In 1985 Michael Ross Murphy (1945-2018) wrote an account of the capture and domestication of the Golden Hamster. All hamsters of this species in captivity from the 1930s until the 1970s were descendants of the original stock, and most still are. He did not, however, deal with the reason hamsters were brought to Britain or with what happened before they became commonplace in zoos and as household pets, a topic I dealt with in Part 1.
I will not go into great detail but the original hamsters were collected in 1930 at the request of Saul Adler during an expedition to northern Syria led by Israel Aharoni (1882-1946). Adler wanted to try hamsters from the Middle East for his research on kala azar, an often fatal disease caused, in that part of the world, by the protozoan parasite Leishmania infantum. He was using Chinese Hamsters (Cricetulus griseus) from the Far East but was unsuccessful in getting them to breed; new stock had to be imported and, moreover, were susceptible to Pasteurella infection.
Aharoni got his local guide, Georgius Khalil Tah’an, to talk to the local sheik. The latter hired labourers to dig holes in a local wheat field. Eventually, having destroyed the crop in much of the field, they found, eight-feet down, a complete nest comprising a mother and her eleven young.
What happened next could have been predicted by anybody who has kept rodents; the mother started to eat one of her young. Georgius saw this happening, removed the mother and killed it with cyanide. Now there were ten. Amazingly, Aharoni and his wife succeeded in hand-rearing the rest of the litter (reportedly, by Adler, on a meat diet). Then the ten escaped. All but one were recaptured. Now there were nine. The nine were handed over to the animal house at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where both Aharoni and Adler worked. The animal house was run by Haim Ben-Menachem, a member of the para-military Haganah and who, on the foundation of Israel, became Director-General of the Ministry of Posts. He made a terrible mistake in putting the animals in a cage with a wooden floor. Hamsters gnaw. Five of the nine escaped. Now there were four: one male and three females. One female was apparently killed by a male in the first attempt at breeding them. Down to three.
Ben-Menachem, though, saved the day. He found a method of introducing the male to the female that did not result in one killing the other, and the pair produced young.
Adler in his first paper using Golden Hamsters gave the timing and circumstances of some of these events. The hamsters were handed over to the parasitology department July 1930 (although one paper gives that as the date of collection) and the first litter was born on 18 August. Sufficient young had been born by October because on 20 October Adler used two in his experiments on Mediterranean Kala Azar.
The population of captive Golden Hamsters soon grew. Within a year they had 150.
The arrival of Golden Hamsters in London was 1931 but this is where Murphy got it wrong. They were certainly brought to London by Adler and two pairs were given to Edward Hindle (1886-1973). Hindle was, Murphy wrote, ‘of the London Zoological Society’. But Hindle was not at London Zoo at this time. From 1928 until 1933 he was Beit Research Fellow in Tropical Medicine at the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research. Like Adler he was a parasitologist who also worked on kala azar. Indeed he had led the Royal Society’s Kala Azar Commission in China in the 1920s. Adler was a successor to Hindle in that role. The Golden Hamsters were a research gift from a parasitologist to a parasitologist. As Adler’s brother made it clear in a letter to The Times on 27 January 1973, Adler and Hindle were close friends. Adler said he ‘smuggled’ them into Britain in his coat pockets. However, there was then no restriction on bringing rodents into the U.K. so the story may have been embroidered a little.
But the two pairs were not the only hamsters brought to London. Adler, in a letter to Nature in 1948, stated he had brought some for the Medical Research Council (presumably the National Institute of Medical Research, NIMR) and some for the Wellcome Bureau, ‘where Dr E. Hindle succeeded in breeding them’. That probably explains the dual authorship of the paper on breeding and growth of the Golden Hamster published in 1934 (by which time Hindle had moved to the NIMR) in Proceedings of the Zoological Society (now Journal of Zoology). His co-author was Hilda Bruce* of NIMR who later discovered the pheromonal and eponymous Bruce Effect.
