The early history of cattle blood groups

Abstract

When Jan Klein invited me to contribute an article relating my impressions and memories of the early days in immunogenetics, he pointed out that it is important not to lose historical perspective and to remind the young generation that immunogenetics was not born yesterday. Indeed it wasn't. When I arrived in Professor M.R. Irwin's laboratory the summer of 1938 to begin work on a project titled "Cellular Antigens in the Blood of Cattle," the terre immunogenetics had been documented in the titles of three articles (e.g., Irwin and Cole) which appeared in 1936. Moreover, Irwin's laboratory, which was located in the basement of the old Genetics Building on the Agricultural Campus of the University of Wisconsin (UW), was already being referred to locally as the Immunogenetics Laboratory. I decided to accept Dr. Klein's invitation in order to relate to you the developments which led to the recognition of nine of the 11 currently recognized genetic systems of blood groups in cattle (Stormont 1977). I was the person who was most intimately associated with those developments and am the only one of the original principals, namely, Ferguson, Irwin, Owen, and Stormont, who might be said to be still actively engaged in that field. To set the stage for what is to follow, it might be well to relate the events which led me to the door of the original i~munogenetics laboratory. I did my undergraduate work at UW, only some distance to the east of the Agricultural Campus, namely, the Letters and Sciences Campus, where I received a B.A. degree in zoology in June 1938, At that time, dogma had it that genes were probably protein molecules-we were still some six years away from the epic discovery of Avery, McLeod, and McCarty indicating that genes are composed of nucleic acids, rather than proteins. Although multiple alleles had been invoked to explain such things as the eye-color mutants in D. melanogaster, there were still some geneticists who could not think in terms of more than a pair of alleles per locus. There were three recognized genetic systems of blood groups in human beings, the ABO groups (six groups altogether when considering the subtypes A1 and A2 of blood factor A), the three MN types, and the two P types. For the most