Digitising the archives of blood research

Blood transfusion has become such an integral part of life-saving procedures used today that it is hard to imagine a time when operations were extremely risky affairs.

The emergence of the Blood Transfusion Service in 1946 was a blessing, though unfortunately too late for many war wounded. It was the losses incurred during the war that intensified the work of the Blood Group Unit, a successor to the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit that was established in 1935.

As part of the Library's large-scale digitisation programme, scanning of the Blood Group Unit archive (which covers largely the period from 1940s to 1970s) has just been completed and will be available online later this year.


Under the directorship of Dr Robert Race at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, many familiar names worked within this group: among them, serologists Arthur Mourant (whose archive was recently digitised, see earlier blog) and Race's wife, Ruth Sanger. These partnerships resulted in many significant advances in blood group science, as revealed in the archives (see File ref: PP/SAR for the personal archive of Ruth and Robert Sanger also held within the library but not yet digitised).


Between them, they produced a manual entitled 'Blood Groups in Man' (see File ref: PP/SAR/C/16 for Race's summary of the multiplicity of blood groups in man that he delivered to the British Association, Brighton, 8-15 Sept1948). This book became a bible for transfusion specialists, so much so, it became known simply as 'Race and Sanger'.

It is not suprising that they became the most well-known names in blood group science in the period following WW11 up to 1980. The international press quickly picked up on their ground-breaking work: The Dallas Morning News, November 13 1946, featured a mug shot of Dr Race beneath the heading: 'RH factor expected to bare man's origin' (File ref: SA/BGU/B.1/3/1) as revealed at an International Hematology and Rh conference in Dallas, Texas and Mexico City, 1946. The study of RH blood incompatability was paramount to solving many genetic problems during the 1960s.



















As a double-act, Race and Sanger were remarkable, which is suggested in a letter from Amos Cahan of the Knickerbocker Foundation in New York October 30 1959:

"I don't know if you know what a thrill it is for us to watch you - how you take a thing like the Reiger serum - pick up the trail of a tiny irregularity - force it to yield it's secrets and lead you to new and unexplored land. We feel privileged to be allowed to take part" (File ref: SA/BGU/F.1/46/1)

The work of the Blood Group inevitably involved studying families which meant close cooperation was necessary, but not always possible. Communication with the families of interesting case-studies was problematic at times. Perservance was required to get continued samples, as indicated in a general letter from Race in February 1950 seeking permission from volunteer blood donors:

"We realise that you have already helped the Blood Transfusion Service a great deal but hope that you will not mind being asked to help again in another way. This Unit is investigating the inheritance of a new blood group; in order to do this small samples of blood are needed from families consisting of both parents and two or more children of any age. Two or three drops of blood from a prick of the finger or ear lobe is all that is required ... Our work is primarily concerned with research into human blood groups, which is of the utmost importance in the practical problems of blood transfusion and certain blood diseases of the newborn" (File ref: SA/BGU/G.3/2/1).

At other times, blood supplies were too plentiful, as Ruth Sanger wrote in a letter to Dr M Pickles of the Radcliffe Infirmary Oxford about a mutual case of interest on 5 April 1977:

"Sorry to be so long in writing, but we've had one of those remarkable deluges of blood, lots of interesting things all at once and exhaustion setting in "
(File ref: SA/BGU/F.20/9).

When Dr Race retired from the Unit in 1973, Dr Ruth Sanger became director. Further progress was made in the identification of blood groups and human genetic problems. One area of continued research interest was differing blood types in twins (SA/BGU/F.20) which revealed the problem of Chimerism, a rare disorder that affects twins when chromosomes are mixed in a single organism resulting in 2 sets of DNA. Evidence of this problem was first published by Sanger along with Race and fellow haemotologists in 1957 in the British Medical Journal (see full article).

The MRC Blood Group Unit moved from the Lister Institute to premises at University College, London in 1975 but was disbanded in September 1995, although its work continues in other research centres.

Images:

A wounded soldier indicating the need for blood donations. Colour lithograph after Reginald Mount, Issued by the Ministry of Health in 1945, Copyright of Central Office of Information, Ref: 22648i, for other publicity issued see, File ref: Archives and Manuscripts GC107/1

Race and Sanger at an International Conference in Washington, 1972, File ref: SA/BGU/L/1/11

Front cover of 'Blood Groups in Man', Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1975 (image courtesy of Google Books)

Race and Sanger with 2 colleagues on streets of 1950's London, File ref: SA/BGU/4/5

Blood Group Unit at play beside the Thames, 1950's, File ref: SA/BGU/5/2

Archives and manuscripts cataloguing, June 2011

This month’s new cataloguing bulletin from the Archives and Manuscripts department releases a large tranche of material for researchers to work upon: five collections of twentieth-century papers, totalling over 230 archive boxes of material or over 1000 new database records. Our congratulations to the cataloguers! All this material is now not merely catalogued in the online database, but also enabled for online ordering so that researchers can, should they wish, browse the catalogue, click the ordering link and have the material ready to view on Monday.

