From the late 1890s-1900's, British biologist William Saville-Kent - who was working for the Australian Fisheries Department on Thursday Island in North Australia - experimented with a new concept of "tissue graft" in pearl oysters.
Also in 1916, Baron Iwasaki, a Japanese nobleman and then head of Mitsubishi, commenced the first South Sea pearl farm project in the Philippines with the new Japanese pearl culture technology [REF].