bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Janet Watson, 1 September 1923 - 29 March 1985
Authors: Fettes D. J. , Plant J. A.
Published: December 2006

Janet Vida Watson was born on 1 September 1923, one of two sisters and the daughter of Professor D.M.S. Watson. Her father had succeeded to the chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College two years earlier. He had, at that time, already established himself as an international authority on vertebrate palaeontology. A career which was to be recognized in many ways including election to the Royal Society in 1922, the presentation of the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society in 1935 and the Wollaston Medal in 1965; sharing the latter awards ceremony with his daughter. Professor Watson stated that his great aim had been the discovery of the evolutionary courses followed by the vertebrates, and it is interesting to note that it was the same step from careful observation to the elucidation of history which intrigued and stimulated his daughter. The family lived in South Hampstead and Janet attended the local high school. Subsequently she went to Reading University where she took a General Science degree in 1943. Colleagues at that time recall Janet as a very clever student rather than being particularly hard working; she was a relatively quiet person with a few close friends. She had a keen interest in the arts, making, for example, regular trips to Sadler’s Wells ballet. At Reading Janet studied under Professor H.L. Hawkins a notable invertebrate palaeontologist and an influential teacher. Carrying with her a strong recommendation from Hawkins Janet went to Imperial College where she graduated with a first class honours in Geology in 1947. At this stage given her strong background in palaeontology it is probable Janet was considering a research career in the subject. However, at that time, H.H. Read was building a research team following the end of the war. Impressed by Janet’s performance in her honour’s exams - Read reportedly said she should have been given 120% to do justice to her relative performance - Read persuaded Janet to join him, the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.
Frank Yates, 12 May 1902 - 17 June 1994
Authors: Finney David John
Published: December 2006

Frank Yates, one of the greatest statistical scientists of his generation, was born on 12 May 1902, the only son of Percy and Edith Yates of Didsbury, Manchester. He had four younger sisters, two of whom, Dr Edna Oakeshott and Mrs Olive Canton, survive him. Percy Yates was educated at Manchester Grammar School, but, partly for health reasons, left when only 16. He eventually became junior partner in the family seed merchant business in Shudehill, Manchester. The firm, founded in 1826 as a retailer, developed into wholesaling and became a supplier to farmers and market gardeners around Manchester; as Samuel Yates Ltd of Macclesfield, it is still trading. Percy was one of five brothers, of whom Harry, the eldest, was the senior partner; two others emigrated to Australia and New Zealand, establishing similar businesses there, which are still in existence. Edith’s father, Frank Wright, ran a corn and seed business (now Frank Wright Ltd) in Ashbourne, Derbyshire; for health reasons, he later took a 200-acre dairy farm on the outskirts of Ashbourne.
Solly Zuckerman, Baron Zuckerman, of Burnham Thorpe, O. M., K. C. B., 30 May 1904 - 1 April 1993
Authors: Krohn Peter Leslie
Published: December 2006

Solly Zuckerman was born on 30 May 1904 and died following a heart attack almost 89 years later, full of honours and though becoming frail, still at work. I was moved along by one accident after another with little or no idea of who I was or of what I would become and with little notion of what the morrow would bring. Up to the time of the Second World War I should have laughed if anyone had suggested that in the years ahead I would become involved in public events. Both sides of his family had come to South Africa from Eastern Europe in the 19th century. His father ran a furniture business in Cape Town. He was a gentle and unambitious man who demanded little. His mother, on the other hand, was a busy taskmistress who was always wanting more from a boy who was aloof, uninterested and reserved. School had to be survived and organized games were disliked. His substitute was mountaineering and this activity led to his observing the social behaviour of the troops of baboons that he encountered on his climbs and hence to his earliest and constantly recurring scientific interest.
Raymond John Heaphy Beverton, C. B. E., 29 August 1922 - 23 July 1995
Authors: Cushing David Henry , Edwards Ronald Walter
Published: December 2006