Although the records’ date is similar – twentieth-century, with a bias towards the latter half - the subjects documented span a wide range, from institutional documentation to personal papers, from hard-core laboratory science to the social implications of health and welfare. The largest and smallest collections are both records of organisations concerned with public health and with communication (in both directions) between citizens and their health-providers.

The records received from the Royal Society for Public Health and its predecessor bodies (SA/RSP) total well over 100 archive boxes and span the widest date-range of any released this month, going back to the foundation of the Sanitary Institute in 1876. The organisation’s history is complex. The Sanitary Institute amalgamated with the Parkes Museum of Hygiene in 1883 (and opened a School of Hygiene), changing its name in 1955 to the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health (the shorter form Royal Society of Health was also used. The Royal Institute of Public Health was founded in 1886 (simultaneously, the same founders set up the College of State Medicine which merged in 1892 with the laboratory founded by the British Institute for Preventive Medicine and eventually became the Lister Institute: see that organisation’s records held as SA/LIS). The third major strand in the organisation’s history is that of the Institute of Hygiene, which was founded in 1903, and merged in 1937 with the Royal Institute of Public Health to form the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene. In 2008 the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health merged with the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene to form the Royal Society for Public Health, bringing all these bodies together. The archives document some strands in the history better than others: the main body of records of the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene were held at its headquarters in the 1990s and surveyed by the Wellcome Library’s archivists then, but had gone elsewhere by the time the newly-unified society presented its historic papers to the Library in 2009. When the missing records are located, they will join the archive here. The collection is, however, already a rich source and includes minutes, examination registers relating to the various qualifications awarded by the societies, publications, financial, legal and administrative material, photograph albums and property records and was first described in an earlier blog posting a few days ago.

A far smaller collection is that of Health Concern (SA/HCN). This body was founded in the mid 1980s with the primary aims of 'campaigning for more resources, co-ordinating comment on Government plans for the NHS and exchanging information on research.' – it was a broad alliance of various member organisations who shared the aim of supporting the NHS by promoting its basic principles and mounting an educational programme on healthcare and treatment. Although non-party in its remit, it clearly operated at a time when the whole concept of socialised healthcare versus the market was a political hot issue (and indeed was founded by Lord Ennals, who had been a Labour minister under Harold Wilson) so its activities were inescapably political in their context. The papers, dating from the 1980s, document its founding and administration during these crucial years.

Turing to personal papers, the records created by Professor Tim Lang and held as PP/TLA are also of major importance regarding public health issues. Tim Lang’s work has been in the field of public understanding of the food supply chain and the issues raised by what we eat and how we get it. His archive, totalling seventy boxes, documents his extensive involvement and role in the field of food policy, nutrition, environment and public health from the late 1970s up until 2000, and also provides a significant record of the development of food policy as a topic for discussion, notably in the UK, during this period. Organisations such as the London Food Commission, Parents For Safe Food, the National Food Alliance and the Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment (SAFE) Alliance are documented, as well as Tim Lang's wide-ranging writings on food; subject files cover some of his interests such as meat production standards, a school meals campaigns in Lancashire (early 1980s) as well as the national school meals campaigns in the 1990s, low income and food poverty, the Food Safety Act 1990, the salmonella and the listeria 'scares' in the late 1980s, and the impact of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) reform and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the food trade, health and safety, the environment and the developing world.

Finally, two collections relating to laboratory scientists conclude this month’s round-up. The papers of Robert Race and Ruth Sanger relating to their work on blood groups (PP/SAR, complementing the organisational records held in SA/BGU) were described in a separate blog posting earlier today. Like Race and Sanger, Dr Shirley Ratcliffe (PP/SRA) was involved in work at a Medical Research Council Unit, in this case the Edinburgh Cytogenetics Unit Study of Long Term Outcomes for Children Born with Sex Chromosome Abnormalities which in 1967 embarked on a longitudinal study of children born with these abnormalities, to establish the conditions’ incidence and long-term prognosis. The study – which also looked at a control group of children without these conditions – ran until the mid-1990s, but Dr Ratcliffe’s papers on the subject continued to be generated until 2010, the very year in which they were transferred to the Library. Much of the material, clearly, is made of clinical patient data that for the moment is closed under the Data Protection Act; however, there is much material on the conditions in general that is available for consultation now, with more to come of course as the years pass.

