Colin Blakemore
Sir Colin Blakemore, , Hon (1 June 1944 – 27 June 2022) was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was Yeung Kin Man Professor of Neuroscience and senior fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at City University of Hong Kong. He was a distinguished senior fellow in the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a past Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council (MRC). He was best known to the public as a communicator of science but also as the target of a long-running animal rights campaign. According to The Observer, he was both "one of the most powerful scientists in the UK" and "a hate figure for the animal rights movement". Early life and education Blakemore was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire on 1 June 1944, the only child of Beryl Blakemore (née Smith) and Norman Blakemore. At the time, Beryl was a member of the Women's Land Army in England and Norman was in the Royal Air Force. When Blakemore was five, his father became a television repair engineer. Blakemore began his schooling at the local primary school, but after showing unusual promise, his parents sent him to a private school, King Henry VIII School in Coventry, where he excelled in science, art, and sports. Blakemore won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA degree (first-class honours) in Medical Sciences in 1965, and was promoted to an MA in 1969. Blakemore obtained his PhD degree in physiological optics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, as a Harkness Fellow in 1968. There he worked with Horace Barlow. Career From 1968 to 1979, Blakemore was a demonstrator and then lecturer in physiology at the University of Cambridge, and director of medical studies at Downing College. From 1976 to 1979 he held the Royal Society Locke Research Fellowship. He was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in 1979, at the age of 35. From this same university he was awarded a DSc higher degree in 1989. He was director of the James S. McDonnell and Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He served as president of the Biosciences Federation, now the Society of Biology, the British Neuroscience Association and the Physiological Society, and as president and chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now the British Science Association. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (HonFRCP), the Royal Society of Medicine (HonFRSM), the Institute of Biology (FRSB), the British Pharmacological Society, the Society of Biology (FBPhS), and of Corpus Christi College and Downing College, Cambridge. In 1981, Blakemore became