Ray Beverton was born on the 29 August 1922, the only child of Edgar John Beverton and Dorothy Sybil Mary Beverton. His father was a commercial artist and his mother, too, came from an artistic family; indeed an ancestor was Sir Thomas Heaphy, a portrait painter and official war artist at Waterloo. Another forebear won the V.C. As a young child Ray acquired enthusiasms for music, fishing and football, activities which were dear to him throughout his life; in later years he became very fond of sailing. He was a regular supporter of West Ham United - the Hammers - until he moved to Swindon. When eight years old he entered his first angling competition and in later life he rarely took a holiday or trip abroad without his fishing rods. He went to school at the Forest School, Snaresbrook and then to Downing College, Cambridge (1940-42), where he read physics, chemistry and mathematics in Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos. Between 1942 and 1945 he worked at the Operational Research Group developing polystyrene and latex for the insulation of coaxial cables for radar. During this time he retained his links with Cambridge and when in 1945, Michael Graham, the newly appointed Director of Fisheries Research, asked his former tutor, Sir James Gray, F.R.S, for an able young graduate to extend his studies on the exploitation of the North Sea cod (Graham 1935, 1938
a
), Ray was introduced to him. Ray wrote ‘I first met Michael Graham in the late summer of 1945 in a small space carved out of the racks of dusty files in St Stephen’s House. He gave me a copy of his book,
The Fish Gate
(Graham 1943). Within a month he took me with him on a Grimsby trawler to the Barents Sea fishing grounds’ (1)*. Ray suffered badly from sea sickness and wrote three letters of resignation, which fortunately he did not send. He spent a year in Lowestoft from 1945-46. During this time he wrote the first chapter of Graham’s Buckland lecture (2), one of a series which are given from time to time by scientists to audiences of fishermen; both Ray and Michael used the English language well, if differently. The amalgam is a delightful study of Frank Buckland, one of the ancestors of fisheries research. In 1946, Ray returned to Cambridge to read zoology in Part II of the Tripos and he gained the top first class degree in his year and the Smart Prize for zoology; he also won a Blue for soccer. He returned to Lowestoft in 1947 and married Kathleen Edith Marner the same year. They had three daughters, Susan, Valerie and Julia. *Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.
Hugh Blaschko, 4 January 1900 - 18 April 1993
Authors: Born Gustav Victor Rudolf , Banks P.
Published: December 2006

Professor Hugh Blaschko was a biochemical pharmacologist of great distinction. His elucidation of the biosynthesis and metabolism of the catecholamines will remain a classic in the application of biochemical methods for solving pharmacological problems; and this and other discoveries made by Blaschko contributed crucially to the development of the first effective drugs for controlling high blood pressure.
Harry Julius Emeléus, C. B. E., 22 June 1903 - 2 December 1993
Authors: Greenwood Norman Neill
Published: December 2006

Harry Emeléus had a profound impact on the development of inorganic chemistry in Britain and a lasting influence on the approach to the subject by countless research students from the UK, the Commonwealth, America and Europe. His seminal book
Modern Aspects of Inorganic Chemistry
(1938), conceived and written with his colleague J.S. Anderson when they were both junior members of the staff at Imperial College, London, presented the subject in an entirely new and exciting way. Indeed, it revived interest in an area of chemistry that had almost completely disappeared as an undergraduate and research field in the U.K. Subsequently, in Cambridge, Emeléus built up an internationally acclaimed school of inorganic chemistry which dominated the subject for several decades. An astonishing number of his research students and collaborators went on to distinguished careers and to senior academic positions both in Britain and abroad. He is remembered by them with great affection and respect, and most trace their subsequent achievements to the lessons learnt during their time in his laboratory.
Sir Kenneth Hutchison, C. B. E., F. Eng., 30 October 1903 - 28 November 1989
Authors: Rooke Denis Eric
Published: December 2006

Sir Kenneth Hutchison had a fertile, original and agile mind. An engineer of diverse talents, technically brilliant, far-sighted, energetic and courageous, he had the knack of leadership, enthused all who worked with him and made many friends. He will be remembered as one of the giants of the modern gas industry, who in his 40 years of service to that industry contributed hugely to the economic life of the country. His innate shyness occasionally led to a degree of taciturnity in public but in private with his colleagues and friends he was relaxed, approachable and full of humour. The potential barrier to oral communication caused by his shyness did not dent his skill as a communicator, and as a writer he was the master of most elegant prose. His growing eminence changed him not a bit and he remained a warm human being who loved life, literature and art, and above all his family and friends.
Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn, 10 March 1904 - 26 August 1994
Authors: Bleaney Brebis
Published: December 2006

H.G. Kuhn was one of the group of emigre physicists who did so much for their subject in their adopted Oxford. Silesian by birth, he studied for his doctorate at Gottingen under the Nobel Laureate James Franck, but when his career in Germany was terminated by Nazi pressures, he was recruited for Oxford by Professor F.A. Lindemann to work at the Clarendon Laboratory. He joined Derek Jackson in work on hyperfine structure in atomic spectra, on spectral profiles and on pressure broadening. After naturalization as a British subject in 1939, he became a member of the team working on the separation of uranium isotopes. In 1945 he resumed his research in atomic spectroscopy. He was elected to a Fellowship at Balliol College in 1950; as its first physics Fellow, he rapidly gained a reputation as an outstanding teacher, confirming his standing in the Clarendon Laboratory. He was the author of two important textbooks on atomic spectra, one published in Germany in 1934 (1), the other in England in 1962 (2). He became a University Lecturer in Oxford in 1945, and a Reader in 1955; after retirement he worked for some time in the Department of Astrophysics.
Sir William Drummond MacDonald Paton, C. B. E., 5 May 1917 - 17 October 1993
Authors: Rang Humphrey Peter , Perry Walter Laing Macdonald
Published: December 2006