Image: a man with Klinefelter Syndrome, in which an extra X chromosome is added to the normal male XY pairing; the work of Shirley Ratcliffe looked at children born with this type of chromosomal abnormality, among others. In this picture, taken from Wellcome Images, the subject - who has undergone testosterone replacement therapy to enable development of male secondary sexual characteristics such as development of muscle bulk - is working out to avoid the development of osteoporosis, a common problem in males with his particular Syndrome.

An unstoppable team in blood grouping: R. R. Race and Ruth Sanger

The archives of Robert Russell Race and Ruth Sanger have recently been made available for consultation in the Wellcome Library (ref. PP/SAR). Race and Sanger are best known for their contribution to the understanding of blood groups, in particular Rh antigens and antibodies, and the genetic mapping of the X chromosome.

Robert Race was born in 1907. After qualifying in medicine in 1933 he became an assistant in a pathological laboratory. In 1937 he was appointed assistant serologist to Professor Ronald Fisher at the Galton Laboratory, University College London, as part of the laboratory serum unit. During the Second World War the unit moved to Cambridge with the duty of preparing blood grouping serum for transfusion purposes.

In 1946 the unit was reconstituted at the Lister Institute for Preventative Medicine in London as the Medical Research Council Blood Group Research Unit, with Race appointed Director. The MRC Blood Group Unit acquired an international reputation in the field of haematology, receiving blood samples from all over the world, and, in 1965, it extended its work into the genetics of blood groups. One of the unit's important contributions was the discovery of the Xg antigen in the 1960s.

Ruth Sanger was born in Australia and first came to England in 1946 to work with Race and complete her PhD. After completing her studies in 1948 she briefly returned to Australia, and then rejoined the staff of the unit in 1950. From this point the work of Race and Sanger becomes intertwined, with most major papers being written together. The first edition of Blood Groups in Man was published in 1950 and quickly became the standard reference text. Race and Sanger married in 1956, and upon the retirement of Race as Director of the Unit in 1973, Sanger became Director until her retirement in 1983.

The collection contains personalia, research notes, newspaper cuttings and photographs relating to honours and awards received, correspondence and papers relating to societies that Race and Sanger were associated with, programmes and photographs of conferences and visits, and reprints of articles written by Race and Sanger. At the heart of the collection is a series of 115 typescripts of lectures given by Race and/or Sanger between 1939-1977. These lectures reflect their research activities and relate to many other parts of the collection.

Complementing the personal papers of Race and Sanger are the archives of the MRC Blood Group Unit. Although progress reports for the unit are in the papers of Race and Sanger, the organisational records of the unit are a separate collection (ref. SA/BGU). Together these collections provide a detailed insight into the work of Race and Sanger.

Both collections will be digitised later this year as part of the Wellcome Digital Library programme, which is currently focussed on the theme of 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations'. Other notable collections being digitised include the papers of Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Arthur Mourant, and Sir Peter Medawar. For further details see the archives digitisation pages.

Author: Toni Hardy

Image: Sanger and Race together in August 1978, from file PP/SAR/F/6/5. The location is unknown, possibly their office at the Lister Institute; readers may like to amuse themselves trying to match the titles of the files behind them to those in the archive collections.

The father of serology - Arthur Mourant

Following on from Francis Crick, preparation work for digitisation continues through the enormous quantity of archival material related to the theme of Modern Genetics and its Foundations here at the Wellcome Library, with the personal papers of Jersey born Arthur Mourant (April 11, 1904 – August 29, 1994).

A man of many talents, it seems, from his initial interest in geology, archaeology and anthropology to his area of expertise later in life – haematology. He was a recipient of many awards and honours during his life-time, but most importantly for his blood transfusion work: in 1945 he discovered a serum with antibody to the e factor; his subsequent development of the Antiglobulin_test which ensured the compatibility of blood in transfusion, paved the way to the modern day Blood Transfusion Service. The effect this test had on the detection of blood-borne diseases was, needless to say, ground-breaking.

