SEX DETERMINATION.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17964, 8 March 1930, Page 10 (Supplement)

SEX DETERMINATION.

THE POSSIBILITY. SCIENCE AND. BREEDING. The possibility of the determination of sex in animals was referred to by Mr A. D. Buchanan Smith (of the Animal Breeding Research Department of Edinburgh University) who gave an address on “Science in Relation to Animal Breeding” at the annual dinner of the Renfrewshire Agricultural Society in Paisley. Mr Smith said the dairy cow offered a ready subject for the scientific investigator, because h.er produce could be measured better than could the produce or performance of an animal of a beef breed. Science could learn the facts of life quicker from the smaller animals, such as rabbits, which reproduced so much faster than cattle or horses. They now knew the mechanism by which characters were transmitted from one generation to another. They could actually see what it was that made a calf develop into a bull or into a heifer. All that knowledge had been accumulated in the past thirty years. Another twentyyears should enable them to manipulate this mechanism, which at present they could only see. In the discussion which followed Mr George Buchanan (’Hunterhill) said if the time arrived when the sex of progeny of various matings could be determined by the matter, then certainly a great step forward would have been made.by the scientists. It would be a tremendous asset to him when he was mating a bull of highproduction descent with a cow of high milk record if he could decide that he wanted a bull calf or a heifer calf. But he was still afraid that the matter had to be left to nature.

Mr Smith said that his chief, Professor A. T. 'Crew, had stated that he expected that it will be possible to determine sex within about fifteen years. He (Mr Smith) very much doubted whether it would be of very much advantage to mankind, because if they knew how to do it with cattle they would certainly get to know how to do it with the human species, and he agreed that it xvas better to leave it to Providence, and then we could not complain. (Daughter). In work recently carried out with rabbits, scientists had been able to take the newly fertilised egg from a rabbit immediately after fertilisation and cut it out of the rabbit and grow young rabbits in an incubator, just in flic same w ; av as they grew chickens from e.ggs. They had a man over in America ihis summer investigating points.