Bill Paton was a scientist and scholar of rare distinction. He made his mark not only by his own contributions to pharmacology and medical science, and by his abilities as an administrator and head of department, but also through his influence on public policy. He was much in demand for committee service because of his ability to get to the root of difficult problems and to achieve consensus on controversial issues. He enjoyed taking on these responsibilities and took them very seriously. For him, forming an opinion was something to be done only after he was fully in possession of the facts and the history of the problem. He was also a very kind and generous man, and lacked any trace of intellectual arrogance. Knowledge was to him something to be used to pave the way to a better human future, rather than to bolster his own esteem. Though his talents took him quickly to the top, he remained an unostentatious person with a modest lifestyle, devoid of the trappings and affectations which often accompany success. His many friends and colleagues owe a lot to his support and guidance, and to the example that he set.
Charles Garrett Phillips, 13 October 1916 - 9 September 1994
Authors: Porter Robert
Published: December 2006

Charles Garrett Phillips was born in London on 13 October 1916, the eldest of four children, having one brother and twin sisters. His own comment on his categorically medical ancestry and distinguished family traditions reads: ‘My grandfather, George Arthur Phillips, J.P (1850-1921), was a Surgeon of Walsall, Staffordshire, and my great-grandfather, George Marshall Phillips (1819-1904), was Surgeon of Whitwell, Hertfordshire.’ Charles’s father, George Ramsay Phillips, F.F.A., R.C.S. (1880-1953), was Senior Anaesthetist to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London W2, a position from which he retired in 1948. His mother, Flora Phillips, née Green (1886-1956), had been a nurse at St George’s Hospital, then at Hyde Park Corner. At the age of 29, she married George Ramsay Phillips who had been Resident Anaesthetist at that hospital. Flora was the youngest of six children who were brought up on a farm in Kent. Her mother died when she was 18 and her father soon afterwards. She was helped by family friends in London, trained as a nurse at St George’s and became a ward sister at that hospital. After her marriage she worked at the Victoria Hospital for Children in Chelsea and, in 1939, became a matron at Bradfield College. Charles Phillips was proud of his medical family tree. His great-grandfather and his grandfather had both qualified at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, as had his father’s brother, Alfred Percy Phillips (1881-1961). His grandfather’s brother, Percy Cranston Phillips (1869-1946), had graduated from St Thomas’s Hospital and practised in Putney, London, as a general practitioner, while George Ramsay Phillips, his father, had qualified at Guy’s Hospital and served in the R.A.M.C. in World War I.
Patrick Christopher Steptoe, C. B. E., 9 June 1913 - 22 March 1988
Authors: Edwards Robert Geoffrey
Published: December 2006

Patrick Steptoe was born on 9 June 1913 in Witney, Oxfordshire. He grew up in a family of eight brothers and sisters, the sixth boy and the seventh child of Grace Maud (née Mimms) and Harry Arthur Steptoe. His mother was an advocate of women’s rights, and worked for the Mothers’ Union and Infant Welfare clinics; she died in 1973. His father was Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Witney; he died in 1953. As a schoolboy at the Witney Grammar School, Patrick became interested in medicine and music, and the two subjects demanded virtually equal time during his late teens. This musical talent manifested early and lasted throughout his life, for even at the age of 13 he played incidental piano music during matinees for the silent films of Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Ramon Navarro and Rudolph Valentino. Later he was organist in St Mary’s Church, and director and organist of Christ Church Musical Society, Oxford, when he was 18 years old. He wrote that the heavy weight of the organ keys helped to make his hands and fingers very strong. These early signs of a character full of determination and initiative were apparent later in his life, as he coped with disappointments and opposition during his medical career. He might indeed have become a musician, but medicine finally triumphed when at age 20 he entered King’s College, London, as a medical student. He qualified in 1939 at the age of 26 with the degrees of M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. from St George’s Hospital in London. This hospital retained his affection throughout his life, even though he remembered wards full of cases of pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia since antibiotics had not then been discovered.
Richard Laurence Millington Synge, 28 October 1914 - 18 August 1994
Authors: Gordon Hugh
Published: December 2006

There is no doubt that Dick Synge was a very exceptional person. According to his family, this first showed itself in the memory of an event, which occurred when he was only fifteen months old, when he was allowed to play with the gravel outside the church during the christening of his sister. The Synge family consisted of two branches, one of which, the Irish Synges, contained the famous playwright, J.M. Synge. They trace their ancestry back to a Thomas Millington also called Singe of Bridgenorth (born
ca
. 1500). The English Synges were also certainly present in Bridgenorth in the early 16th century. The Irish and the English Synges are known to have been in touch with one another in the 18th century. The English Synges remained as fairly prominent citizens of Bridgenorth until the late 19th century. Both branches of the family used the name Millington as a Christian name. For unknown reasons the spelling of his surname, Sing or Synge, varied. Family legend has it that the origin of the name Millington, which was used by both branches of the family as a Christian name, was that they had lived at Millington Hall in the parish of Rostherne (Cheshire). Because a member of the family sang so beautifully before King Henry VIII he was told to take the name of Singe. One of Dick Synge’s great uncles, born in 1863 and always known as ‘Uncle Millington’, became Warden of St Edwards School, Oxford. Among Synge’s recent ancestors was his grandmother who was a Thornely. All the Thornelys were mildly academic and quietly eccentric or unconventional in one way or another, so that Synge is thought to have inherited much from them, even including his height. Two generations further back was William Roscoe, M.R, who helped to abolish slavery and whose art collection still forms the nucleus of the Walker Art Gallery; he also founded the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Synge came from a distinguished family which included his grandfather, A.M. Sing, who was President of the Liverpool Athenaeum and a Governor of the Liverpool Collegiate School.
Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth, C. B. E., 17 April 1899 - 12 February 1994
Authors: Locke Michael
Published: December 2006

