Conversations from the Hall of Fame
Vernon G. Pursel, Animal physiologist, interviewed 2006
(Time: ~15:46 minutes)
I was born and raised in Yerington, Nevada way far west and born and raised on a diversified farm. We had, mother had about a thousand laying hens and we had pigs, sheep and cattle so we had just about everything. I had three older brothers. I was fourth, the baby and I'm told I was very spoiled. And as I grew up I was in 4H, FFA showed pigs and cattle in livestock shows. 
When I went to college, I went to University of Nevada in Reno major in animal husbandry and there I worked all the time that I was going to school but I worked in the physiology lab under a fellow by the name of Dr. Howard Weeth. Dr Weeth was a very inspiring professor and I got to know him very well because I worked for him for two school years taking care of the physiology, of the rats in the physiology laboratory. 
He suggested I try to go on to graduate school, he thought that I had promise and I'd shown a lot of interest in what he was doing, his research. So I applied at several and I was accepted for a  fellowship at the University of Minnesota in St Paul and under Dr. E.F. Graham. Ed Graham was a very dynamic scientist and he gave us a lot of latitude. He didn't design our experiments we had to learned from the ground up to do experiments and it was a terrific experience.
I got my first job with the experiment station at the university in Morris Minnesota where I was a dairy scientist. I finished my PhD while I was writing a thesis while I was out at that location and very much enjoyed the work but it just wasn't what I wanted.
And I had an opportunity to take a job here at Beltsville in the swine research branch working toward trial preservation of sperm and so that's what I did I took that job came here in1967 did that work in collaboration with Dr Larry Johnson who was also a Hall of Fame scientist here at Beltsville 
He did the chemistry part of the job and I did morphology of sperm cells and we had our first evidence of fertilized pig eggs from frozen semen in our lab in 1970.
So Larry and I worked very diligently for the next, about the next four years before we had a procedure known as the Beltsville freezing and thawing procedure for boar sperm and we published that work and also worked with industry to get the method used commercially.
Never on a grand scale because we never could, and still have not, been able to get it to the same degree of perfection as freezing of bull sperm. With pig sperm we could never, there was always a lot of damage to the sperm cells and we could never achieve that the level it could be used widespread and still isn't used extensively but it can be used and is used to transport semen over distances so were you need to have a lot the sperm cells preserved for a long period of time and once the fertilizing ability is preserved  it really is good for thousands of years is long as it's maintained in liquid nitrogen.
Transgenic Animals
In the early 1980s when the first transgenic mice were produced Dr Ralph Brinster at the University Pennsylvania made a proposal to the ARS, that ARS finance him to do research on, to produce transgenic cattle.
That proposal was circulated to Dr. Rexroad, who was a co-worker, and I. And Dr. Rexroad thought well this had great promise and he requested permission to contact Dr Brinster and see if the work can be done cooperatively. It was a really a collaboration between the University of Washington in Seattle and University Pennsylvania, Dr Brinster, and here at Beltsville. Dr. Rexroad was working with sheep at the time. One of the difficulties with sheep are they're a seasonal breeding species and so there were just a big part of the year that the work couldn't be done so there was advantages to using pigs. So, Dr Hawk came to me after six months or so asked if I would be willing to do to switch my effort from semen preservation which we're still working on at that time and synchronization of estrous and partition control a whole bunch of problems in reproduction in swine. And, I thought about it and said well actually I felt I'd been spinning my wheels the last several years just not making any great progress so I switched my effort and began collaborating with the group to recover the fertilized, recently fertilized eggs from the pigs surgically and we transferred, transported those to Philadelphia where the genes that were produced in Washington were micro-injected into the pig eggs and sheep eggs and we succeeded within about six months of starting that in producing the first litter of transgenic pigs and there were surprisingly two transgenic pigs within a litter of eight so we were on our way.
We continued with that work and I think we transferred during my tenure a total of eighteen different genes. We never had anything that was enough to go back on the farm. We did learn a tremendous amount and actually there's, there's been a tremendous amount of interest in producing biomedical products from transgenic animals and to this date only one product has been produced after twenty two years. Only one product has been approved for use and still not in the United States only in Europe. The European Union was last summer just recently approved the use of a biomedical product from transgenic goats that were produced in Massachusetts.
Cloning
1997, Dr Rexroad, who was the lab leader at that time went to the National Program Staff and I was asked to be the research leader of the Gene Evaluation and Mapping Lab where it continued the transgenic work but also he started a cloning project just before he left the laboratory and I took over as directing that project again it was a very much a collaborative effort and Ann Powell did nuclear transfer, Gibbon Wells produced a gene and the gene was originally produced by a post doc that had been here and who was now at the University of Vermont and that gene was used to clone Annie, our first transgenic calf. She's a purebred Jersey and I think before I retired we produced a total of six transgenic cloned calves. The effort there again was a huge collaborative effort as essentially all of my research was without the collaborators, and that's one of the really strengths of the research is being conducted in most laboratories, is that it's a collaborative effort it's not just one person out there slogging away. You get a lot of different  expertise involved in a project and you can make progress much more rapidly.
Advice to Young Scientists
You need to solve practical problems that farmers have and you need to really figure out the best ways to attack that problem and don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't think you've got all the answers. If you can collaborate with others and get their expertise and input that's very essential to your success. You don't need to worry about promotion if you do your job and solve practical problems that are important to agriculture you'll succeed and you'll move up in rank within the department. 
The agency can really put a lot of support behind you if you're going to solve an agricultural problem but you better have, you better be in tune with what that problem is. If you don't want to work on that problem then you better find a job somewhere else. You're here to do research. 
You need to teach your technicians and so forth what to do and how to do it and you need to you to teach others and you need to sell your program as well. You have to be willing to go out to the farmer and tell him what you're doing and see how it fits. There's tremendous depth of resource within the department and you can work outside. You can work, here at Beltsville, you can work with the scientists at NIH, we've had many collaborative efforts with NIH, various universities University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University and with industry as well.
Retirement
I had thirty four and a half years of service by the time I retired. What do I do now? Well, I've been very active. Was asked to be on the board of directors of Friends Agricultural Research here in Beltsville otherwise known as FAR-B. I'm very active in that. I work with science fairs Howard County, Montgomery County, Prince George's County at the county level.
Reflections on ARS
When I was an undergraduate it was pointed out to me there was a range scientist located at University of Nevada and he gave a lecture or two and again Dr Weeth pointed out that there are lot of advantages to working with Agricultural Research Service. One can teach an occasional class not a regular class if he wanted. He can have access to graduate students if he wanted. He didn't have to worry about college committees being located there and he thought that ARS scientists had the best of everything and if you wanted to do research, Agricultural Research Service was the place to do it and I fully agree with him. I was always interested in science. I was always interested in agriculture. I fully expected to go back to the farm but financially that wasn't possible for me. I really ... Dr. Weeth got me interested in going to graduate school and working on research and research with animals was my love and so that's what I did.