Murdoch Mitchison

John Murdoch Mitchison ( born June 11, 1922 in Oxford, † March 17, 2011 in Edinburgh ) was a British cell biologist and longtime professor of zoology at the University of Edinburgh, which became the best-known expert on the cell cycle of the yeast.

Life

Mitchison came from an intellectual family of politicians and scientists. His father Dick Mitchison was a member of the House of Commons and the House of Lords for the Labour Party and disappointed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1964 despite a prior commitment not appointed him to his cabinet to the Minister of Science. His maternal grandfather was the physiologist John Scott Haldane, who is considered the founder of the methodological holism, while his brother, Mitchisons great-uncle, Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane was twice Lord Chancellor. His mother was the novelist Naomi Mitchison, who was a sister of the theoretical biologist and geneticist and co-founder of population genetics JBS Haldane.

His older brother Denis Mitchison was a professor of bacteriology at the University of London, while his younger brother Avrion Mitchison is a zoologist who has made significant contributions to the understanding of immunological reactions in infections, allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Mitchison visited a scholarship Winchester College, where he had chemistry classes with Eric James, later Lord James of Rusholme, the 1959 first Vice Chancellor of York University. In 1939 he began his studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where he graduated as valedictorian from the lectures in zoology. One of his professors was Edgar Adrian, the 1932 Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1951 and was Head of Trinity College.

In 1941 he was called up for military service in the British Army, where he served in the Operations Research Department and was promoted to Major in 1946. In 1947 he married the historian Rosalind " Rowy " Wrong Mary, the author of numerous books about the social history of Scotland.

After his release, he was a research scientist in 1950 (Research Fellow ) at Trinity College, and practiced this activity until 1954. During this time he wrote numerous articles in journals such as birefringence in amoebae, The Mechanical Properties of the Cell Surface, The status of hemoglobin in sickle -cell anemia, The mechanism of cleavage in animal cells and differentiation in the Cell Cycle. In the 1950s he led the Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model organism in cell biology.

After he was lecturer for ten years 1953-1963, he was then a quarter of a century from 1963 to 1988 Professor of Zoology at the University of Edinburgh. In the words of his predecessor, Michael Swann, he was " the scientist who knew more about the cell cycle of the yeast than any other in the world." As a pioneer of cell biology, he researched the growth mechanism and the cell cycle. His staff was also the biochemist Paul Nurse, who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001.

In addition, he was 1964-1972 President of the British Society for Cell Biology and an outstanding member of the working group on biological force from 1968 to 1971 and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 1974-1988.

Mitchison was a member of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.