science

Letter: Sir Colin Blakemore obituary


A meeting with Colin Blakemore and Les Ward on the set of BBC One’s Kilroy programme in 1991 led to us forming what eventually became the Boyd Group. At the time Les was director of Advocates for Animals, and I of the Research for Health Charities Group.

Then as now I opposed animal research in principle, but felt that patients’ needs and medical advances must come first in a society that chooses to eat animals and uses them for work. Those involved with the issues – animal rights activists and animal welfare organisations, scientists, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, and medical research charities and patients groups – usually met only in TV and radio bear pits where the objective was to win the polarised debate, not listen to the concerns of the other parties, and we wanted to encourage more effective exchanges.

Colin did not encounter Les randomly. In autumn 1991 came the public launch of the RHCG, originally chaired by the Wellcome Trust and made up of major charities including the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, whose high street charity shops were being firebombed and having their windows smashed by radical animal rights activists.

As a science journalist, and following recent success in getting 25 charities together to hold National Transplant Week, I was appointed director, and eventually it grew to represent 95 medical research charities and patients’ organisations before being merged with the Association of Medical Research Charities in 1997. The first public event I organised was a debate on Kilroy, and Les and Colin were both invited on to it.

During the debate someone shouted out that Colin deserved to be killed for his eye research on kittens, and Les responded that such sentiments had no place in the animal rights movement, as everyone had an equal right to life and decent treatment, animals and humans.

Immediately after the broadcast ended I approached Les to talk to him, and Colin joined us to thank him, which is how we all met for the first time. Within a year Colin had persuaded Prof Kenneth Boyd to chair the discussion group as a neutral ethics expert, and by 1992 we were meeting round a table with the Home Office, public, pharmaceutical and charity research funders, academic societies, vets, animal welfare charities, alternative research groups and some radical activists. One of the best things we all did, and issued a public statement on, was to agree that cosmetics testing on animals has no place in a civilised society.

Colin was immensely proud of the Boyd Group, and must take much of the credit for its success and organising the early administration. He took much of the unfair and personal brunt of animal activists’ threats at the time, especially to his family, but many of us also received death threats and abuse simply for trying to advance medical science, the public’s understanding of how research takes place, and new treatments and cures for patients, especially in the fields of genetics and brain research.

He was a great communicator and will be missed by us all.



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.