On 17 April 1899, in Kirkham, Lancashire, Vincent Brian Wigglesworth was born into a talented and idiosyncratic Victorian family with roots going back to the hamlet of Wigglesworth in the south-west comer of Yorkshire. He was the son of Sydney Wigglesworth, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., Captain R.A.M.C., and Margaret Emmeline (née Pierce). Sydney Wigglesworth was a general practitioner but also an amateur mechanic and inventor who had studied engineering at Owens College (later the University of Manchester) before changing to medicine. He made scale models of locomotives and was a passionate pioneer motorist. Margaret Pierce came from a well-to-do family of London solicitors originating from Devon yeoman stock with business and nautical interests (Pierce Sound in North West Canada is named after an eighteenth-century ancestor). As an amateur painter trained at South Kensington she developed a great eye for colour. It was the kind of family that produced many famous Englishmen, artists as well as scientists. V.B.W.’s scientific illustrations show that he inherited his mothers artistic talent. His elder brother’s career as a landscape painter was cut short by his early death in 1936.
Cyril Clifford Addison. 28 November 1913—1 April 1994.
Authors: Lord Lewis of Newnham  , Johnson B. F. G.
Published: December 2006

The inorganic chemistry community was saddened on learning that Professor C.C. Addison had died suddenly of a heart attack on Good Friday, 1 April 1994, during a stopover at his daughter's home on his way from Nottingham to his country cottage at Silecroft.
Richard Hume Adrian, D. L. 2nd Baron Adrian of Cambridge. 16 October 1927—4 April 1995
Authors: Huxley Andrew
Published: December 2006

Richard Adrian was a distinguished electrophysiologist who cleared up many of the puzzles about the electrical behaviour of striated muscle. The situation in this tissue is exceptionally complex, both because the surface membrane is invaginated to form the transverse tubules, whose surface area is several times that of the fibre surface, and because substantial amounts of charge are carried across these membranes by processes connected with the turning on of contraction itself. Apart from his scientific work, he played an important part in the life of Cambridge University, as Master of Pembroke College for 11 years and as Vice-Chancellor for two. In the House of Lords, he contributed in an important way to the debates leading up to the new Act of 1986 governing experiments on living animals, and took a major part in the defence of academic freedom in the universities when it was threatened in the Education Reform Bill of 1988.
Alfred Maurice Binnie, F. Eng. 6 February 1901—31 December 1986
Authors: Wood Alan Muir
Published: December 2006

The Binnie family may be traced back many generations to the Eastern Lowlands of Scotland, early records of the surname being associated in the 13th century with Uphall, West Lothian. The Armorial Bearings granted to a distant ancestor, a ‘horse's head furnished with a wagon proper’, and an ambiguous motto, ‘virtute doloque’ (by courage and policy [or deceit]), recall an incident of history–or myth—of the year 1313 in which a yeoman farmer, William Binny, who supplied hay to Edward II of England's garrison troops of a peel, Linlithgow Castle, adopted the ruse of stalling his wagon on entering the castle so that neither could the drawbridge be raised nor the portcullis lowered. Scottish soldiers emerged from beneath the hay and, with local irregulars, took the castle in the name of Robert the Bruce of Scotland.
Peter Humphry Greenwood. 21 April 1927—3 March 1995
Authors: Patterson C.
Published: December 2006

Humphry Greenwood was an ichthyologist, noted in particular for his pioneering work on the species flocks of cichlids in the great African lakes, and for studies of the phylogeny and systematics of teleosts.
Benjamin Arthur Hems. 29 June 1912—2 July 1995
Authors: Jack David , Walker Tom
Published: December 2006

Arthur Hems was best known as the Director of Chemistry and Research in the Glaxo Group who created the exceptional team of chemists who produced, inter alia, the first commercial synthetic thyroxine, numerous glucocorticoid steroids for systemic and topical use, and important cephalosporin antibiotics. Their expertise was a very significant part of the scientific base which enabled Glaxo Laboratories Limited, a relatively small British pharmaceutical company when he joined them in 1937, to grow into the truly international Glaxo-Wellcome pic of today.
Inge Lehmann. 13 May 1888—21 February 1993
Authors: Bolt Bruce A.
Published: December 2006

