Lewis Wolpert obituary
How does a single fertilised egg divide and morph into an embryo with head, tail, limbs and organs? That question was an inexhaustible source of fascination to the biologist Lewis Wolpert, who has died aged 91. With a twinkle in his eye, he told audiences it was not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation – the stage in which a uniform ball of cells folds to become differentiated layers with the beginnings of a gut – that was “truly the most important time in your life”.
Wolpert combined his interest in fundamental problems of development with a parallel career as a science communicator. He enjoyed performing in public, and brooked no compromise in his quest to persuade people that “science is the best way to understand the world”. He broadcast frequently on BBC radio and TV, and wrote a number of popular books. The best known of these, Malignant Sadness (1999), was a fiercely objective attempt to understand his own experience of a severe depression that he suffered at the age of 65. He gave the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 1986, chaired the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science from 1994 until 1998, and won the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize (for science communication) in 2000.
He was not afraid to court controversy, dismissing bioethical concerns about embryo research and human cloning as “a gross load of nonsense”. An avowed atheist, he engaged in public debates about science and religion. However, he distanced himself from more militant atheists in acknowledging that some people benefit from religious experience. For many years he was vice-president and later patron of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK).
Wolpert re-established the central importance of pattern formation in embryonic development, a subject that had fallen into neglect. In a key paper of 1969 he proposed that the way an embryonic cell interprets its genetic instructions ultimately to become bone or cartilage, or part of an elbow or a finger, depends on its position. According to this model, the cell “knows” where it is in relation to sources of chemical signals called morphogens, because the strength of the signals varies with distance from the source.
The idea was not instantly accepted. Wolpert vividly remembered a meeting at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, in the US, where American participants cold-shouldered him after he gave his paper. The next morning the molecular biologist (and later Nobel prize winner) Sydney Brenner – whom Wolpert had known as an undergraduate at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg – found him standing in the sea in despair. Brenner told him to take no notice, and that he had been thinking along the same lines. “He totally saved me,” said Wolpert.
He had worked initially with experimentally tractable sea urchin embryos and the freshwater invertebrate Hydra, which can regenerate from a damaged stump. But after taking up the chair in biology as applied to medicine at the Middlesex hospital medical school in 1966 he switched to limb development in chick embryos: how you make a hand, he thought, would be a question more relevant to medicine. For the rest of his career he continued to design experiments to test his model. He credited his technician, Amata Hornbruch, with being his “hands” in the laboratory work, for which he had no interest and not much aptitude.
Another collaborator was Cheryll Tickle, who joined him as a postdoctoral researcher and went on to be a leader in the field. She cites him as a mentor who “allowed me the freedom to develop and did not put me down”. Wolpert was not directly involved in identifying individual morphogens, but discoveries relating to the genetic control of pattern formation have largely borne out his theories. As lead author of the definitive textbook Principles of Development, now in its sixth edition, his influence on the field was immense. In 2018 the Royal Society awarded him its highest honour, the Royal Medal.
Wolpert was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the only surviving child of William, a manager in a newsagent and bookshop, and his wife, Sarah (nee Suzman). In a frank interview for the British Library’s National Life Stories collection, he remembered his parents with little warmth: his father would tolerate no contradiction, and his mother cared only for appearances in their Jewish social circle. He felt more positively about other relatives: one of his uncles, a distinguished doctor, was married to the anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzman, and he spent some time living in their home.
He studied civil engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he became involved in progressive politics, helping to distribute communist literature in the townships; in 1952 he met Nelson Mandela. After two years working on soil mechanics as assistant to the director of the Building Research Institute in Pretoria, he hitchhiked to Europe, working briefly for the water planning board in Israel before studying soil mechanics at Imperial College London.
His life was changed when a friend in South Africa wrote to suggest he apply his knowledge of mechanics to the study of dividing cells. The biophysicist James Danielli at King’s College London accepted him as a PhD student, and with a Swedish colleague, Trygve Gustafson, he went on to measure the mechanical forces involved in cell division. He was promoted to lecturer and reader (in zoology) at King’s before taking up the chair of biology as applied to medicine at the Middlesex (transferred to University College London after the two institutions merged), where he remained until he retired aged 74.
He began broadcasting regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4 in the early 1980s. A series of broadcast conversations with scientists was published in book form as A Passion for Science in 1988. Further popular books included How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells (2009), The Triumph of the Embryo (1991), and an investigation into religious belief, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (2006). Still writing in his 80s, Wolpert fell victim to the perils of online research when his last two books, You’re Looking Very Well (2011; on ageing) and Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? (2014) proved to contain unattributed passages from other writers’ works. Wolpert apologised, saying the apparent plagiarism was “totally inadvertent and due to carelessness”.
Wolpert married Elizabeth Brownstein, whom he had known in South Africa, in 1961, and they had four children, two of whom, Daniel and Miranda, also became at different times professors at UCL, in neuroscience and clinical psychology, respectively.
The marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce, and in 1993 Wolpert married the Australian writer Jill Neville. It was when his working and home lives were at their most secure and harmonious that a suicidal episode led to him spending three weeks in hospital. He recovered after treatment with antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. Jill died suddenly of cancer in 1997.
In 2016 he married Alison Hawkes, after a longstanding relationship. She survives him, along with his children, Miranda, Daniel, Jessica and Matthew, two stepchildren, Judy and Luke, and six grandchildren.
• Lewis Wolpert, biologist, born 19 October 1929; died 28 January 2021