Scientist who helped treat blind children endured attacks by animal-rights activists
It is not often that neurobiologists top terrorism hitlists, but in the autumn of 1998 that is where Colin Blakemore found himself. A prolific lecturer and acclaimed research scientist, he had spent much of his career seeking a cure for forms of childhood blindness – a goal not normally associated with death threats, panic buttons and triplelocked safe rooms. His ‘‘crime’’, as the animal rights activists saw it, was that his research involved potentially cruel scientific tests on cats and primates.
Over the previous two decades reports of his methods had been trickling out – including details of an experiment involving the blinding, and later elimination of, more than 30 kittens. Then, in
1987, the Sunday
Mirror published a set of falsified allegations against Blakemore, including doctored photographs of cats with stitchmarks drawn on to their eyelids.
Blakemore, who has died of motor neuron disease, aged 78, came out fighting. ‘‘I answered every letter,’’ he later recalled, ‘‘I got a Press Council ruling against the Sunday Mirror. I was so outraged by the lies and slur against my name.’’
Perhaps inevitably, the media circus bolstered his career, and within a year he was presenting his own TV show – a documentary series on the brain called The Mind Machine. His natural, breezy delivery and talent for elucidating the complex turned him into an unofficial spokesman for his field.
But with every bullish response, every reaffirmation of his views, Blakemore became more of a hate figure for animal rights groups who began to target him personally.
In 1997 his wife, Andree, watched terrified through video monitors as a 300-strong mob of balaclava-clad activists tried to beat down their front door with a brick. On another occasion his daughters opened a package containing a ring of HIV-infected needles swaddling half a kilo of explosive. No-one was ever seriously injured, but the campaign of harassment gave his children nightmares and drove his wife to attempt suicide. When she was pregnant, she picked up the phone to be told: ‘‘I hope your baby is born blind.’’
Blakemore’s tormentor-in-chief, Cynthia O’Neill, claimed that he invented thalidomide, had a pharmaceutical company-funded swimming pool in his back garden, and was keeping the corpse of her cat frozen in his refrigerator. After securing a restraining order against O’Neill in 2000, the harassment slowly began to subside.
Blakemore was cleared of cruelty by the Home Office and the Medical Research Council, which concluded that his experiments had caused no pain to animals and had promoted crucial scientific understanding. Due to the kitten experiments, it is now possible to treat conditions such as
‘‘I think animal experimentation is evil . . . I don’t know one scientist who does it for pleasure.’’
amblyopia, or lazy eye, the most common form of child blindness – as well as understanding the need to operate on squints in the first weeks of life. His work later moved away from animal research to humans as brain scanners were developed.
The crucial insight Blakemore helped bring to neuroscience was that the brain itself changes as patterns of activity flow through it. In the first few months of life it is particularly plastic, and its cells form billions of new connections. If you are deprived of sight at this crucial period, for example, vital connections between the eye and the brain are never made, and you will never see normally.
Born to a poor family in central England, Blakemore would accrue almost every honour in his field: he was a professor of neuroscience at Oxford, chief executive of the British Medical Research Council, and a fellow of the Royal Society.
To the confusion of his detractors he was a devoted cat owner and spoke out against both foxhunting and animal testing for cosmetics and household detergents. ‘‘I think animal experimentation is evil,’’ he once told a journalist. ‘‘If it weren’t necessary I would put the flags out. I don’t know one scientist who does it for pleasure – unlike hunters . . . or leather wearers,’’ he added, looking pointedly at his interviewer’s shoes.
He was often described as softly spoken, yet there was scarcely a controversy he did not wade into. During the BSE crisis he called for banning beef, and he advocated for cannabis to be legalised. A humanist, he signed a letter with other academics calling for the government to reconsider its support for religious schools.
Colin Brian Blakemore was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the only child of a TV salesman. Blakemore was the first member of his family to go to university. He met his future wife, Andree Washbourne, at school when they were both 15. She predeceased him this year; the couple had three daughters.
He went to Cambridge on a scholarship and graduated with first-class honours in 1965. He went to the University of California, Berkeley, and from there his advancement was dramatic. In 1976, aged 32, he became the youngest person to deliver the BBC’s Reith lectures. By 1979, he had a chair at Oxford University. In 2001 he was made chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
His career was fairly loaded with awards and prestigious appointments, although to his great irritation he was overlooked five times for a knighthood because of the animal rights controversy surrounding his work. It was at this point that his support for the Labour Party, which was then in charge, took a real knock. He railed against the ‘‘personal prejudices, political considerations and the vagaries of public presentation issues’’ he felt his omission had uncovered in the honours system. He was eventually knighted in 2014.
Communicating science to the public was also a talent, and he delivered public lectures and made television programmes throughout his career. One party trick was to reproduce from memory 18 lines of figures on a screen, to demonstrate how pathetic human memory was compared to that of a computer.
‘‘If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the Moon and back,’’ he once said. ‘‘Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are.’’ –