ABSTRACT
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, geneticist R. A. Fisher and serologist George Taylor published an appeal to workers in the newly founded Emergency Blood Transfusion Service (EBTS). Taylor led the Galton Serum Unit, a Cambridge laboratory producing blood grouping reagents for a national network of hospitals and EBTS depots. Fisher was Taylor’s former boss at University College London (UCL), who had recently relocated to the agricultural Rothamsted Experimental Station in Harpenden. The letter, entitled ‘Blood Groups of Great Britain’, entreated blood depot medical officers to send to Fisher or Taylor the records of transfusion volunteers. They explained that the records, which included the results of blood grouping tests, constituted valuable ‘genetical and ethnological data’ that could:
not only … throw light on points that require very large numbers for their elucidation, but will open up the field, at present wholly unexplored, of the homogeneity or heterogeneity in respect to blood groups of the population of these islands. 1
In response, the researchers were inundated with lists of donor records and blood grouping results. It represented the start of two wartime research programmes that Fisher and his colleagues conceived during these years. The first – to study the distribution of ABO blood group allele frequencies across Britain – made use of the many thousands of blood grouping records generated by the EBTS. The second – to determine the detailed genetic structure of the Rhesus blood groups – depended upon blood samples sent in from doctors and hospitals around the country. This essay is about how Fisher mobilized the infrastructure and materials of the wartime transfusion services to carve out a new research agenda for human genetics. 2