Distinguished scientist who was persecuted by extremists
Sir Colin Blakemore 1944-2022
Sir Colin Blakemore, who has died aged 78, opposed the testing of cosmetics on animals, said The Daily Telegraph; he disapproved of fox hunting; and he tried to avoid factoryfarmed meat. But as a neuroscientist, he was convinced that experimenting on animals for the purposes of medical research was a necessary evil; and in the 1980s and 1990s, his defence of vivisection – coupled with publicity about experiments he had conducted on kittens, while looking for a cure for childhood blindness – made him the target of animal-rights extremists. He received death threats, paint stripper was poured over his car, bricks were thrown through his windows, and a parcel containing explosives and hypodermic needles was sent to his daughter.
Blakemore refused to be cowed, said The Times. When, in 1987, the Sunday Mirror published doctored photographs of his experiments on cats, he sought a Press Council ruling against the paper. The ensuing “media circus” actually bolstered his career: within a year he was hosting his own BBC TV science series, The Mind Machine. But the more he defended vivisection, the worse things got. In 1997, a 300-strong mob surrounded his home, and tried to beat down the door. His “tormentor-in-chief” was a woman named Cynthia O’Neill, who claimed that he was keeping the corpse of her cat in his freezer. Reasoning with her did not help. “I have never stolen a cat,” he said, “but out it comes over the megaphone, ‘Blakemore stole my cat!’” Only when she was subjected to a restraining order in 2000 did things start to calm down.
Colin Blakemore was born in 1944, the only child of Cedric Blakemore, a TV salesman, and Beryl Smith, and raised in Coventry. Precociously intelligent, he was educated at a local grammar school, and studied medicine at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a state scholarship. His academic career, at Oxford University and elsewhere, was “glittering”: his work on kittens led to treatments for amblyopia, or lazy eye; and he had crucial insights into the “plasticity” of the brain. In 1976, aged 32, he became the youngest ever Reith lecturer, with a series of talks on “Mechanics of the Mind”. He served as the director of numerous scientific associations; he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1992; and in 2003, he was made chief executive of the Medical Research Council. He was knighted in 2014. In his spare time, he collected art and ran marathons. His wife Andrée (née Washbourne), a former ballet dancer he had met when they were both 15, died in January; their three daughters survive him.