Adler does not state whether it was on the same trip that he took animals to Nattan Larrier in Paris.
But Saul Adler was not simply a foreign scientist visiting Britain in 1931. He was British. He was born in what is now Belarus but his parents and family had migrated to Leeds in 1900 when he was five. Scholarships took him to Leeds Central High School and the medical school of the University of Leeds. With medical qualifications obtained in 1917 he immediately joined the Royal Army Medical Corps from the university’s Officer Training Corps. He served in Mesopotamia until July 1920. Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine saw him next after which he worked as a research assistant in Sierra Leone. Then, in 1924, he was appointed to the Hebrew University—and he stayed there, as Professor of Parasitology—until his death in 1966.
His research in the Second World War took a similar turn to that of Goodwin (see Part 1) in assisting the effort to protect and treat Allied forces against tropical diseases including leishmaniasis. ‘For services to the Forces’ he was appointed O.B.E. in January 1946. In 1957 he was elected to the Royal Society, and his biographical memoir details the range and depth of his interests not only in many aspects of parasites and their hosts but in Charles Darwin, for example. He not only translated the Origin into Hebrew but hit the headlines by proposing in 1965 that Darwin’s debilitating illness was Chagas Disease, caused by a South American protozoan parasite.
I do like this story from Biographical Memoirs:
Although Adler had a remarkable memory he also had a reputation for absent-mindedness. The following story, although probably apocryphal, is an amusing illustration. One day, while wandering through Jerusalem, he got into a quarter with which he was unfamiliar. Almost anyone in Jerusalem would know him, so he stopped a passer-by and asked him if he could direct him to the street where Professor Adler lived. The individual addressed looked at him in some astonishment and said: ‘Daddy, don’t you recognize me?’
During the late 1930s Golden Hamsters were sent to other countries from Jerusalem and from London. Murphy found no earlier reports of animals in the U.S.A. before I.J. Kligler, Professor of Microbiology in Jerusalem, sent a batch in 1938. There was a pet hamster craze in the U.S.A. in the 1940s and early 50s, just as in Britain after the War.
Edward Hindle FRS was an interesting character with wide zoological interests and activities. In the interests of brevity I will discuss him in another article.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that the hamsters Adler obtained were not the only ones collected by Aharoni in 1930. Murphy mentioned the fact that three old females were captured on 27 and 29 April 1930 and deposited in the Berlin Zoological Museum. The timing is right for them to have been collected at the same time as Adler’s animals. Was one the mother killed by Georgius Khalil Tah’an, i.e. the direct ancestor of all the domesticated hamsters? And were the other two collected dead or alive?
In Part 3 I look at Golden Hamsters collected before 1930 and after 1970.
*Hilda Margaret Bruce (5 April 1903 – 2 November 1974)
Adler D. Professor E. Hindle. The Times, 27 January 1973.
Adler S. 1948. Origin of the Golden Hamster Cricetus auratus as a laboratory animal. Nature 162, 256-257.
Anon. 1973. Professor Edward Hindle. The Times. 24 January 1973.
Adler S, Theodor O. 1931. Investigations on Mediterranean Kala Azar. II.—Leishmania infantum. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 108, 453-463.
Bruce HM, Hindle HM. (1934). The Golden Hamster, Cricetus (Mesocricetus) auratus Waterhouse. Notes on its Breeding and Growth". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1934: 361–366.
Garnham PCC. 1974. Edward Hindle. 1886-1973. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 20, 217-234.
Murphy MR. 1985. History of the capture and domestication of the Syrian Golden Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus Waterhouse). In, The Hamster. Reproduction and Behavior. Edited by HI Siegel. New York: Plenum Press. Murphy covers the early literature including papers and book by Aharoni written in Hebrew.
Shortt HE. 1967. Saul Adler 1895-1966. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 13, 1-34.
No comments:
Post a Comment