Science, conservation and the making of the Institute of Zoology, circa 1946–2016

Widely regarded today as a world-leading centre for conservation science, the Institute of Zoology (IoZ) was, until surprisingly recently, best known for its contributions to comparative medicine and reproductive physiology-research foci which it inherited from two precursor institutes. Funded by private foundations and endowed with cutting-edge laboratory facilities, these institutes quickly established distinctive research programmes working with an array of little-studied mammals. In this article, I chart the establishment and development of this historically neglected scientific infrastructure and its associated research culture. In the process, I link scientific agendas to the broader imperatives of a post-war Zoological Society of London (ZSL) navigating the end of empire and shifting societal attitudes to collections of captive animals. Leveraging its publishing acumen and status as an international clearing house for zoology, ZSL played an important role in aligning zoos with the burgeoning conservation movement. This is a history of transformations in ZSL's institutional identity as it went from being a living museum defined by the breadth of its animal collections to a multidisciplinary centre of conservation science.