Robert McCredie May
Authors: Geoff Watts
Journal: The Lancet (2020)

Physicist turned ecologist and UK Chief Scientific Adviser. He was born in Sydney, NSW, Australia, on Jan 8, 1936, and died of pneumonia in Oxford, UK, on April 28, 2020, aged 84 years. Anyone unfamiliar with the career of Lord Robert May, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford in the UK, might wonder why a medical journal would publish the obituary of a man whose first degree was in chemical engineering, whose PhD was in theoretical physics, and who, when he did switch to the life sciences, chose animal ecology. The clue lies in his chosen branch of the discipline: theoretical ecology, with an emphasis on population dynamics. This topic encompasses populations of microbes, and May's thinking has since proved central to epidemiological modelling. Professor Alison Galvani, Director of Yale School of Medicine's Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis in New Haven, CT, USA, did a PhD at the University of Oxford under May's supervision. As she points out: “In the current COVID-19 crisis, the type of modelling [he devised] now guides policies to mitigate transmission all over the world.” His collaborator in this modelling was Sir Roy Anderson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, who recalls how “Bob could take a complicated (biological) problem…and translate it into a set of equations that permitted analysis. I've never come across anyone who was as good at that.” May was aware that his career path had been as meandering as it was fruitful. “I would say that I am a scientist with a short attention span”, he said in a 2008 interview. “It's not that I go around deliberately thinking of what is a different thing to do. It's just that my scientific career has been a sequence of accidents.” After his PhD—awarded, like his first degree, by the University of Sydney in Australia—May took a postdoctoral job as a lecturer in applied mathematics at Harvard University in the USA. He returned to the University of Sydney in 1961, where, at the end of that decade, he was granted a personal chair in physics. By this time, a growing awareness of environmental change and the nascent concept of social responsibility in science had begun to stimulate his interest in ecology. Predictably, it was the mathematics of the subject that caught his attention. “He had a big picture view of ecology”, says Dame Georgina Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, UK. “Ecologists are very easily driven towards detail, trying to understand specific interactions…He, as a physicist, took a system level view of ecology.” May's monograph, Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems (1973), became a key work of the ecological literature. In 1973, May took up a professorship in the Department of Biology at Princeton University in the USA, where he had already spent an 18-month sabbatical at its Institute for Advanced Study. He continued his work on infectious diseases and biodiversity until 1988 when he moved to the UK as a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford and from where, in 1995, he was recruited to spend 5 years as the UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA). This was an imaginative appointment. May was in no sense an establishment figure; an outsider by birth and disposition, he was always a plain speaker with views he was unafraid to express. His surprising switch to public policy came the year after his Oxford friend and colleague Lord John Krebs, now Emeritus Professor of Zoology, had become Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. “We had talked a lot about how one can serve science more generally…in the public sphere”, Krebs recalls. “I think that was one part [of his decision]…And he was always up for doing difficult jobs.” Unlike his predecessors, May saw the GCSA post as a platform for debating issues such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, genetically modified foods, and climate change. He didn't believe that science should be put in a box, says Mace. “One of the things he did as chief scientist was to argue for a science adviser in every government department…to him it was clear that you had to have a scientific approach across every area of policy.” In 2000, after his stint as GCSA, May was appointed President of the Royal Society. Galvani describes her mentor as highly competitive “even at croquet”, but generous and full of entertaining stories about other scientists. “He didn't get bogged down in the stress of things. He gave the government his advice without being too concerned whether or not they would be happy with it.” He was fun to be with, says Anderson: “He could work very hard, but he could also play very hard.” May was a tremendous communicator, adds Krebs. “He had a phenomenally quick and analytical mind. As well as being good mathematically, he was good at grasping concepts.” These talents served him well in his wide-ranging career. May leaves a wife, Judith, and a daughter, Nome.