An ‘exceedingly promising’ science student at school [File ref: PP/AEM/A.57 1920], the young Mourant went on to Oxford graduating with first class honours in chemistry and philosophy in 1926. He digressed to follow his interest in geology in the following years and proved to be an accomplished draughtsman according to a number of geological and botanical sketches within the collection [File refs: PP/AEM/A.86, PP/AEM/A.91, PP/AEM/A.92 all dating to 1926]. Despite the difficult post-war economic slump, Mourant managed to secure a position at The Geological Survey in 1929: File: PP/AEM/B.1 contains his Official pass with photo for Dept of Scientific and Industrial Research and a pass 'To Walk Upon The Line' of London Midland and Scottish Railway Co. Examples of his field work sheets are held within File ref: PP/AEM/B.2.

However, unsatisfied by the priorities of the Survey, Mourant resigned in 1931 following the ending of his probation according to File ref: PP/AEM/B.6: on the basis that he was “not likely to prove an efficient field geologist of the type that we require on this staff”. The subsequent depression years put paid to this particular career path it seems: File PP/AEM/A.112 contains a handwritten list of all the posts (largely for chemistry master in numerous colleges and schools) that Mourant applied for between 1931-7. He was forced to resort to taking a course in medical chemistry and returned to his childhood home of Jersey, where he set up a chemical pathology laboratory (1933-38) which later became the States of Jersey Pathology Laboratory.

Restless again, Mourant returned to his medical studies in 1939 at St. Bartholomew's Medical College, in London just before the German occupation of Jersey in 1940. As with all archives, there are some revealing insights into the life of their creator. During this period of his life when he was isolated from his family, the numerous letters that Mourant receives from his mother reveal a fascinating, if personal insight into what life was like in Jersey during the German occupation – she writes:

“I bought a jar of honey yesterday, & this week we have marmite … we have plenty of food (& nice things too). This week we have had a nice lot of chocolate & it is a treat to have bacon...”

Aside from these culinary benefits, more significantly, she reveals:

“In going to St Mary's we passed the huge heap of stones as high as this house that the Germans dug (abandoned) out to make their underground hospital”

[File ref: PP/AEM/A.189]. This vast underground hospital was built in 1944 to protect the German troops from the expected allied invasion that never occurred. It has since been carefully restored as a museum of the German occupation in Jersey. A regular stream of parcel exchanges it seems kept the family spirits up during this period – while Mourant sent his mother ‘nylons’ from America, she offered ‘black butter', a traditional preserve still made in Jersey with liquorice.

By 1946, Mourant had become Director of the Blood Group Reference Laboratory at the Lister Institute in London where he discovered his life’s work. From there on numerous publications were produced, notably ‘The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups' (1954). However, funding, it seems always remained an issue. Numerous letters refer to the movement or closure of his laboratories (File ref: PP/AEM/D.2 contains a letter from Michael Perrin of The Wellcome Foundation Limited 28 Oct 1964 regarding Mourant's use of the space for a lab unit at Boundary House, 91 Charter- house Street, London E.C.1) and even more files contain numerous letters of reference in an attempt to find his staff other work in the field of serology. In a letter of 6 May 1970, Mourant writes:

"One thing which is not down for discussion is the ultimate fate of the enormous masses of data and of frozen blood specimens which we now hold and which ought to continue to be readily available to the next generation of workers in this field'

[File ref: PP/AEM/K.223]. His correspondence with many fellow serologists to obtain blood samples from a variety of races in far flung locations across the globe reveals the logistical and often legal difficulties of transporting the samples safely and in a way that maintained their freshness.

Although this archive generally lacks the ascerbic wit of Francis Crick’s archive, it does have its moments: Mourant evidently took an interest in the story about the 'The typist with the touch of pink', a story reported in the Daily Mail in 1960 (?) concerning a girl who sweated pink due to consuming turmeric that had reacted and sent the dye through her pours! [From a collection of cuttings related to blood issues in File ref: PP/AEM/E.28].

With such a hectic and varied career, it is no surprise that Mourant did not have time to marry until the age of 74 when he retired back in Jersey at Dower House, his family farm in St Saviour. It was here he wrote his autobiography ‘Blood and Stones’ (published posthumously in 1995). The appendix to this book lists an unbelievable 460 known publications, proof of Mourant’s prolific career as a writer. The archive includes a typescript copy of this book (in File ref: PP/AEM/A.4) which was published in 1995.

Many more letters were penned from Dower House, not just to his serological comrades, but to his many geological contacts, notably the Société Jersiaise who had a bust of him installed outside the museum there in 1995 by John Doubleday to honour his contribution to the heritage of Jersey.

Images:

Top: Blood for transfusion, Wellcome Images, Image ref: C 27213

Bottom: Bust of Mourant by John Doubleday, Image source: wikipedia