Francis Crew
- Born
- Unknown
Francis Crew was a zoologist, geneticist whose research contributed greatly to our understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance, genetics of sex and the endocrine glands. Crew was also one of the three founding fathers of the Society of Experimental Biology.
Crew was born in 1886 and his interests in science and experimentation started at a young age. By 1912 he had graduated from the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He developed an interest in genetics through the lectures he received there from eminent geneticists such as Arthur Darbishire and Sir Edward Sharpey Schafer.
After graduation and throughout WWI, Crew and his wife lived in Devon, where he set up a medical practice. Upon the end of WWI they returned to Edinburgh where in 1920 Crew became the first director of the Institute of Animal Genetics and allowed him to carry out much of his ground-breaking research. The organization later formed the Roslin Institute where the first successfully cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was created.
Crew worked on the genetic aspect of sex determination and researched sexual abnormalities in birds and mammals, especially in goats and the domestic fowl. In 1928 Crew became the first professor of animal genetics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1945 he was chair of public health and social medicine, and it has been said that during this tenure he laid the foundations of medical genetics.
While in Edinburgh, Crew also took on a number of refugee biologists escaping war around the time of the Second World War. Notably, he offered posts to three Austrian researchers, including Hugo Merton and a female biochemist, in his department of animal genetic.
Crew was keen to create a ‘club’ atmosphere, which entailed anything from working late hours and debating into the night to taking tea on the roof and engaging in out-of-hours ping-pong matches.
Claire Button, writing for Royal Society about the Institute for Animal Genetics
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a boom in experimenting on plant physiology and botanists were effective in demonstrating the importance of plant investigation because of the implications they had in medicine. However, zoologists at the time wanted to resolve this issue of preference to botany by promoting experimental zoology.
In 1922 Crew was working as the director of the Animal Research Department in Edinburgh. Together with Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley he led the group that established the British Journal of Experimental Biology (renamed the Journal of Experimental Biology in 1929). Following on from its creation in 1923, the group set up the Society for Experimental Biology later the same year. The inaugural conference was held at Birkbeck College, London in December 1923.
Francis Crew passed away in 1973.