Dr Inge Lehmann was born on 13 May 1888 at Osterbro by the Lakes in Copenhagen. She grew up and lived much of her long life there, and for over 50 years, on Kastelvej, Copenhagen. The Lehmann family had its roots in Bohemia; the Danish branch had many influential members of high standing, including barristers, politicians and engineers. Inge Lehmann's paternal grandfather laid out the first Danish telegraph line (opened in 1854) and her great grandfather was Governor of the National Bank. Her mother's father, Hans Jakob T0rsleff, belonged to an old Danish family with a priest in every generation. A granddaughter, Anne Groes, was for a while Minister of Commerce. Inge's childhood was a happy one in the peaceful atmosphere of the 1890s. Her father, Alfred Lehmann, was a professor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen who pioneered the study of experimental psychology in Denmark. He was rarely seen except at mealtimes, though sometimes on Sunday he took the family for a walk. (A fund endowed by her estate makes a travel award each year alternatively to a psychologist and a geophysicist.) She had a sister, Harriet.
Allan Roy Mackintosh. 22 January 1936—20 December 1995
Authors: Bleaney Brebis
Published: December 2006

Allan Mackintosh was a gifted physics student at Cambridge University, whose later career was quite unusual. After obtaining his B.A. as a scholar at Peterhouse College in 1957, he worked in the Royal Society Mond Laboratory under the supervision of Professor A.B. Pippard. For his thesis on an ‘Experimental study of the Fermi surface of lead’, he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1960. He spent seven years as a Professor at Ames, Iowa, and returned to Europe to hold two Professorships in Copenhagen. He became Director of the Danish National Laboratory at Risø from 1971 to 1976, and of NORDITA from 1986 to 1989. He was President of the Danish Physical Society from 1976 to 1979, and of the European Physical Society from 1980 to 1982.
Sir Richard Oswald Chandler Norman, K. B. E. 27 April 1932—6 June 1993
Authors: Waddington David
Published: December 2006

Dick Norman's career spanned teaching and research in organic chemistry of the first rank at the Universities of Oxford and York, the Presidencies of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and the Royal Society of Chemistry, a spell as Chief Scientific Adviser to two major Government departments (Defence and Energy) and the Rectorship of Exeter College, Oxford. These elements of his career–teaching, research, leadership and administration–build on each other to be a greater whole than even the distinguished separate parts.
Thomas Philip Stroud Powell. 13 July 1923—8 February 1996
Authors: Guillery R. W.
Published: December 2006

Tom Powell was a master of descriptive neuroanatomy. He knew and understood all parts of the central nervous system, had taught it all and studied most of it. During the more than 40 years of his working life, methods of studying the brain advanced dramatically. Tom used new and old methods critically, he knew the snags, the difficulties and the risks of misinterpretation, was careful to try and avoid them in his own work and quick to spot them in the work of others.
Roger Wolcott Sperry. 20 August 1913—17 April 1994
Authors: Voneida T. J.
Published: December 2006

‘Where does behaviour come from? What is the purpose of consciousness?’ Questions such as these, which appeared on the first page of Sperry's class notes in a freshman psychology course at Oberlin College, represent an accurate preview of a career that included major contributions to fundamental issues in neurobiology, psychology and philosophy. Indeed, his first paper, published in the Journal of General Psychology in 1939, entitled ‘Action current study in movement coordination’ (1)*, begins: ‘The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience’, and continues, setting the stage for much that was to follow: ‘The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist.’
Maurice Stacey, C. B. E. 8 April 1907—9 October 1994
Authors: Overend W. G.
Published: December 2006

Maurice Stacey was a remarkable man who had a fulfilling and varied life. His contributions to chemistry were substantial and brought him international renown. Throughout his career he had an abiding passion to unravel the intricate processes of nature and to strengthen the scientific basis of medicine and agriculture. He succeeded in bridging the areas of organic and biological chemistry at a time when the latter was a relatively young science. But his influence on British science extended well beyond his own research, as he participated in the management of science through his service on governmental committees and the Councils of the Scientific Societies.

Stacey was not a scientist whose success is achieved by a single-mindedness of purpose to the exclusion of all else. He was a polymath, and, besides science, was involved in many other pursuits, which led to him being well-known and respected beyond the chemical fraternity. He inspired his students, both the high-flyers and the less gifted, and imparted to them his broad understanding of science. The first and lasting impression of Maurice Stacey was of someone who had a warmth of spirit and who caught the imagination.
Henry Melson Stommel. 27 September 1920—17 January 1992
Authors: Wunsch Carl
Published: December 2006

Henry Melson Stommel, probably the most original and important physical oceanographer of all time, was in large measure the creator of the modern field of dynamical oceanography. He contributed and inspired many of its most important ideas over a 45–year period. Hank, as many called him, was known throughout the world oceanographic community not only as a superb scientist, but as raconteur, explosives amateur, printer, painter, gentleman farmer, fiction writer and host with a puckish sense of humour and booming laugh.
Arthur James Cochran Wilson. 28 November 1914—1 July 1995
Authors: Woolfson M. M.
Published: December 2006

