The Strangeways Laboratory, ‘The Mustard Club’, and Honor Fell’s ‘aliens’

You may remember that when the Mustard Club met here last time we were asked to provide some chemical or physical proof that the globules which entered the cells of our cultures were really mustard.

Honor Fell, Director of the Strangeways Research Laboratory, wrote this to Sir Joseph Barcroft on 6th May 1940. She was not alluding to the wildly successful organisation for the promotion of the condiment devised by the novelist Dorothy Sayers while working at Benson’s advertising agency. With the outbreak of World War II, along with other war-related projects, the Strangeways undertook research, using their pioneering techniques of tissue culture, on the biological action of toxic gases used in chemical warfare, including ‘mustard gas’, so widely deployed during the Great War, in collaboration with other institutions, specifically the Ministry of Supply Chemical Defence Research Department’s Experimental Station at Porton. Fell was also in correspondence with Professor R. A. Peters in Oxford, whose related work on British Anti-Lewisite can be found in GC/197.

The archives of the Strangeways and the papers of Honor Fell and her colleague F. G. Spear have been available in the Wellcome Library for nearly two decades and an article on them was published in Medical History in 1996. Archives and Manuscripts fairly recently received an additional accession of the files relating to the Strangeways’ war work and other government-sponsored research in the 1940s: these have now been catalogued as SA/SRL/M.

Work under wartime conditions and the constraints of official secrecy raised numerous practical problems. By March 1940 Honor Fell was becoming rather anxious about the safety of the increasing accumulation of top secret documents and reports relating to the project, and wondered whether locked cupboards inside locked rooms were adequately secure. She asked Lord Rothschild whether the Ministry of Supply could provide them with a small safe. She also asked him whether he was able to procure for them a small sloughed snake skin to their experiments:

I am sorry to trouble you about this, but it would be rather difficult for me to get hold of the material without being asked awkward questions.

(Rothschild’s contacts at the Zoological Society of London did in fact expeditiously produce an ‘almost complete’ garter snake skin.) They also had to ask permission to discuss research matters with individuals who were not already on the approved list. In November 1940 the Ministry of Supply suffered losses through enemy action and had to request Fell to send copies of documentation. Acquiring the necessary equipment and its maintenance in adequate working order also presented problems, as the long-drawn out saga of gaining access to a functioning absorptiometer in the face of competing claims to the few available indicates.

As well as the general concerns over preserving the secrecy of the work Fell and Allsopp were doing, for which guarantees had to be provided, the Strangeways during the 1930s had come to employ a significant number of refugee scientists. Honor Fell’s concerns over her ‘aliens’ and her desire to protect them is reflected in this correspondence. In Jan 1939 she wrote to the Director of Military Intelligence refusing to supply information about ‘the aliens in this laboratory’, having learnt from Lord Rothschild that this was in order that the aliens in question could be secretly supervised by military police:

Since these people are not only my colleagues but personal friends in some cases of long standing, the idea of assisting in this matter is extremely distasteful to me… I believe that I am under no legal obligation to supply the information and I am prepared to guarantee the reliability of anyone in my department and to accept full responsibility for them.

She added that scrupulous care was taken to preserve secrecy about the work they were doing for the Ministry of Supply, with only staff who had signed the Official Secrets Act having access to the relevant laboratories.

For a significant period Fell was deprived of the assistance of ‘my aliens’, who had been carrying on the non-secret research in which the Laboratory continued to be engaged but by late 1940 the Ministry of Supply was able to get the Aliens War Service Department to give them provisional permits enabling their return. By the end of 1942 they were even providing indirect assistance to the secret work by translating an ‘immensely long’ scientific paper in German which Porton were anxious to have for reference.

An unexpected outcome of the research into agents of chemical warfare and the means to counter their effects during the Second World War was the discovery that some of them had therapeutic uses.

An extensive sources leaflet provides further information on War, Medicine and Health at the time of the Second World War and a number of other collections illustrate the important contributions of refugee doctors and scientists.

Main man for mutant mice

Archives and Manuscripts is pleased to announce that a detailed catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg FRS (1907-1982) is now available online. Although a rudimentary boxlisting of this collection has been available for some considerable time, this failed adequately to reflect the richness and importance of Grüneberg’s correspondence, covering the years 1922-1982, with colleagues, friends, family, institutions, publishers, etc. This correspondence has now been listed in detail with (as far as possible, since some signatures remain illegible, or consist merely of a nickname) the names of correspondents given, searchable via the online catalogue.

