Carolina Biological Supply Company
Carolina Biological Supply Company is a supplier of science and math education materials to teachers, college professors, home-school educators, and professionals in health and science-related fields in the United States. History. Carolina was founded in 1927 by Dr. Thomas E. Powell Jr., a young geology and biology professor at Elon College (now Elon University). During the 1920s, science teachers had to collect most of the materials they used in their classes and laboratories, which took considerable time away from their primary responsibilities. Like other teachers, Dr. Powell was spending much of his own time  in the field gathering specimens for his classes. Because he usually got more than he needed, he sold the surplus to his colleagues. This grew into the Carolina Biological Supply Company as Powell foresaw that the coming years would bring a growing need for his collecting abilities. Products. The company sells thousands of items—from simple one-celled organisms to complex equipment—in an 1,100-page catalog. Carolina publishes its complete catalog online, and its Web site provides free classroom activities and other resources for educators. The company’s main facility is in Burlington, NC. In 2007, artist John LeKay , a friend of Damien Hirst between 1992 and 1994, was reported by Dalya Alberge of "The Times" to have provided ideas and inspirations for a variety of his later works, including having given him a "marked-up duplicate copy" of a Carolina Biological Supply Company catalogue that LeKay had been using as inspiration and supply for his work, noting how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647, a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece", a reference to Hirst's work "Mother and Child, Divided", a cow and calf cut  in half and placed in formaldehyde.