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The power of partnerships: the Liverpool school of butterfly and medical genetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2014

DORIS T. ZALLEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA. Email: dtzallen@vt.edu.

Abstract

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a group of physician–researchers forming the ‘Liverpool school’ made groundbreaking contributions in such diverse areas as the genetics of Lepidoptera and human medical genetics. The success of this group can be attributed to the several different, but interconnected, research partnerships that Liverpool physician Cyril Clarke established with Philip Sheppard, Victor McKusick at Johns Hopkins University, the Nuffield Foundation, and his wife Féo. Despite its notable successes, among them the discovery of the method to prevent Rhesus haemolytic disease of the newborn, the Liverpool School began to lose prominence in the mid-1970s, just as the field of medical genetics that it had helped pioneer began to grow. This paper explores the role of partnerships in making possible the Liverpool school's scientific and medical achievements, and also in contributing to its decline.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2014 

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References

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27 For example, some Rh-negative mothers who are also blood type O will not develop antibodies against an Rh-positive foetus if that foetus is blood group A or B but will when the foetus is blood group O like themselves. Levine, Philip, ‘Serological factors as possible causes in spontaneous abortions’, Journal of Heredity (1943) 34, pp. 7180Google Scholar; Nevanlinna, H.R. and Vainio, T., ‘The influence of mother–child ABO incompatibility on Rh immunisation’, Vox Sanguinis (1956) 1, pp. 2634Google Scholar.

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33 ‘Top of the decade’, Time (26 December 1969) 94, p. 31. The prevention of Rh disease was included with such advances as the birth-control pill, the polio vaccine, kidney transplantation and dialysis, and human heart transplantation.

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41 McConnell to McKusick, 31 October 1957 (copy provided to the author by McConnell). The original letter is archived in CMA, Box 110B5-6 – Victor McKusick Papers: Old Moore Clinic Fellows, A-G-1960s, folder: Evans, David Alan Price.

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50 Clarke, op. cit. (25).

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52 Other contributors to the building were the North West Cancer Research Fund (which supported a cytogenetics unit and an immunochemistry unit) and the university itself, which provided funds for a facility housing animals for research and for a Department of Radiodiagnosis.

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59 Because she disliked her childhood nickname, Peggy, she and her mother selected another nickname, Féo, found in a novel. It became the name she used from her teen years throughout the rest of her life.

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70 Clarke, C.A., Clarke, F.M.M. and Sheppard, P.M., ‘Mimicry and Papilio memnon: some breeding results from England’, Malayan Nature Journal (1968) 21, pp. 201219Google Scholar; Clarke, F.M.M., ‘Papilio memnon: a tailed “butlerianus” in the Malay Peninsula’, Malayan Nature Journal (1978) 30, pp. 551553Google Scholar.

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81 P.A. Coventry and John Pickstone, ‘From what and why did genetics emerge as a medical specialism in the 1970s in the UK? A case-history of research, policy and services in the Manchester region of the NHS’, Social Science and Medicine (1999) 49, pp. 1227–1238.

82 Among these alumni are David Weatherall (Oxford), Rodney Harris (Manchester), Marcus Pembrey (London) and Peter Harper (Cardiff).