Grüneberg was something of a prodigy, publishing his first paper (on Devonian fossils) in the yearbook of the Elberfeld Natural History Society when he was only 17. He studied medicine and genetics in Bonn and Berlin but his career in Germany was adversely affected by the rise of the Nazis to power and early in 1933 he lost his position at the Elberfeld Municipal Hospital. Shortly afterwards he was invited to pursue genetic research with J. B. S. Haldane at University College London, where he arrived in August 1933, finding the ambience very different from what he was used to in Germany. Apart from a period in the Army during the Second World War, he spent the rest of his life at UCL, retiring as Emeritus Professor of Genetics in 1974.

Along with C H Waddington (with whom there is a substantial tranche of correspondence in this collection), Grüneberg established the field of development genetics, studying pathological processes in mutant mice, and formulating a "pedigree of causes" of genes, which was an important model for human disease. His interest in mouse mutations led him into correspondence with amateur breeders of fancy mice as well as scientific colleagues, while he was also interested in questions of best practice in feeding, housing and general maintenance of laboratory mice. His ‘waltzing mice’ were featured in a BBC science programme. He took an active part in the discussions of the Committee for Standardized Nomenclature of Inbred Strains of Mice.

The collection, while reflecting Grüneberg’s own significant work in genetics, and his importance in establishing the mouse as a leading animal model in mammalian genetics, also includes his later work on snails and radiation-induced mutation, and his involvement in the teaching of the subject in medical schools. It contains much correspondence from leading contemporaries in the field, including fellow refugees such as Charlotte Auerbach FRS. There are also substantial amounts of material on his travels, particularly to India and Sri Lanka, and his relationships with colleagues in those countries, and on his work as external examiner in genetics at the University of Malaysia.

Apart from a small amount of material closed for reasons of Data Protection, this collection is available to researchers subject to the usual conditions of access to material in Archives and Manuscripts.

Another link completed: Sir Ernst Chain's papers made searchable

Our programme to convert all archive catalogues to electronic form passed another milestone this month, with the release to the database of our single largest remaining collection. The papers of the biochemist Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906-1979) comprise some 67 boxes of widely varied documentation; the catalogue, written in the early 1980s, came to three hefty volumes of typescript.

Chain is best known for his work on penicillin, for which he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey. Fleming had made the initial observation of penicillin’s properties in 1928, noting that it produced substances that killed bacteria; however, its instability had ruled out its use as an antiseptic, his initial hope, and he had not thought of its use to cure bacterial infections.

The turning point came in 1935, when Howard Florey became Professor of Pathology at Oxford: convinced that pathologists and chemists could co-operate fruitfully, he invited Chain to develop a department of biochemistry in the University’s Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. In 1938 the two men decided to turn their researches towards three anti-bacterial substances produced by micro-organisms, one of them penicillin. A third member of the team, Norman Heatley, made crucial practical suggestions as to how the substance could be extracted and purified. (It has been argued that Heatley should also have shared in the Nobel Prize and would have done had not the rules restricted joint recipients to three; his own papers are currently undergoing cataloguing at the Wellcome Library and readers will be able to judge for themselves when this material is released.) In 1940 animal tests showed that small quantities of penicillin could protect against bacteria introduced into the bloodstream, and suddenly a property that had seemed a mere curiosity when spotted by Fleming turned into a crucial weapon of war, with major collaborative efforts put into the manufacture of penicillin by the Allies. Chain worked with British and American scientists on an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to synthesise articificial penicillin; another collaborative effort was the Therapeutic Research Corporation, in which five major pharmaceuticals manufacturers, including the Wellcome Foundation, came together "to accelerate the research and production of pharmaceuticals during the war years and in particular the production of Penicillin" (the records of the Corporation can be seen in the archive catalogue under the reference WF/TRC).

