Victoria Braithwaite obituary
Until the early 2000s everyone knew that fish do not feel pain. The biologist Victoria Braithwaite, who has died aged 52 from cancer, showed that everyone who thought that was wrong.
Her demonstration that fish do feel pain caused a revolution in animal welfare research, resulted in changes to Home Office regulations and even featured in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a concern of its central character, Henry Perowne, when shopping for dinner at a fishmonger. More than that, while provoking some members of the angling community and causing scientists and philosophers to argue over what it means to experience pain, her work has begun to change the way that fish are treated in the pet trade, in the laboratory and in aquaculture.
For her DPhil research at Oxford University in the early 1990s Victoria had investigated what visual information homing pigeons use to return to their base quickly. Her work showed that the birds fly home faster if they can see where they are before they are released.
In 1993 she took a postdoctoral position at the University of Glasgow to investigate the cognitive abilities of salmon. Although this was a switch in taxonomic group that some considered retrograde (“Don’t goldfish have a three-second memory?”), it was the beginning of her lifelong fascination with a much misunderstood group of animals.
The search for what information fish use when navigating led her to question how their environment shapes their cognitive abilities. For example, Victoria showed that fish living in stable pond environments are more likely to use visual landmarks as guides, while fish living in rivers with poor visibility learn to use turn sequences (left, right, right, left). This work showed that an animal’s “smarts” are shaped by the world in which they live, and led to her election in 2005 as a fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation.
Although Victoria never lost interest in what fish learn, in the late 90s, working at the University of Edinburgh, she began to ask the question that shaped the remainder of her career: do fish feel pain? The animal welfare movement had transformed the way in which farmed animals were treated, based on growing evidence that chicken and sheep, for example, experience pain and suffering, but everyone assumed that this was not true for fish. No one had thought to confirm this “fact”.
The first step was to show whether fish had the anatomical structures needed to detect pain. The second was to determine whether they responded to painful stimuli. The most difficult, final step was to show that fish actually perceived pain. Victoria and colleagues located pain receptors, showed that these detected bodily damage, and also showed that the behaviour of fish exposed to an unpleasant stimulus, such as vinegar, was affected. But this was not sufficient to confirm that fish perceive pain. Instead, Victoria showed that vinegar-exposed fish behaved differently if given tasks to do when administered drugs that humans know as pain relievers.
The publication of her data in 2003, in two papers (Do Fish Have Nociceptors: Evidence for the Evolution of a Vertebrate Sensory System, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society; and Novel Object Test: Examining Nociception and Fear in the Rainbow Trout, in the Journal of Pain) unleashed a storm of criticism from angling and fishing communities. A book, Do Fish Feel Pain? (2010), expanded on the findings for a wider audience.
Since Victoria’s groundbreaking work, further evidence confirming that fish feel pain has steadily accumulated.
These results have led to changes in Europe and Canada in the way scientific work on fish is conducted, and the ways in which commercially fished species are kept and killed. Other countries are also considering how to change their welfare guidelines.
Victoria had a deep interest in the emotional experiences of animals, especially those very different from humans. She critically analysed the inferences that could be made regarding pain and other emotional states. During her time as a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2015, she focused her efforts on this analysis, including the design of elegant experimental studies that would allow stronger inferences.
Born in Bradford, Victoria was the sixth of seven children of June (nee Pickles), chair of the magistrates’ bench in Halifax, and Alan Braithwaite, a company director. Her mother came from an acting family (Victoria’s great-uncle was the radio and TV personality Wilfred Pickles, and her aunt Christina and cousin Carolyn both became actors), while her maternal grandfather was a Liberal politician and mayor of Halifax, and her uncle James Pickles was a wellknown district court judge.
At Bradford girls’ grammar school Victoria’s teachers thought her serious and thoughtful, but evidence of her determination was shown when the headteacher tried to stop her from applying to Oxford University on the grounds that she would not get in. Victoria never liked to be told she could not do something. She started at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1985, and in 1989 was awarded the Christopher Welch scholarship to fund her DPhil. In 1992 she married Andrew Read, an evolutionary biologist.
She was appointed to a lectureship in Edinburgh University in 1995, and was promoted in 2004 to senior lecturer and three years later to reader. In 2007 she became a professor of fisheries and biology at Penn State University in the US, also holding a visiting professorship at the University of Bergen, Norway (2008-11).
In 2018, by now divorced and her two sons having left home, Victoria was about to take up the directorship of the IGB Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
She is survived by her sons, James and Matthew, and grandchildren, Jonas and Isla, and by her siblings, Jonathan, Justin, Nicolas, Sarah and Caspar. Her brother Gareth predeceased her.
• Victoria Anne Braithwaite, biologist, born 19 July 1967; died 30 September 2019
defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a philosophical theory emphasising the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining his or her own development”. Fortunately the hospital offered me an existential therapist. It’s taken almost a year to understand exactly what it means, but the penny has finally dropped. I don’t have to do what anyone else wants me to do, or worry about what they think when as an individual my experience is unique. I’ve finally squared it with the help of Jean-Paul Sartre, who said: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”Aliya HasanTwickenham, London
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