page_title: East of England
section_title: Scientific heritage
hierarchical_section_title: East of England / History / Scientific heritage
caption_attribution_description: English: Headquarters (entrance) of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Cambridge
context_page_description: The East of England is one of nine official regions of England situated at the first level of the European Union's Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics. NUTS is an administrative structure for referencing the subdivisions of countries for statistical purposes. This structure was given its current form in 2018 and revised in 2020 to account for changes in EU membership. The East of England region was created in 1994 and adopted for statistics purposes from 1999. It includes the ceremonial counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Essex has the highest population in the region.
  The population of the East of England region at the 2011 census was 5,847,000.
  Bedford, Luton, Basildon, Peterborough, Southend-on-Sea, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford and Cambridge are the region's most populous towns. The southern part of the region lies in the London commuter belt.
context_section_description: Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA at Cambridge on 28 February 1953. William Bateson, at Cambridge, invented the term genetics and co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett.
  At the Bourn Hall Clinic in Bourn, west of Cambridge, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was first achieved in 1978. Smith, Kline, and French developed Tagamet in the 1970s at the Frythe, north of Welwyn; the site was sold by GSK in December 2010, and in World War II was home to Station IX, which made sabotage equipment for secret agents. Tagamet was for many years the world's best-selling prescription drug―for stomach ulcers. In 1912, in Cambridge, Frederick Gowland Hopkins discovered vitamins, gaining the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1929. 
  Under Sir David Jack, Allen & Hanburys at Ware (part of Glaxo Group Research since 1958, next to Chauncy School) developed Ventolin (for asthma) in the late 1960s and Zantac (for peptic ulcers) in the late 1970s; Zantac was the first pharmaceutical to sell more than $1bn per year; more recently Seretid (also for asthma) was developed there and the site is now part of GSK, which has a separate manufacturing site there. In 1975, at Cambridge, César Milstein and Georges J. F. Köhler separated monoclonal antibodies at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and gained the 1984 Nobel Prize for Medicine; the MRC LMB has had many Nobel prizes for Medicine. Adalimumab, known as Humira, the world's best-selling drug, was partly developed in Cambridge by Cambridge Antibody Technology. Smith & Nephew Research was based at Gilston Park House, in Gilston, north of Harlow.
  At Royal Papworth Hospital the UK's first heart transplant took place in January 1979, being operated by Sir Terence English and Sir Roy Calne, on 44-year-old Charles McHugh. The world's first heart, lung and liver transplant was performed there on 17 December 1986. The world's first long-term artificial heart was implanted (and connected) on 26 August 1994 by Dr John Wallwork. The patient lived for 9 months; John Wallwork had performed Europe's first heart–lung transplant there in 1984; such transplants are often carried out on people with cystic fibrosis. Ben Milstein conducted Britain's first open-heart surgery there in September 1958 on a woman with an atrial septal defect, known as a hole in the heart.
  John Ray was an important naturalist from Essex, and the first to distinguish flowering plants between monocotyledons and dicotyledons in his 1682 book Methodus Plantarum Nova. Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, introduced crop rotation to Britain (which had originated in Holland) in the early 1700s using wheat, turnips, barley and clover. The Maris Piper disease-resistant potato was developed by the Plant Breeding Institute in Trumpington in 1966. At the Rothamsted Experimental Station, near Harpenden in Hertfordshire, 2,4-D was discovered, under Juda Hirsch Quastel; this is the most widely used herbicide in the world; later at the station, the pyrethroid insecticide was developed, under Michael Elliott, which is now the most common insecticide on the domestic market.
  William Gilbert (astronomer) from Colchester was an important early physicist; the Gilbert was a former unit of magnetisation. Radar was developed in around Chelmsford in the late 1930s and at Bawdsey Manor on the Suffolk coast; on 24 July 1935 at Orfordness was the first detection on a CRT screen of tracking a plane on the radar – a Westland Wallace. Earlier radio had been developed around Chelmsford by the Marconi Company; much of Britain's electronics industry was derived from Marconi, later to be GEC and now BAE Systems. In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell at Cambridge discovered his electromagnetic wave equation, part of his Maxwell's equations. CSR (previously Cambridge Silicon Radio) has made much technology for Bluetooth.
  William Hyde Wollaston, a chemist from Norfolk, discovered palladium in 1802 and rhodium in 1804, and in 1802 discovered
  the features of the Sun's electromagnetic spectrum, known as Fraunhofer lines, allowing the chemi
caption: British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge
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