John James Rickard Macleod, 1876-1935

1935 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 584-589

John James Rickard Macleod, the son of the Rev. Robert Macleod, was born at Cluny, near Dunkeld, Perthshire, on September 6, 1876. He received his preliminary education at Aberdeen Grammar School and in 1893 entered Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, as a medical student. After a distinguished student career he graduated M.B., Ch.B. with Honours in 1898 and was awarded the Anderson Travelling Fellowship. He proceeded to Germany and worked for a year in the Physiological Institute of the University of Leipzig. He returned to London on his appointment as a Demonstrator of Physiology at the London Hospital Medical College under Professor Leonard Hill. Two years later he was appointed to the Lectureship on Biochemistry in the same college. In 1901 he was awarded the McKinnon Research Studentship of the Royal Society. At the early age of 27 (in 1902) he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, a post he occupied until 1918, when he was elected Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto. Previous to this transfer he had, during his last two years at Cleveland, been engaged in various war duties and incidentally had acted for part of the winter session of 1916 as Professor of Physiology at McGill University, Montreal. He remained at Toronto for ten years until, in 1928, he was appointed Regius Professor of Physiology in the University of Aberdeen, a post he held, in spite of steadily increasing disability, until his lamentably early death on March 16, 1935, at the age of 58.

1948 ◽  
Vol 6 (17) ◽  
pp. 212-218

E. Waymouth Reid, who retired from the Chair of Physiology at University College, Dundee, University of St Andrews, in 1935, after forty-six years’ service, died on 10 March 1948 at the age of eighty-five. He was born 11 October 1862 in Canterbury, the fourth son of a surgeon there, James Reid, F.R.C.S. He was educated at Sutton Vallance Grammar School, gaining eventually a Classical Scholarship to Cambridge. He matriculated at Cambridge University in 1879. In 1882 he gained a first class in Part I of the Natural Science Tripos and in 1883 a first class in Part II. During the period 1882-1883 he also acted as one of the demonstrators in the Department of Anatomy. He then decided to qualify in medicine and in 1883 he joined St Bartholomew’s Hospital, graduating in medicine in 1885. He early showed his interest in electrical reactions,, being appointed assistant ‘electrician’ at St Bartholomew’s in 1885. The same year he was elected to a Demonstratorship in Physiology at St Mary’s Hospital under A. D. Waller and in 1887 was promoted to the post of Assistant Lecturer in Physiology. Reid, during the period he was at St Mary’s, carried out in conjunction with Waller a most interesting investigation on the electrical activity of the excised mammalian heart. This investigation must have been one of the earliest pieces of research in electrocardiography in this country. His interest in physico-chemical reactions was also manifested early as in 1887 he devised a useful recording osmometer. In 1889 Reid was elected, at the early age of twenty-seven, as the first holder of the newly created Chair of Physiology at University College, Dundee, where he joined a stimulating and enthusiastic band of colleagues including Geddes, D’Arcy Thompson and Ewing. Reid was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898 and in 1904 gained the Sc.D. of his old University. The University of St Andrews conferred on him the degree of LL.D. when he retired from his Chair.


1960 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  

Agnes Arber was born in 1879, the eldest child of a cultured family, whose members achieved distinction in different fields. Her father, Henry Robert Robertson, was an artist of Scottish extraction, whose father, a man of considerable botanical interests, also with gifts as an artist, had a private school at Slough. Her mother, Agnes Lucy Turner, was a descendant of Robert Chamberlain, who founded the china works of Chamberlain & Son at Worcester, and her mother’s relatives included John Davidson, the African explorer, and George Fownes, both of whom were Fellows of the Royal Society. Her brother, Donald Straun Robertson, M.A., F.B.A., was Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge and author of various books on classical subjects. Her sister, Janet Robertson, was a portrait painter. At an early age her mother inspired her with an interest in plants and her father gave her regular drawing lessons from the age of three until she went to school. This early training developed her powers of observation, and laid the foundation of the skill and artistry which later formed such a notable feature of her books and papers.


1973 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 234-267 ◽  

James Bertram Collip was a pioneer in endocrine research, especially in its biochemical aspects. Following an excellent training in biochemistry under Professor A. B. Macallum, F.R.S., at the University of Toronto, he spent thirteen years at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. There was a momentous year at the University of Toronto about midway through the Edmonton period; this coincided with the discovery of insulin by Sir Frederick G. Banting, F.R.S., and Professor Charles S. Best, F.R.S., and the experience altered the course of his career. Henceforth, Professor Collip’s life was dominated by an urge to discover hormones that would be useful in clinical medicine. Success attended these efforts, first in the isolation of the parthyroid hormone, called parathormone, while he was at the University of Alberta and later in the identification of placental and pituitary hormones during particularly fruitful years at McGill University. There were other important facets to Professor Collip’s career. These included the training of young scientists, many of whom subsequently came to occupy positions of responsibility, work with the National Research Council of Canada, and in his latter years an important contribution as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Western Ontario. In addition to a life of fulfilment through accomplishments of scientific and medical importance, Professor Collip’s career was enriched by a happy family life and by the friendship of a host of individuals who were attracted to his brilliance as a scientist and his warm personality.


