104 | Obituaries
Marianne Fillenz (1950) Marianne was born in 1924 in Timisoara, Romania, the older of two daughters. Her mother was Viennese and her father was a Hungarian Jew. In October 1939, the family fled to New Zealand as refugees from Nazism, and settled in Christchurch. The years in New Zealand laid the foundations for the rest of Marianne’s life, coming at a crucial time (between the ages of 15 and 25) and bringing her into contact with a number of people who had a lasting influence on her. Among them was the philosopher, Karl Popper, who had come to Canterbury University Christchurch as a lecturer in 1937. Marianne went to his philosophy evening classes, got to know him well, and through him developed a life-long interest in philosophical problems, particularly the mindbody question. Marianne studied Medicine at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, from 1943-48. The newly arrived professor of Physiology was Jack Eccles, later a Nobel prize winner. He was an inspirational teacher, and his approach had a profound influence on Marianne. Eccles had been an Australian Rhodes scholar in Oxford before coming to New Zealand, and influenced by him Marianne came to Somerville in 1950 to do a DPhil. She remained in Oxford for the rest of her life, and against the backdrop of earlier disruption and displacement it became her much loved home. Her life here revolved around two main axes – her work and her family. She met her future husband John Clarke, a Rhodes scholar from Western Australia, in June 1950 and they were married soon afterwards. Their lifelong partnership was one in which John played a genuinely equal role in looking after their three children so that they could both pursue their scientific careers. With her DPhil completed, Marianne was appointed to a college lectureship at St. Hilda’s and a demonstratorship in the Department of Physiology, where she encountered some unenlightened attitudes on the part of her male colleagues – her own head of department advising her to spend less time in the lab and more time with her family. Undeterred, she went on to develop an international reputation as a neuroscientist, making contributions to the understanding of various aspects of brain function, particularly the role of neurotransmitters, in collaborations with a number of individuals and research groups in Oxford and elsewhere, leading to the award of a DSc by the University in 2000. Her last scientific paper, on the life and work of Jack Eccles, was published in 2012.