Biology gets the blues

The UK has an enviable legacy when it comes to biological research…but do we take it for granted? The Society of Biology think so, and to put that right they have installed ten blue plaques across the country to honour the eminent and sometimes unsung heroes of biology

This is part of the Society’s Biology: Changing the World project which has commemorated individuals and teams across the biosciences. We have a great heritage of scientific discovery but many of the individuals involved have not always received the recognition they deserve. From the man who established the Natural History Museum to the woman who increased our understanding of rheumatoid arthritis, and the team who worked on the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell – Dolly the sheep –the project aims to give some of the leading biologists from the past the recognition given to other historical figures.

Through exploring the great history of discoveries and discoverers, the project also aims to inspire and spark curiosity in the bioscientists of the future; a profession that will be much needed in order to help society meet the challenges of the 21st century, such as food security and antibiotic resistance.

The Society was particularly keen to honour female biologists from the past. Marjory Stephenson, a microbiologist and one of the first two female Fellows of the Royal Society, used a range of techniques to understand the biological properties of bacteria. She enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, at a time when female students still wore long skirts, took practical classes separately to the men and were chaperoned to lectures outside the college. Her book, Bacterial Metabolism, published in 1930, became a standard textbook for generations of microbiologists. Stephenson was a founding member of the Society for General Microbiology and became its President. She has been commemorated with a plaque at her childhood home in Burwell, Cambridgeshire.

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Dame Honor Fell has been commemorated with a plaque at her old school, now Wychwood School, in Oxford. Dame Honor developed the organ culture method which has allowed scientists to grow living cells in the laboratory and to study the biology of cells without any risk to human organs. This method has been key to basic medical research and has laid the foundations for stem cell research today. Dame Honor used these methods to study bone and cartilage, and the role of the immune system in rheumatoid arthritis. She was also Director of the Strangeways Laboratory for more than 40 years, and offered researched facilities to many scientists who were refugees from the Second World War. The laboratory pioneered the development of radiobiology, studying the effect of X-rays on living tissue, which helped in the development of radiotherapy as a treatment for cancer.

Another scientist to be honoured at her old school, now the Sir John Leman High School in Beccles, Suffolk, is Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. She pioneered the then relatively new technique of X-ray crystallography. This allowed the structure of complex biological molecules such as penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin to be determined. This has given us a better understanding of illnesses such as diabetes and in some cases has allowed us to make synthetic versions of proteins as treatments. X-ray crystallography is still an important tool for understanding disease and designing new medicines.

Also commemorated, in part for his work on insulin, is Fred Sanger, at his old family home on Hills Road in Cambridge. Sanger is still one of only two people to win the Nobel Prize twice in the same category; he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 for determining the chemical structure of insulin, and again in 1980 for DNA sequencing. The technique he developed led to the first sequencing of a complete genome, which has allowed the whole field of genomics to develop and the ability to give people medicines based on their personal DNA sequence. Sanger’s work led to the production of insulin in a laboratory, and hence the development of treatments for diabetes.

The great polymath, JBS Haldane, has been honoured at Dragon School in Oxford, which he attended as a boy. Haldane was one of the founders of population genetics, which put the study of evolution on a firm mathematical basis on the assumption of Mendelian inheritance. He was a great writer and did much to popularise science.

Also a man of many talents, Sir Anthony Carlisle has been honoured with a plaque in his birthplace of Stillington, County Durham. Sir Anthony was a surgeon and a much respected scientist in his day. The plaque in the village garden commemorates him for his co-discovery of electrolysis. He held many important posts including Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Society, and Royal Academy of Art, and was President of the Royal Society. It is also believed that he wrote gothic novels under the pseudonym of Mrs Carver.

Another anatomist with wide-ranging interests who has been honoured with a blue plaque is Sir Richard Owen. A palaeontologist too, he described many vertebrates for the first time, including a number of dinosaur bones, which he named Dinosauria, meaning ‘terrible lizard’ in Greek. Sir Richard was also the founder of London’s Natural History Museum.

Of course scientific discoveries are often a team effort and in the case of Dolly the sheep, the animal commemorated with a plaque was chosen to represent all those members of the team who worked on the project, including laboratory technicians, farm staff, surgeons and anaesthetists. The birth of Dolly revolutionised our understanding of the mechanisms that regulate development, and showed that a cell that had differentiated into a specific tissue type could be changed. A plaque has been installed at the Roslin Institute, where the team was based.

Sir Alan Hodgkin and Sir Andrew Huxley have been commemorated at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, where they carried out research that established how signals are sent along nerves – essentially how we see, hear and feel – and how our brains work. They did this by inserting electrodes into the giant nerve fibre of the long-finned squid, which was found in the seas off Plymouth, and then recording the voltage across cell membranes.

Patrick Steptoe, Sir Robert Edwards and Jean Purdy have been commemorated at the site of their old research laboratory in Oldham, now Dr Kershaw’s Hospice. They developed IVF, which led to the birth of the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’ and has since resulted in millions of births across the world. Gynaecologist Steptoe used the technique of laparoscopy to harvest eggs from female volunteers. Reproductive biologist Edwards and his assistant Purdy had developed a technique to fertilise eggs in the laboratory. They began working together in the 1960s and started transferring fertilised eggs into the womb in 1971. It took more than 80 embryo transfers before they achieved their first pregnancy and the first ‘test-tube’ baby, Louise Brown, was born in July 1978.

A statement from Louise, that was read at the Oldham unveiling ceremony, sums up the importance of not only the IVF pioneers’ work but of all those who have been commemorated through Biology: Changing the World: “Sometimes we forget that science is not just about test tubes and chemicals, it is about people and the difference that can be made to people’s lives.”

A free app is available to download in the apple (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/biology-changing-the-world/id926821036?mt=8) and android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.societyofbiology.bcw.app&hl=en_GB) stores.