Hans Grüneberg's mice skeletons
Notes associated with the item record that it belonged Hans Grüneberg (1907-1982), a biologist who established the subject of development genetics in Britain along with C. H. Waddington (1905-1975), who worked in Edinburgh. He used this item in the late 1950's to show his students the effect of genetic mutations on skeletal development.
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Fact File
| Collection | UCL Grant Museum of Zoology |
| Accession Number | LDUCZ-EN-24 |
| Dimensions |
Length 28.00 cm, Height 9.72 cm, Width 6.25 cm |
| Provenance | UCL Wolfson House |
| Key Dates | Manufactured between 1955 and 1960 Acquired by the Grant Museum of Zoology in 2011 |
| Materials | Bred laboratory mice, synthetic alizarin, glyceraol, glass, wood and cork. |
Introduction
Hans Grüneberg devoted most of his scientific career to the study of mammalian genetics and to the mouse as a model for human genetic defects. Through his work on the genetics of the mouse, he considerably influenced the medical profession to take genetics and human inherited diseases more seriously. Above all, his work established the mouse as the genetic animal that was to be used extensively in cancer and immunological research and gene manipulation.
Grüneberg joined University College London in 1933, on the invitation of J.B.S. Haldane (Lewis & Hunt, 1984). He was closely associated with the Galton Laboratory, which played a pivotal role in the development of human genetics worldwide. Grüneberg’s academic career at University College London, which ended with his retirement in 1975, coincided with this period of effervescence at the Galton laboratory that strongly contributed to establishing human genetics as a specific discipline. What’s more, Grüneberg’s career was a time of deep transformation in the relationship between genetics and society. Indeed, although eugenics belonged to mainstream biology in the pre-war period, it gradually lost credence after 1945.
More broadly, the mid-twentieth century constitutes a turning point in the study of genetics. While the discipline had hitherto focused on family studies in humans and breeding experiments in plants and animals and to explore the mechanisms of inheritance, the advent of molecular biology in the 1950s allowed scientists to study the role of DNA as a carriers of genetic information.
This object holds a certain importance in the Grant Museum collection, because it is reminiscent of a transformative stage in the history of genetics, and was produced at a time when biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), R. A. Fisher (1890-1962), Lionel Penrose (1898-1972) and others profoundly shaped contemporary genetics from the Galton Laboratory at University College London. Last, the specimen at hand carries valuable information concerning the use of the house mouse as a laboratory animal and its input to the practice of genetics.
Object Biography
The mice skeletons were prepared between 1955 and 1960 by Grüneberg's assistants, presumably in Wolfeson House, where he conducted his research.
Shortly before his death in 1982, Grüneberg donated most of his research material to the Natural History Museum (Berry, personal communication). The specimen at hand was found in 2011 in the basement store in the depths of Wolfson House, and was about to be thrown away when Professor Sue Povey donated it to the Grant Museum. .
The item is currently in stores at the Grant Museum. Its relatively poor state of preservation may perhaps explain why it is not on display.
Genetics and society in the post-war period
The 1950's saw profound changes in the relationship between genetics and society, as the eugenics movement gradually lost credence as a result of the Second World War. This dynamic is made evident by the changes that the Eugenics Society underwent in that period.
The Eugenics Society was founded in 1907 by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a British mathematician and biologist. The Society sought to influence parenthood in Britain, with the aim of improving the overall genetic profile of the national population. In the early twentieth century, it carried out extensive propaganda activities, and championed radical policies that sought to decrease the proportion of the "unfit" in society through means such as forced sterilization of the "mentally defective" (Harper, 2008, p.408).
From 1930 onwards the Society's general secretary, Carlos Blacker, shifted its focus to making methods of birth control more widely available. In his 1952 book “Eugenics: Galton and after,” Blacker acknowledged a swing away from widespread acceptance of eugenic ideals in Britain to a negative public attitude to eugenics in the years following World War II. In 1963, the Society stopped its propaganda activities entirely (Wellcome Trust, 2015).
The ideals of eugenics lost credibility in academic circles as well as in public opinion, as we shall see in the section concerned with the Galton Laboratory.
The Galton laboratory
The discipline of human genetics emerged in the post war period. The Galton Laboratory in Britain was one of the principle research centres to foster this trend (Harper, 2008, p.224). The facility had existed since 1911, when it was opened by Francis Galton as a “Laboratory for National Eugenics" (UCL, 2015)
In 1945, biologist Lionel Penrose (1898-1972) was appointed to the Galton Chair. Penrose brought radical changes to the ethos of the Laboratory. He sought to distance the Laboratory from its eugenic heritage as much as possible, and, in 1963, had the name of his chair changed from tot he Galton Professorship of Human Genetics (Harris, 1973,p.538). Unlike his predecessors, Penrose was medically trained, and thus placed the scientific study of human genetic diseases as the central focus of his department’s research.
Penrose attracted a number of talented scientists to work with him as colleagues and students, in particular, physicians who wished to enter the field of human genetics. The presence of scientists who were part of University College and who interacted closely around the Galton Laboratory was an important factor in the attraction of new researchers (Harper, 2008, p.230). These included John Maynard Smith, pioneer of evolutionary genetics, J.B.S. Haldane, evolutionary geneticist and popular science writer, R.A. Fisher, a biologist with a strong mathematical mind.
