Roger Philip Ekins. 22 September 1926—26 July 2016

Abstract

Roger Philip Ekins was born in London and educated at Westminster School. He studied natural sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and then returned to London, where he spent the rest of his career. His work initially focused on the thyroid gland and its disorders. In the 1950s, measurements of circulating hormones and other substances relied on biological assays. These were very time-consuming, inaccurate and unsuitable for routine clinical laboratories. In 1960, Ekins published the first radioactive assay for measuring the thyroid hormone thyroxine, using an approach he called ‘saturation analysis’; this and other work led to the systematic and accurate diagnosis of different forms of thyroid disease. He also developed tests for low-concentration biological substances, such as vitamin B 12 , always using simple and elegant techniques. In 1986, he was the first to propose the use of microarray ‘chip’ technologies for measuring these biological molecules simultaneously, recognizing that this could be applied to many other substances, such as oligonucleotides or peptides; he then worked with Boehringer Mannheim-Roche to develop the methodology. Meanwhile, he helped to identify the importance of thyroid hormones during human development, demonstrating that reduced levels of maternal thyroxine predicted the severity of the resulting ‘cretinism’ in their children. As a result, he went on to study the effects of abnormal levels of maternal thyroid hormones on fetal development, developing a rat model of maternal hypothyroidism. He travelled widely giving courses on standardization of the radioactive clinical assays, sponsored by the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He received many UK and international awards for his work, including the Prince of Wales Award for Innovation in 1991 and the Dale Medal from the Society of Endocrinology in 1998. He was elected FRS in 2001.