Arthur James Cochran Wilson was born in SpringhiH, Nova Scotia, on 28 November 1914. His father, a medical doctor, served with the Canadian army in the First World War and he was reported missing in circumstances that were not very clear. Arthur had no memory of him at all and he and his sister, Jean, were brought up by their mother, who had to work extremely hard just to feed and clothe the family. He had a younger cousin, John Wilson, and it was John–s mother, who had a substantial inheritance, who paid for Arthur–s schooling. There was considerable social stigma associated with poverty in those days and the necessity of accepting charity in order to see to her children–s needs was resented by Arthur–s mother, which created tension in the family.
Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton. 8 September 1918 – 16 March 1998
Authors: Ley Steven V. , Myers Rebecca M.
Published: December 2006

Derek Harold Richard Barton was born on 8 September 1918 in the Thames-side town of Gravesend in Kent, the only child of William Thomas Barton and Maude Henrietta (
née
Lukes). His humble background gave no indication of the magnitude, depth and impact that his career would have on the lives of so many and the scientific community in general.
Brian Blundell Boycott. 10 December 1924 – 22 April 2000
Authors: Wässle Heinz
Published: December 2006

Brian Blundell Boycott was an outstanding zoologist and neurobiologist. His early research (1947–52), at the Anatomy Department of University College London and at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, was on learning and memory in cephalopods and the functional architecture of the octopus brain. From 1952 to 1970 he was a teacher of zoology and later neurobiology at University College London (Zoology Department). Brian's research interests changed in the early 1960s, when he began studying the mammalian retina. Over a period of 35 years he produced many seminal papers that laid the foundation for our modern understanding of the cell types and synaptic connections that form the basis of parallel processing in the retina. In 1970 Brian moved to the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biophysics Unit at King's College London, from which he retired as Director at the end of 1989. He continued to be an active researcher at Guy's Hospital Medical School (1990–97) and in the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London (1997–2000). Brian was a modest and kind person, generous in sharing ideas and material; he liked to interact and cooperate with other people and was very supportive of young scientists.
Quintin Mcgarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone. 9 October 1907 – 12 October 2001
Authors: Lewis Geoffrey
Published: December 2006

Of those Fellows elected under Statute 12 for services and achievements outside the range of the natural sciences, Quintin Hogg had special claims to be chosen.

The missionary strain to educate ran deep in his family. When his grandfather, the first Quintin Hogg, left Eton he immediately began bible classes for ragged boys under the arches at the Adelphi near Charing Cross. This embryonic educational enterprise grew rapidly. In 1882, when he was not yet 40, he started the first Polytechnic, from which all others took their name, in Regent Street just north of Oxford Circus. The idea was to provide a place where underprivileged men could find an outlet for ‘any healthy desire, physical, spiritual, social, or intellectual, which he possessed’. It was the first university for the underprivileged. Within seven years some 70 000 young men had enrolled. The Polytechnic was in the bloodstream of the Hogg family.
Raymond Urgel Lemieux. 16 June 1920 – 22 July 2000
Authors: Bundle David R.
Published: December 2006

Raymond Lemieux was one of the outstanding chemists of the second half of the twentieth century. During the four decades from 1950 onwards he dominated the field of carbohydrate chemistry. His rare and special degree of insight into chemical problems resulted in numerous seminal discoveries and observations that influenced organic chemistry extensively, and provided the area of carbohydrate chemistry—and its associated subjects—with extremely significant conceptual and experimental tools. His work was a determining factor in converting this field from an academic specialization into one of great practical importance in chemistry, biology and medicine. His influential role was recognized when, with 21 world-renowned chemists, he was invited by the American Chemical Society to write his autobiography. The highly engaging series of books,
Profiles, pathways and dreams
, documents the development of modern organic chemistry through the research careers of chemists who made fundamental contributions to organic chemistry over many decades of research. Lemieux's contribution,
Explorations with sugars. How sweet it was
, is an excellent account of his research from 1946 to 1990 (50)*.
Stewart Crichton Miller, C.B.E. 2 July 1934 – 7 August 1999
Authors: Ruffles Philip Charles
Published: December 2006

Stewart Crichton Miller, a mechanical engineer of great distinction, was the former Director of Engineering and Technology for Rolls-Royce plc, where he worked for over 40 years. Stewart was a foremost contributor to several of the company's most important development projects, chief among them being the RB211-535 engine project, which is used on Boeing 757 aircraft.

Stewart was born on 2 July 1934 to William and Grace Miller in Kirkcaldy, Fife, where he spent his childhood. His primary school education at Kirkcaldy Fife High Primary School started on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared. A contemporary, with whom he was a close friend during school years, is Archie Howie (F.R.S. 1978), a distinguished physicist and former Head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Professor Howie recalls that he and Stewart vied with each other for school prizes, etc., with Stewart emerging as the Dux of the primary school.

On leaving primary school, Stewart attended Kirkcaldy High School from 1945 to 1951. It was there that he received the Scottish Higher Learning Certificate in 1950 and an award in the Edinburgh University Bursary Competition. He continued his education at the University of Edinburgh from 1951 to 1954, enrolling as an engineering degree candidate. His choice of engineering as a career was considered unusual by others for someone of his high academic abilities. However, this doubt only increased his determination. His research emphasis while studying was on mechanical vibration, which served as useful background for his later work at Rolls-Royce on turbo-machinery. He graduated in 1954 from Edinburgh with a BSc (firstclass honours) in mechanical engineering.