For a period of thirty years from 1945 onwards, researchers in the Galton Laboratory contributed to establishing the basic principles of medical genetics and collaborated within a network centred around Lionel Penrose.
A history of the laboratory mouse
Although the labels of the test tubes suggest that these mice were bred and prepared in the 1950s, one could argue that the fabrication of the object in fact begun in the early twentieth century, when biologists developed new genetically defined strains of mice (Festing and Lovell, 1981).
Laboratory mice can be said to date from 1909, when C.C. Little (1888-1971) produced the first inbred mouse strain by inbreeding the descendants of two “fancy” mice through brother sister mating (Berry, 2012). The initial reason for developing inbred strains was to study cancer, which required genetically defined animals for tumour transplant studies (Held, 1978). Later on, the motivation for creating new inbred strains was to respond to the need for a variety of genetically uniform stocks as a starting point for the identification of the genetic elements in pathologies (Paigen, 2003).
The laboratory mouse is a mixture of genomes from at least four species and subspecies (Paigen, 2003). The common laboratory mouse descends from wild, domesticated and “fancy” mice who were bred by biologists over time. However, most laboratory mice are thought to have been derived in the nineteenth century from “fancy” mice, a variety of mice that have been collected and bred in Japan for centuries (Festing and Lovell, 1981, p.45).
These remarks on the history of the laboratory mouse show that the fabrication of the item is related to a process of selective breeding of mice that lead to the creation of a new sub-species, the laboratory mouse.
The father of mouse genetics
Grüneberg recognized that the mouse's genetic makeup shares similarities with that of humans, and thus saw the mouse as a promising tool for medical research. What's more, he acknowledged that the mouse's quick rate of reproduction would facilitates the study of lineage in large families.
For these reason, Grüneberg sought to establish a consistent system of nomenclature for mouse genes. To this end, he founded the Committee on Mouse Gene Nomenclature in 1939 with Drs L.C. Dunn and G.D. Snell. In the year of its foundation, the Committee published a repertoire named "Genetic Variants and Strains of the Laboratory Mouse" which referenced all known genes in the laboratory mouse and laid out the fundamental rules of gene nomenclature (Lyon et al., 1996, p. vi).
The Committee's work was subsequently re-edited and expanded to record advancements in research. The gene nomenclature contained in the book pertains to the study of inherited medical conditions in humans, and serves as a references to practitioners.
References and Further Reading
Berry, R.J., 2012. Foreword Mice and (Wo)Men: an Evolving Relationship In: M. Macholan, ed. 2012. Evolution of the House Mouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daintith, J. ed., 2008. A Dictionnary of Chemsitry. Sixth edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2008. Alizarin. [text] Available at: < http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/15547/alizarin> [accessed 19/02/15]
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2014. Glycerol. [text] Available at: <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236029/glycerol> [accessed 20/02/15]
Festing M. F. W., Lovell D. P., 1981. Domestication and Development of the Mouse as a Laboratory Animal In: R. J. Berry ed. 1981. Biology of the House Mouse, The Proceedings of a Symposium held at The Zoological Society of London on 22 and 23 November 1979. London: Academic Press. pp. 43-62.
Greene, M. C., 1952. A Rapid Method for Clearing and Staining Specimens for the Demonstration of Bone. Ohio Journal of Science, [online] Available at: <http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/3896/V52N01_031.pdf?sequence=1> [accessed 16/02/15]
Grüneberg, H. 1943. Genetics of the Mouse. London: Cambridge University Press (revised edition 1952, published as volume 15 of Bibliographa Genetica).
Grüneberg, H. 1953. Genetical studies on the skeleton of the mouse. VI. Danforth’s short tail. Journal of Genetics, 51: 317-326.
Grüneberg, H. 1958. Genetical studies on the skeleton of the mouse. XXII. The development of Danforth’s short tail. Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology, 6: 124-148.
Grüneberg, H., 1963. The Pathology of Development, a Study of Inherited Skeletal Disorders in Animals. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.
Grüneberg, H., 1949-1969. Correspondence: Laboratory animals. [letters] Lane-Petter, W., Medical Research Council Laboratories, Laboratory Animals Centre, Carshalton, Surrey.
Harris, H., 1973. Lionel Sharples Penrose. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 19: 521-561.
Harper, P.S., 2008. A Short History of Medical Genetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Held, J. R., 1978. Introductory Remarks. In: H.C. Morse III, ed., 1978. Origins of Inbred Mice. London: Academic Press.
Lewis, D. and Hunt, D.M. (1984). Hans Grüneberg. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 30: 226-247.
Lyon, M. F., Rastan, S. and Brown, S.D.M, eds., 1996. Genetic Variants and Strains of the Laboratory Mouse. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
UCL, University College London, 2015. History of the Galton Collection. [online] Available at: <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/galton/about/history> [Accessed 29 March 2015].
Wellcome Trust, 2015. The Eugenics Society Archives. [online] Available at: <http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/makers-of-modern-genetics/digitised-archives/eugenics-society/> [Accessed 20 March 2015]