The collection is composed of a paper ( a 'mimeo' copy) on The genetics of populations. The paper consists of 364-pages, numbered.
It contains chapters on general or static populations, forces which change gene frequency, mating systems, and appropriate breeding plans.
On the title page is handwritten in ink: H. P. Donald (presumably of the Animal Breeding Research Organisation, Edinburgh, of which he became Director in 1951), August 1949. There is also a date stamp: 18 January 1956.
Jay Laurence Lush, the pioneering animal geneticist, was born on 3 January 1896 in Shambaugh, Iowa, United States of America. He studied the B.Sc. course in Animal Husbandry at the Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University, or KSU), and after obtaining the degree in 1916 he was awarded his M.Sc. at KSU in 1918, and then a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1922.
Between 1930 and 1966, Lush was the Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor in Agriculture at Iowa State University, and he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967. He was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 1968, and the Wolf Prize in 1979. Lush visited Britain and Australia in 1948 on temporary duty with the US Department of State.
Lush's influence on animal breeding around the world has been enhanced greatly by the wide distribution of his work Animal Breeding Plans (1937). In addition, his authoritative mimeographed notes, The genetics of populations (1948), have also played a major role in the thinking of animal breeders.
Professor Jay L. Lush died on 22 May 1982.
Open for consultation to bona fide researchers, but please contact repository for details in advance of any visit.
Acquired from the Library of the Roslin Institute where the item owned shelfmark 575.15 LUS. Accession no: E2009.31 (initial accession 2009/44).
Compiled by Graeme D. Eddie, Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library.