After leaving university, Stewart spent two years completing a graduate apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce that marked the beginning of his extensive career. Spending his first year gaining workshop experience and his second in all the major technical offices, Stewart subsequently qualified to receive the status of Chartered Engineer.
Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini. 5 December 1907 – 30 December 1993
Authors: Bignami Giovanni
Published: December 2006

Giuseppe (Beppo) Occhialini was born in Fossombrone (Umbria) on 5 December 1907. He spent his childhood and adolescence following his father, Raffaele Augusto, around Italy from one university appointment to the next. Together with (Lord) Patrick Blackett, F.R.S. (P.R.S. 1965–70), his father was to be one of the people who most influenced Occhialini's life and way of thinking. Between 1911 and 1917 the family lived in Pisa; then Beppo (who was at that time still called Peppino) moved to Florence, where he lived with his mother, Etra, until he graduated from university in 1929. In the years that followed he worked at the Institute of Physics of the University of Florence, first as a temporary research assistant and later in a permanent appointment. The seat of the institute was then in Arcetri, very near the observatory and the ‘Gioiello’, the villa of Galileo's last years. The physics course had been established in Florence only a short time before, thanks to the influence of Antonio Garbasso and Enrico Persico, two charismatic figures in the incredible scientific ferment that was running through the Italy of the 1920s and 1930s. Years later, Beppo's romantic temperament was to recall, of the Physics Institute, that ‘the view from those windows made one forget the scantiness of the equipment, the lack of functionality of the convent-like structure and the difficulty of access’. To get to Arcetri, of course, he had to pedal up the hill on his bicycle from Florence.
Martin Rivers Pollock. 10 December 1914 – 21 December 1999
Authors: Ambler Richard P. , Murray Kenneth
Published: December 2006

Martin Rivers Pollock was born in Liverpool on 10 December 1914. He came from an old legal family, being the great-great-grandson of Sir Jonathan Frederick Pollock, Bt. (1783–1870), a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, barrister, MP for Huntingdon, Attorney General in Peel's first administration and Chief Baron of the Exchequer from 1844 to 1866. His father, Hamilton Rivers Pollock, also went to Trinity College, qualified as a barrister but never practised, and in 1914 was with the Cunard Steam Ship Company, before spending World War I with the Liverpool Regiment and the Royal Air Force. His mother was Eveline Morton Bell, daughter of Thomas Bell, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After the war his father inherited a fortune from an uncle, and the family moved to Wessex, where they lived first at splendid Anderson Manor, Dorset, and then Urchfont Manor, Wiltshire, his father living as a country squire and JP.

Pollock had a conventional upper-class education, beginning with a nanny, followed by West Downs School (1923–28) and then Winchester College (1928–33). His first scientific enthusiasm was for astronomy, but he decided he was insufficiently mathematical to pursue it further (his mathematics master was Clement Durrell, author of some famous texts including Advanced algebra), so he then decided to study medicine. His Wessex schooldays were influenced by the nearby Powys brothers, the youngest (Llewelyn1) having been a Cambridge friend and contemporary of his father. Through Sylvia Townsend Warner2 he met her cousin Janet, daughter of Arthur Llewelyn Machen3, who eventually, in 1979, became his second wife.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1933, having done his first MB and the first part of his second MB while still at school, and opting to do the two new half-subjects (Pathology and Biochemistry) that had just been instituted—he remembered thinking at the time that biochemistry was going to be the key subject for medicine in the future. Already while at school he had become a theoretical Communist, and as an undergraduate worked very hard, both at his medical studies and in political activity (such as selling the Daily Worker) for the Party—and knew most of the soon-to-be notorious Cambridge Communists of the time, including Guy Burgess4 and Donald Maclean5. He was now a Senior Scholar, and graduated BA first class in 1936; he started to spend a fourth year reading Part II Biochemistry. He decided in April 1937 that he had spent too long at Cambridge, so moved on to his clinical studies at University College Hospital. He also felt he should try to become qualified before what he saw as the inevitable war started, although he was nearly distracted into joining the International Brigade and going off to Spain—he had been a friend of John Cornford6, who did go to Spain and wrote and died there, and of Norman John (but widely known as James) Klugmann.
Stanley Keith Runcorn. 19 November 1922 – 5 December 1995
Authors: Collinson D.W.
Published: December 2006

Stanley Keith Runcorn was born in 1922 in Southport, Lancashire, the son of a monumentalmason of staunch Congregationalist persuasion. He was educated at the King George VGrammar School, where his strongest subjects were history and mathematics. When in thesixth form his headmaster persuaded him to take science subjects, and he was subsequentlyawarded a State Scholarship to study at Cambridge University. At an early age his father hadtaken him to a small local observatory, encouraging his interest in astronomy. On the sportingside, in spite of his later interest in rugby he refused to play the game at school and insteadconcentrated on swimming. Under his captaincy his house regularly won the swimming trophy.

