ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how R.A. Fisher, in Britain during World War II, mobilized the infrastructure and materials of the wartime transfusion services to carve out a new research agenda for human genetics. It describes the organization and activities of the Emergency Blood Transfusion Service (EBTS) and the institutional setting of the Galton Serum Unit and its influence on wartime blood grouping practices. The chapter shows how people with diverse interests negotiated techniques, samples, and access to willing populations and analytical expertise. It presents some of the practices and infrastructures that shaped mid-twentieth-century human genetics. In 1941, the Blood Transfusion Research Committee drew up a memorandum on blood grouping techniques in the transfusion services, which it circulated to various workers in the field before publication. The Galton Serum Unit's most famous wartime research programme, and one that established Britain as the leading nation in blood group genetics for at least another decade, was on the inheritance of the Rhesus blood groups.
