As much at home in a barn as behind a laboratory bench, a team of 30 young researchers in Scotland is remaking the image of the modern agricultural scientist as they go about their ground-breaking work in molecular biology. While some of their experimentation takes place in the heart of the city—at the 400-year-old University of Edinburgh's modern science complex—some of it is also happening in a far more rural setting.

Situated in the foothills of the Scottish Pentlands, five miles south of Edinburgh—where the low, rolling terrain gives way on higher ground to picturesque heaths and grazing lands for flocks of docile sheep—are the balance of the team's laboratories as well as the sophisticated animal facilities prerequisite to their research. At this facility, the lab where the team's molecular biology specialists are microinjecting genetic material into the eggs of sheep is only yards away from the facility where other...

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