Colin Blakemore

Sir Colin Blakemore,, Hon (1 June 1944 – 27 June 2022) was a British neurobiologist, specialising in vision and the development of the brain.

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

He 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 (MRC).

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

According to The Observer, he was both "one of the most powerful scientists in the UK" and "a hate figure for the animal rights movement".

Blakemore was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire on 1 June 1944, the only child of Beryl Blakemore (née Smith) and Norman Blakemore.

At the time, Beryl was a member of the Women's Land Army in England and Norman was in the Royal Air Force.

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

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.

in the late 1960s Blakemore was one of the first to demonstrate that the visual part of the cerebral cortex undergoes active, adaptive change during a critical period shortly after birth, and he argued that this helps the brain to match itself to the sensory environment.

He 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 also from the selective death of nerve cells.

Although initially controversial, the idea that the mammalian brain is 'plastic' and adaptive is now a dominant theme in neuroscience.

Blakemore won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA degree (first-class honours) in Medical Sciences in 1965, and was promoted to an MA in 1969.

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

There he worked with Horace Barlow.

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

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.

From 1976 to 1979 he held the Royal Society Locke Research Fellowship.

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

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

From this same university he was awarded a DSc higher degree in 1989.

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

He 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.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (HonFRCP), the Royal Society of Medicine (HonFRSM), the Institute of Biology (FRSB), the British Pharmacological Society, the Society of Biology (FBPhS), and of Corpus Christi College and Downing College, Cambridge.

In 1993, he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine and in 1996 won the Alcon Research Institute Award for research relevant to clinical ophthalmology.

He 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.

In July 2001, he was one of the signatories to a letter published in The Independent which urged the Government to reconsider its support for the expansion of maintained religious schools, and was one of the 43 scientists and philosophers who signed and sent a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair and relevant government departments, concerning the teaching of creationism in schools in March 2002.

In 2001, he received the British Neuroscience Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience, and in 2012 the Ralph W. Gerard Prize, the highest award of the Society for Neuroscience.

He formerly 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 (€1.3 million).

and was one of the signatories to a letter supporting a holiday on Charles Darwin's birthday, published in The Times on 12 February 2003, and sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

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 Académie Nationale de Médecine, 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.

He won the 2010 Royal Society Ferrier Award and Lecture.

In 2012, he was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy's Centre for the Study of the Senses at the School of Advanced Study in London.

He 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.

Blakemore was a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association) and an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

His efforts to develop scientific relations between the United Kingdom and China were recognised in 2012 when he received the Friendship Award, the People's Republic of China's highest award for "foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country's economic and social progress".

In 2012 he was appointed a Master of the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy.

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

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

His contribution to neuroscience included his role in establishing the concept of neuronal plasticity, the capacity of the brain to reorganise itself as a result of the pattern of activity passing through its connections.