye. By 1917, Mall had gathered, into what had become theCarnegie Human Embryo Collection, more than two thousand embryos. 49
Similar collections were made in Europe. All those embryos and fetuses stored in jars made an impression onJ.B.S. Haldane, a Scottish biologist credited with uniting Mendelian genetics with Darwinianevolution and who happened to
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