Runcorn showed an early interest in religious and cultural matters, which was to stay with him throughout his life. He attended a Methodist Sunday school and for some time provided a Sunday evening service for his sister and grandmother while his parents attended church. He read extensively and went to London on his own, visiting museums and architectural landmarks. Later, while at Cambridge, he developed a love of music.

In 1940 he entered Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge to read electrical engineering. After graduating in 1943 he commenced research at the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE), remaining there until the end of the war. During his time at the RRE he was confirmed into the Church of England.
John Stanley Sawyer. 19 June 1916 – 19 September 2000
Authors: Mason John
Published: December 2006

John Sawyer was born at Wembley on 19 June 1916, the only child of Arthur Stanley Sawyer,a civil servant, and Emily Florence Sawyer (née Frost). Arthur Sawyer left school at the ageof 16 and joined the Post Office Savings Bank, where he remained until his retirement in 1937.He had a leaning towards science despite his limited education. He bought a Zeiss microscope and built up a collection of botanical slides, most of which he made himself. He also became a keen and skilful photographer, doing his own processing and enlarging until his death in1946. Emily, John's mother, was much involved in singing as a member of the Royal ChoralSociety and lived to be 97 despite prolonged ill-health.
Elsie May Widdowson, C.H. 21 October 1906 – 14 June 2000
Authors: Ashwell Margaret
Published: December 2006

I first met Elsie Widdowson in the early 1970s, but it was not until the mid-1980s that I began to take a particular interest in the story behind her remarkable scientific achievements.
Wilson Baker. 24 January 1900 – 3 June 2002
Authors: McOmie J.F.W. , Lloyd D.M.G.
Published: December 2006

Emeritus Professor Wilson Baker was one of the last of the very distinguished classical organic chemists whose wide-ranging researches were nearly all performed before the advent of commercially available spectroscopic instruments that revolutionized the determination of molecular structures.
Thomas Brooke Benjamin. 15 April 1929 – 16 August 1995 Elected FRS 1966
Authors: Hunt J.C.R.
Published: December 2006

Thomas Brooke Benjamin was a brilliant researcher, whose original and elegant use of applied mathematics and extraordinary physical insights changed the way we now study and think about fluid mechanics.
Harold Garnet Callan. 5 March 1917 — 3 November 1993 Elected FRS 1963
Authors: Gall Joseph G.
Published: December 2006

With the death of Harold Garnet (‘Mick’) Callan on 3 November 1993, the community of cell biologists lost one of the twentieth century's most profound and colourful students of chromosomes. During his 50-year scientific career the study of chromosomes and genes went from purely descriptive and morphological to deeply analytical and molecular. Steeped by training in the earlier tradition, Callan nevertheless contributed enormously to this revolution with his meticulous studies on the giant chromosomes of amphibians, all the while maintaining that he was a ‘mere cytologist’ on whom much of the molecular analysis was lost. Mick Callan and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends whose careers intersected at many points. We visited and worked in each other's laboratories, we published together, we generated a voluminous correspondence (much of it in the days when letters were handwritten), and our families enjoyed many good times together in Scotland and the USA. My most difficult task in writing this biography has been to extract from the vast amount of public and personal information in my possession those parts of Mick Callan's life and work that will be of chief interest to a broader audience. I have been helped in this by a 30 000-word autobiography written by him near the end of his life, covering the period from his birth in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945. This account provides considerable insight into the factors that shaped his later professional career and is an engrossing account of the life of a boy in prewar England and a young man at Oxford and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the worst days of the war. Callan's autobiography has been deposited in the University library, St Andrews, Scotland.
John Flavell Coales CBE 14 September 1907 – 5 June 1999 Elected FRS 1970
Authors: Macfarlane Alistair
Published: December 2006

John Coales made important contributions to the development of radar-directed naval gunnery. He played a significant role in the emergence of a new profession of control engineering, by building up a school of control research in Cambridge, and by his part in the creation of the International Federation of Automatic Control.
Henry Ellis Daniels. 2 October 1912 – 16 April 2000
Authors: Cox David
Published: December 2006

Henry Ellis Daniels was born in London in 1912, the second child of a Jewish family that had come from the Russian territories of Poland and Lithuania as refugees from the pogroms there. His father's family had come from Poland to London, whereas his mother's were Litvak Jews who had arrived in Scotland; the herring boats that sold fish to the Baltic ports returned with many immigrants to Leith. When Henry was two years old, at the time of the Zeppelin raids on London, the family moved to Edinburgh to join the branch there. The life of the Jewish community in Edinburgh at that time is described by Daiches (1971), whose family were neighbours.
David Keynes Hill. 23 July 1915 – 18 August 2002 Elected FRS 1972
Authors: Huxley Andrew
Published: December 2006

David Hill followed his father, A.V. Hill FRS, into the study of muscular contraction. Using a wide range of experimental techniques, he made several important advances of which the most important was the discovery of the ‘short-range elastic component’ a phenomenon which implied that even in the resting state there was an interaction between the thick (myosin) and thin (actin) filaments. He also studied physical changes in nerve when stimulated.