Janet Scott Salmon Blyth
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Janet Scott Salmon Blyth | |
|---|---|
| Born | 19 February 1902 |
| Died | 1972 (aged 70) Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Janet Scott Salmon Blyth (19 February 1902 - 1972) was a Scottish geneticist who specialised in poultry genetics and husbandry in the interwar and post-war decades and played a prominent role in establishing the Poultry Research Centre, one of several institutions that would eventually be amalgamated to form the Roslin Institute.
Janet Scott Salmon Blyth was born on the 19th February 1902 at Logie Farm in Flisk in East Fife to farmer James Blyth and his wife Janet McLaren Blyth (nee Osler). Growing up, she had two younger siblings, James and William, and a large complement of tenants, labourers, and their families for company at the Fife farm.
Blyth undertook her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh from 1918 to 1921, gaining a BSc in Agricultural Sciences in 1921.[1] She began her PhD at the same institution later that year, based at the university’s Department of Animal Breeding, then under the directorship of noted pioneering geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew. She was awarded her doctorate in 1925 for her thesis researching the individual wool types and yield produced by the offspring of the Department’s ovine hybridisation programme.[2]
Her early career research in this field, along with that of academic peers such as J.A. Fraser Roberts and F. Fraser Darling would impact ovine research globally for the next quarter of a century.[3]