Sir David John Weatherall. 9 March 1933—8 December 2018

Abstract

Sir David Weatherall was the outstanding, internationally recognized, clinician scientist of his generation. His lifelong interest in the haemoglobinopathies first came from studying a child that he recognized as having beta thalassaemia while working as an army physician in Malaya. His interest in these diseases further developed as he undertook his PhD in the Department of Haematology under the supervision of Lockard Conley and Victor McKusick in Baltimore. There, together with John Clegg (FRS 1999), he developed the technology to directly measure the synthesis of the alpha and beta globin chains of haemoglobin, and his subsequent work at the University of Liverpool showed that thalassaemia resulted from imbalanced globin chain synthesis. Importantly, using the globin genes as their model, David's laboratory went on to make many of the first discoveries of how expression of the globin genes and mammalian genes in general could be perturbed to cause human genetic diseases. As professor of medicine in Oxford, he established one of the first institutes to develop the use of molecular biology in medicine and he trained many of the world's leading clinician scientists in this area of biomedical research. He also established worldwide networks to apply molecular biology to the haemoglobinopathies and infectious diseases, making a unique contribution to global medicine. He had outstanding qualities as a clinician, a scientist, and a leader, all of which he achieved with great humility and humanity.