57 Facts About Colin Blakemore

Colin Blakemore was Yeung Kin Man Professor of Neuroscience and senior fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at City University of Hong Kong.

Colin Blakemore was a distinguished senior fellow in the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a past Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council.

Colin Blakemore was best known to the public as a communicator of science but as the target of a long-running animal rights campaign.

When Colin Blakemore was five, his father became a television repair engineer.

Colin Blakemore began his schooling at the local primary school, but after showing unusual promise, his parents sent him to a private school, King Henry VIII School in Coventry, where he excelled in science, art, and sports.

Colin Blakemore won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA degree in Medical Sciences in 1965, and was promoted to an MA in 1969.

Colin Blakemore obtained his PhD degree in physiological optics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, as a Harkness Fellow in 1968.

From 1968 to 1979, Colin Blakemore was a demonstrator and then lecturer in physiology at the University of Cambridge, and director of medical studies at Downing College.

Colin Blakemore was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in 1979, at the age of 35.

Colin Blakemore was director of the James S McDonnell and Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

Colin Blakemore served as president of the Biosciences Federation, now the Society of Biology, the British Neuroscience Association and the Physiological Society, and as president and chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now the British Science Association.

Colin Blakemore was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Institute of Biology, the British Pharmacological Society, the Society of Biology, and of Corpus Christi College and Downing College, Cambridge.

In 1981, Colin Blakemore became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

Colin Blakemore held an honorary professorship at the University of Warwick, and a professorship at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, where he was chairman and then external scientific advisor to the Neuroscience Research Partnership.

Colin Blakemore was a patron of Humanists UK and an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

Colin Blakemore was honoured for his scientific achievements with prizes from many academies and societies, including the Royal Society, the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, the French Academie Nationale de Medecine, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the BioIndustry Association and the Royal College of Physicians.

Colin Blakemore held ten Honorary Degrees from British and overseas universities and was a foreign member of several academies of science, including the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of India, the Indian Academy of Neurosciences, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Colin Blakemore won the 2010 Royal Society Ferrier Award and Lecture.

Colin Blakemore chaired the Selection Committee for The Brain Prize of Grete Lundbeck's European Brain Research Prize Foundation, the world's most valuable prize for neuroscience.

Colin Blakemore first visited China in 1974, during the Cultural Revolution, and collaborated in research at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Colin Blakemore's research focused on vision, the early development of the brain and, more recently, conditions such as stroke and Huntington's disease.

Colin Blakemore published scientific papers and a number of books on these subjects.

Colin Blakemore went on to show that such plasticity results from changes in the shape and structure of nerve cells and the distribution of nerve fibres, and from the selective death of nerve cells.

Colin Blakemore showed that the visual parts of the human cortex become responsive to input from the other senses, especially touch, in people who have been blind since shortly after birth.

Colin Blakemore summarised research on brain plasticity in his 2005 Harveian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians and explored the role of plasticity in human cultural evolution in his 2010 Ferrier Lecture at the Royal Society.

Colin Blakemore served on the editorial board of the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.

In parallel with his academic career, Colin Blakemore championed the communication of science and engagement with the public on controversial and challenging aspects.

Colin Blakemore subsequently presented or contributed to hundreds of radio and television broadcasts.

Colin Blakemore wrote for British and overseas newspapers, especially The Guardian, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph and The Times.

Colin Blakemore wrote or edited several popular science books, including Mechanics of the Mind, The Mind Machine.

In 1989, when Colin Blakemore was awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for his work in public communication, the citation described him as "one of Britain's most influential communicators of science".

Colin Blakemore won many other awards for his work in public communication and education, including the Phi Beta Kappa Award for contribution to the literature of science, the John P McGovern Science and Society Medal from Sigma Xi, the Edinburgh Medal from the City of Edinburgh Council and the Science Educator Award from the Society for Neuroscience.

Colin Blakemore worked for many medical charities and not-for-profit organizations, including SANE, the International Brain Injury Association, Headway, Sense, the Louise T Blouin Foundation, Sense about Science and the Pilgrim Trust.

Colin Blakemore was president of the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Brain Tumour Charity, vice president of the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy Association and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Colin Blakemore helped the Dana Foundation of New York to establish the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, an alliance of leading European neuroscientists who are committed to raising awareness of the importance of brain research.

Colin Blakemore was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and an Honorary President of the World Cultural Council, a member of the World Federation of Scientists and a patron of Humanists UK.

Colin Blakemore was a patron of the Oxford University Scientific Society and an Honorary Member of the Cambridge Union Society.

Colin Blakemore served in an advisory role for several UK government departments and for agencies, foundations and government departments overseas.

Colin Blakemore chaired the General Advisory Committee on Science at the Food Standards Agency and was a member of the Wilton Park Advisory Council.

Colin Blakemore had a long-standing interest in policy on drugs of abuse, and was a Commissioner of the UK Drug Policy Commission, an adviser to the Beckley Foundation and a Trustee of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

Colin Blakemore was an author of an influential paper published in the Lancet in 2007, introducing a rational, evidence-based system for assessing the harms of drugs, which suggested that alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than many illegal drugs.

Colin Blakemore has long been publicly identified as a humanist and patron of Humanists UK, and campaigned with the organisation for a secular state and on a number of human rights and equality issues, particularly in education.

Colin Blakemore was among a number of top scientists who successfully campaigned with Humanists UK for a ban on the teaching of creationism as scientifically valid in England, and later in Wales, and for evolution to be embedded in the science curriculum.

Colin Blakemore was outspoken in his support of the use of animal testing in medical research, though he publicly denounced fox hunting and animal testing for cosmetics.

Colin Blakemore came to the attention of the animal rights movement while at Oxford University in the 1980s, when he carried out research into amblyopia and strabismus, conducting experiments that involved sewing kittens' eyelids shut from birth in order to study the development of their visual cortex.

In 1998, during the 68-day hunger strike of British animal-rights activist Barry Horne, Colin Blakemore's life was threatened in a statement released by Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Press Office on behalf of the Animal Rights Militia.

Colin Blakemore advocated frank and full public debate about animal research and has worked to persuade other researchers to be more open.

Colin Blakemore was chair of the Coalition for Medical Progress, the Research Defence Society and Understanding Animal Research, an organisation devoted to making the case for responsible use of animals in research, which was launched in 2008.

Colin Blakemore launched a national roadshow to consult the scientific community and quickly changed the mechanisms for handling funds, rationalised the grant schemes, introduced new forms of support for young researchers and overhauled the communications policies of the MRC.

Colin Blakemore initiated a comprehensive review of the MRC's strategy and argued for a stronger commitment to clinical research and to the translation of basic research into benefits for patients.

Colin Blakemore was succeeded at the MRC by Leszek Borysiewicz.

Colin Blakemore was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to scientific research, policy, and outreach.

Colin Blakemore had a duodenal ulcer during his teens, and a second in his third year at university, requiring a gastrectomy that removed half of his stomach.

Colin Blakemore almost died from bleeding caused by the ulcers.

Colin Blakemore developed a lifelong interest in fitness and sport, especially long-distance running.

Colin Blakemore completed 18 marathons and won the veteran's section for the British team at the Athens Centenary Marathon in 1996.

Colin Blakemore was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2021, and died at Sobell House Hospice in Oxford on 27 June 2022, at the age of 78.