Though better recognized for its immediate endeavors in human embryo research, the Carnegie Department of Embryology also employed a breeding colony of rhesus macaques for the purposes of studying human reproduction. This essay follows the course of the first enterprise in maintaining a primate colony for laboratory research and the overlapping scientific, social, and political circumstances that tolerated and cultivated the colony's continued operation from 1925 until 1971. Despite a new-found priority for reproductive sciences in the United States, by the early 1920s an unfertilized human ovum had not yet been seen and even the timing of ovulation remained unresolved. Progress would require an organized research approach that could extend beyond the limitations of working with scant and inherently restrictive human subjects or with common lab mammals like mice. In response, the Department of Embryology, under the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), instituted a novel methodology using a particular primate species as a surrogate in studying normal human reproductive physiology. Over more than 40 years the monkey colony followed an unpremeditated trajectory that would contribute fundamentally to discoveries in human reproduction, early embryo development, reliable birth control methods, and to the establishment of the rhesus macaque as a common model organism.
...MoreDescription Focuses on the work done to investigate human reproduction with rhesus macaques.
Book
Craig, Patricia Parratt;
(2004)
Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vol. 4: The Department of Plant Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB000520112/)
Book
Sandage, Allan;
(2004)
Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vol. 1: The Mount Wilson Observatory: Breaking the Code of Cosmic Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB000501451/)
Book
Brown, Louis;
(2004)
Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vol. 2: The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
(/isis/citation/CBB000550072/)
Book
Yoder, Hatten S.;
(2004)
Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vol. 3: The Geophysical Laboratory
(/isis/citation/CBB000550019/)
Article
Radick, Gregory;
(2006)
What's in a Name? The Vervet Predator Calls and the Limits of the Washburnian Synthesis
(/isis/citation/CBB000770730/)
Book
Baulu, Jean;
Dance, Peter;
(2005)
Singes et grands singes: la découverte des primates par les naturalistes et leur représentation dans la gravure et le dessin au cours des cinq derniers siècles
(/isis/citation/CBB000774122/)
Article
Rossiianov, Kirill;
(2002)
Beyond Species: Il'ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes
(/isis/citation/CBB000300215/)
Article
Le Grand, Homer E.;
(1990)
Rise and fall of paleomagnetic research at Carnegie's DTM
(/isis/citation/CBB000030053/)
Book
McGinnies, William G.;
(1981)
Discovering the desert: Legacy of the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory
(/isis/citation/CBB000047068/)
Article
Servos, John W.;
(1983)
To explore the borderland: The foundation of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington
(/isis/citation/CBB000027964/)
Chapter
Kingsland, Sharon E.;
(1993)
An elusive science: Ecological enterprise in the Southwestern United States
(/isis/citation/CBB000055090/)
Chapter
Sober, Elliott;
(2007)
Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB000774728/)
Article
Kosmachevskaia, E. A.;
Gromova, L. I.;
(2011)
Tropics in the Subtropics: I. P. Pavlov and the Sukhumi Primate Station
(/isis/citation/CBB001211392/)
Book
Hazen, Margaret Hindle;
Trefil, James;
(2002)
Good Seeing: A Century of Science at the Carnegie Institution of Washington
(/isis/citation/CBB000201410/)
Book
Greene, Meg;
(2008)
Jane Goodall: A Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB000774885/)
Essay Review
Kimler, William;
(2012)
Case Studies, Controversy and the “Fieldworker's Regres”s
(/isis/citation/CBB001566820/)
Book
Peterson, Dale;
(2006)
Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man
(/isis/citation/CBB000741520/)
Article
Rees, Amanda;
Radick, Gregory;
(2006)
Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB000770726/)
Book
Dale Peterson;
(2018)
The Ghosts of Gombe: A True Story of Love and Death in an African Wilderness
(/isis/citation/CBB283766535/)
Article
Hagen, Joel B.;
(2010)
Waiting for Sequences: Morris Goodman, Immunodiffusion Experiments, and the Origins of Molecular Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001022394/)
Be the first to comment!