If this were all there was to say about Chain his papers would already be well worth consulting. However, there are many other points of interest in Chain's long and dramatic life, which his papers illustrate. Before starting work with Florey at the age of thirty he had already come through hardship. As his name suggests, he was born in Germany – his family were Jewish, and his father, the industrial chemist Dr Michael Chain, had been born in Russia. The family had known considerable financial hardship when Michael Chain died in 1919, but it proved possible for Ernst to study at the University of Berlin, graduating in chemistry and physiology in 1930 and moving on to take a doctorate in the Charité Hospital Institute of Pathology's chemistry department (a foreshadowing of the way the two disciplines would meet in Oxford later in his career). All this while he was also exploring the possibility of making a career in music: he performed as a pianist and wrote newspaper music criticism. During the early 1930s Chain began to conclude that his real flair was for science but it was of course political developments that turn out to be decisive in the shaping of his career rather than his own choices: the Nazis' advent to power in 1933 prompted Chain to leave Germany for England, where he worked under Sir Gowland Hopkins at Cambridge, obtaining a second doctorate, before the crucial invitation to join Florey in Oxford.

Chain's papers reflect this multi-national element. Early material documents his studies in Germany, his flight from the country and arrival in the U.K. as a refugee. After the war, his relationship with Florey deteriorated – the familiar story of disputes over priority and credit for discoveries – and in 1948 he moved to the Istituto Superiore de Sanità in Rome, before returning to England in 1961 to take up the chair of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London. All phases of his later career are represented in the papers, including copious correspondence: Chain was fluent in English, German, Russian, French and Italian, and his papers – in these and other languages - show the wide range of his contacts across the world of science and industry. A cursory scan down the names of his correspondents in section K of the archive indicates the breadth of his social and professional networks: there are major scientific figures like Linus Pauling and Richard Doll; less stellar names whose work can be fleshed out by other papers held in the Library (for example, the pathologist and cancer researcher Sir Alexander Haddow or the nutritionist Thomas Latimer "Peter" Cleave, both of whose own papers are held in the archives department); and other figures whose fame lies outside the fields of science or medicine, such as the Labour MP and founder of the National Health Service Aneurin Bevan, to whom Chain wrote several times in the late 1940s and early 1950s (at a time when the Labour Party was in opposition and Bevan at loggerheads with some other leading figures in the party, Chain declared himself Bevan’s “loyal follower”).

The beauty of having all this information in a database, of course, is that all these names – and many other terms – become accessible to the reader searching across the whole archive collection, not necessarily knowing in advance that this individual had any contact with Ernst Chain at all. This increase in accessibility is certain to mean increased use for the collection as a whole, and in particular for the areas of it that deal with areas of Chain’s career other than the 1940s penicillin work for which he is most famous. Getting all this data accessible online is the culmination of a long process. For some months the Library Administrator, Tracy Tillotson, worked on rekeying this entire catalogue into a spreadsheet for loading into the database (a process described in an earlier blog post), fitting this into whatever spaces might open up between her many other duties. The data created in this way was loaded in early June and the whole catalogue is now searchable online, coming to just under 2400 new database records. The sheer size of the collection is brought into focus when one searches the database on reference PP/EBC: even when displayed in brief, single-line hitlist style the records fill 48 web pages. Our brief description here only gives a taste of the material newly searchable: readers are invited to log onto the archives catalogue and make their own explorations.

Note (September 2010): this posting refers to the papers of Norman Heatley as undergoing cataloguing and shortly to be made available. We are pleased to announce that the Heatley papers have now been released to the public: a description can be read here and the catalogue browsed in the Wellcome Library archives catalogue under the reference PP/NHE.

Images, from top:
1/ Ernst Boris Chain around the time of his Nobel Prize, from file PP/EBC/A.226
2/ Early penicillin-manufacturing equipment, from file PP/EBC/B.18
3-4/ Diagrams for a lecture on "The chemical structure of the penicillins", showing synthesis and degradation, from file PP/EBC/B.38.

Refugee Day

Hundreds carrying white umbrellas marched down Whitehall yesterday for world refugee day. Similar parades took place in eight other European cities.
The white umbrellas symbolise care, safety and shelter in foreign countries for those in need of international protection.

Creative Youth

Continuing the summer theme of the past week.
As part of their summer season Steam Industry have co-ordinated with the Latin American youth forum, holding a number of creative workshops that provide an opportunity for young people to tell their stories of settling in a new country.

These young South American refugees got the opportunity to present their experiences (good, bad, and teenage dramatic) to the public at the Scoop (an outdoor theatre next to City Hall).