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Francis Albert Eley Crew

Foundations of modern genetics.

Crew (1886-1973) was a pioneering geneticist who paved the way for Edinburgh to become a centre of genetics research. In 1920 he became the first director of the Institute of Animal Breeding and in 1928 he became the first Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1945 he was chair of public health and social medicine, and it has been said that during this tenure he laid the foundations of medical genetics.

Crew worked on worked on many things, including sex determination and sexual abnormalities in birds and mammals. This collection of nearly 7,000 offprints reflects his special interests and also general developments in genetics and animal research. These published papers include some written by Crew himself and others collected by Professor Alan Greenwood, who ran the Institute of Animal Genetics during Crew’s absence on war duty.

A project is currently working to catalogue the papers and there are indexes in each of the bound volumes which make the contents accessible.