1985 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 172-196

David Gwynne Evans was born in Atherton, near Manchester, on 6 September 1909 of Welsh parents; his father, a schoolmaster, was from Pembrokeshire and his mother from Bangor, North Wales. He was the third of four children in a distinguished family. His older brother, Meredith Gwynne, became Professor of Physical Chemistry in Leeds and later in Manchester and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. His sister, Lynette Gwynne, took a degree in modern languages at Manchester University and taught in girls’ high schools. His younger brother, Alwyn Gwynne, after holding a lectureship in Manchester University was appointed to the Chair of Physical Chemistry in Cardiff University. David left Leigh Grammar School in 1928 at the age of 18 years and worked for two years in a junior capacity for the British Cotton Growers’ Association at the Manchester Cotton Exchange. However, when Alwyn went up to Manchester University in 1931, David decided to go with him and both graduated B.Sc. in physics and chemistry three years later and M .S c. after a further year. At this time Professor Maitland in the Department of Bacteriology wanted a chemist to help in the public health laboratory which was run by his department. Professor Lapworth recommended David for the post and thus David entered the field of bacteriology and immunology, to which he was to contribute so much. He was appointed Demonstrator and soon afterwards Assistant Lecturer in the University Department. During these early years he worked with Professor Maitland on the toxins of Haemophilus pertussis (now Bordetella pertussis ) and related organisms, work that provided a sound basis for his subsequent interest in whooping cough immunization and later for his abiding interest in vaccination against other diseases and in the standardization of vaccines and antisera.


1982 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  

In 1921, at a time when Charles Best was only 22 years of age, there appeared in the Medical Building of the University of Toronto a notice which read: ‘University of Toronto Physiological Journal Club Nov. 14th — 4 o’clock — Room 17 Speakers — Dr. Banting Mr. Best Subject — Pancreatic Diabetes’. In this quiet fashion a medical revolution was foreshadowed which ultimately made possible the enjoyment of life, in good health, of millions of diabetic people who otherwise, before 1922, would have faced an early death . In 1972 Dr C. H. Best himself estimated that ‘approximately one hundred and thirty million people have taken insulin since 1922. Some of them have lived 50 years’ (30). To have been the joint discoverer of insulin at the outset of a career in medical science might have been a disability for one w ho aim ed at making subsequent discoveries, but the account that follows later of his research activities shows that this was not so for Charles Best. In a foreword to a Festschrift for Charles Herbert Best which was published in 1968 the Chancellor of the University of Toronto, Dr O. M. Solandt, wrote ‘Most scientists who make discoveries, even ones that lead to important end products, have little contact with those whom they help. Probably all of us have benefited greatly from the work of Einstein, but I doubt if he was stopped on the street by people w ho wanted to thank him personally for the great effect that the theory of general relativity had on their lives. The discovery of insulin was different. Literally millions of diabetics all over the world feel personally indebted to Banting and Best. As with Dr Banting, wherever Dr Best has gone he has been engulfed by an intense personal recognition of himself and his work. He has received quite exceptional public as well as professional acclaim for his achievements.’ But such acclaim did not induce him to rest upon his laurels, as might easily have been true for many others.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. i-ix
Author(s):  
Jack Minker

Raymond Reiter, Professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and winner of the 1993 – IJCAI Outstanding Research Scientist Award, died September 16, 2002, after a year-long struggle with cancer. Reiter, known throughout the world as “Ray,” made foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and databases, and theorem proving.


1955 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 174-184 ◽  

John Lennard-Jones was born on 27 October 1894 in Leigh, Lancashire and was educated at Leigh Grammar School, where he specialized in classics. In 1912 he entered Manchester University, changed his subject to mathematics in which he took an honours degree and then an M.Sc. under Professor Lamb, carrying out some research on the theory of sound. In 1915 he joined the Royal Flying Corps, obtained his Wings in 1917 and saw service in France; he also took part in some investigations on aerodynamics with Messrs Boulton and Paul and at the National Physical Laboratory. In 1919 he returned to the University of Manchester as lecturer in mathematics, took the degree of D.Sc. of that university and continued to work on vibrations in gases, becoming more and more interested in the gas-kinetic aspects of the subject as his paper of 1922 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows. In 1922, on the advice of Professor Sydney Chapman, he applied for and was elected to a Senior 1851 Exhibition to enable him to work in Cambridge, where he became a research student at Trinity College and was awarded the degree of Ph.D. in 1924. At Cambridge under the influence of R. H. Fowler he became more and more interested in the forces between atoms and molecules and in the possibility of deducing them from the behaviour of gases.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document