Contributors to 'Outside the Square', while expected to make interdisciplinary connections of some kind, can develop their contribution in the way they think appropriate. In most instances, what comes is likely to give the browser a surprise and information that might help him or her to understand some aspect of life that, until now they have been unaware.
Bush Telegraph on Radio
National often provides information for those of us in the cities as well as
enabling contact between people in rural and remote places. In this way it
helps urban dwellers to make connections with those people living outside
metropolitan areas. This program has an educational role and often encourages
collaboration rather than competition. Its approach is often interdisciplinary
because it puts the situation for people in different industries in the context
of their time, place, cultural, economic and social background as well as considering the influence of their
personal experiences. Making sure that people understand the context of this or
that development is essential.
Here Dr Oliver Mayo, a geneticist who contributed to Challenging the Divide and worked for the CSIRO, describes a development in the woollen industry. In his essay for Challenging the Divide, Oliver Mayo considered Charles Darwin’s
engagement with different emotions described by great writers, in his book The
Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals. Here,
Oliver Mayo says, that this contribution to interdisciplinary connections, Biological
defleecing in the 21st century,
probably only connects with poetry in that it suggests the demise of ‘Click Go
the Shears’.
Biological
defleecing in the 21st century
When I joined CSIRO (Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in 1989, BWH (biological wool
harvesting) was a project that many thought had no future. Many cost-effective chemical agents
known to cause depilation had been tested and discarded because of concerns
about safety &/or animal welfare.
A biological agent, epidermal growth factor (EGF), had been shown to
defleece sheep effectively and safely, and a strong use patent had been
obtained. However, EGF was
obtained from the salivary glands of mice and was prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the process of wrapping
the sheep to prevent loss of fleece and sunburn &/or frostbite and
unwrapping the fleece was slow and inefficient.
In 1989-90, wool was ‘enjoying’
an unsustainable boom through the inappropriate use of the Reserve Price
Scheme, and CSIRO was well funded to conduct R&D (research and development)
on wool sheep, including the BWH project.
However, the wool industry had served notice on CSIRO three years
previously that its specially segregated, ‘non-contestable’ funding would end
in 1990. Accordingly, we had to
decide what work to stop. BWH was
an obvious candidate. Two factors
prevented its instant death. A
senior scientist had noticed that researchers at a Japanese soya sauce company
had been granted a patent for modified bacteria that could produce a gram of
human EGF per litre of culture; this astonishingly high yield would make EGF
affordable. A young research
engineer, recruited for a different research project, convinced me that he
could produce a robust, cost-effective sheep coat for retention and harvesting
of the fleece, and a method for ‘donning’ and ‘doffing’ the coat.
In parentheses, I should mention
that the head of the soya sauce company had been persuaded by a brilliant
molecular biologist employee that the company’s future lay in biotechnology,
building on its skills in microbiology (especially fermentation) and molecular
biology and hence had made a large, long term investment in basic molecular
biological R&D. A remarkable step for a traditional company, nearly 400
years old and controlled by one family for 150 years.
The Reserve Price Scheme
collapsed under its own weight in 1990, and CSIRO suffered a massive decline in
‘wool’ funding. Major reductions
in expenditure had to be effected rapidly, which meant redundancies, given that
most animal research expenditure is on people. This was very distressing for all concerned, but was done
after thorough economic evaluation of all research areas and attempts to
redeploy staff wherever possible.
BWH showed up as having enormous potential, if we could make the process
practical for the grower and cost-effective. If 50 million sheep could be defleeced annually at a cost
comparable to normal shearing (mechanical severance of every fibre by a highly
skilled and physically strong shearer working in difficult conditions), this
represented annual sales of the order of $400 million. Although the total world population of
wool sheep in high-wage countries was no more than 250 million, so the ultimate
market size was limited, it was still worth pursuing the project.
BWH wool is better in quality
than mechanically shorn wool for a number of technical reasons. BWH sheep are happier and healthier for
other technical reasons. Workers
using BWH don’t have to be as strong or as skilled as shearers. As BWH did not depend on as much labour
and skill as shearing, its costs could be expected to decline with volume
production of coats, machinery and EGF.
The project was re-established
and moved swiftly (for livestock R&D) to success: in five years we had a
cost-effective process in prototype, and in seven we had licensed BWH to a
start-up, Bioclip Pty Ltd, run by a far-sighted and courageous entrepreneur.
So far, so good. A decade on, why aren’t all Merinos BWH
sheep? I’ll list a lot of possible
reasons, each one of them encapsulating a small world of activity, plus a
penumbra of politics.
Sheep
Coat / Fleece Retention Net
The
sheep coat had to be completely redesigned into the Bioclip Fleece Retention
Net, to accommodate the size variation of sheep in Australia, and to produce
superior quality wool.
Manufacturing of this new net on
a commercial scale took time, but it has happened: from the original price of
$100, it’s down to today’s $1.
Depilatory
Formulation
The depilatory formulation had to
be redeveloped to suit the range of environmental conditions found across
Australia.
Further development was required
to move from a split treatment (2 doses) to a single treatment, greatly
increasing the speed of the process and reducing the overall cost of treatment.
The original manufacturing plant
was closed and a new one was established, making the process a much more
competitive option.
Machinery and
Labour
BWH machinery has been developed
from scratch. BWH can now harvest
sheep in a quarter of the time taken by mechanical shearing without the
physical stress that is typical in the shearing industry.
The physical requirements of
shearing (probably the hardest skilled job around) constitute the reason why
there is a real shortage of shearers in Australia, and the reason why the peak
industry body has identified biological defleecing as the best option to avoid
significant shearing crises in the future.
And yes, BWH is a non-traditional
process and the industry was so successful along traditional lines that it
found some changes hard to understand, much less adopt. Indeed, the ‘two bob each way’ attitude
of some industry leaders meant that a variety of other projects were supported
by the industry, such as semi-automated mechanical shearing, automated
mechanical shearing having consumed far more research funding than BWH with no
practical outcome.
BWH still has a modest market
share, but wool (off the sheep’s back in the net) is being sold direct to the
largest wool processor in the world, and the sceptics are slowly talking less
loudly.
The reader may be thinking: ‘He’s
left out the real reason for lack of adoption: the process is a dud.’ I’ve often wondered about that, but I
firmly believe it’s not. I don’t
like admitting mistakes, but I don’t think this was one.
Another reason may be that our
multidisciplinary approach wasn’t broad enough: we had molecular biologists,
physiologists, geneticists, wool biologists, textiles experts, engineers and
farm managers involved, and the company also worked with marketers and others
along the pipeline, but perhaps we needed psychologists and sociologists as
well.
Oliver Mayo, geneticist and contributor to Challenging the Divide, and his partner, Margaret, in front of the the Camino de Santiago de Compostella
