IN MEMORIAM: Lewis Wolpert

[BSc Eng 1951]

1929-2021

Acclaimed for his ideas on pattern formation in the embryo and “positional information” by which cells recognise where they ought to be in the field of a developing organ, biologist Dr Lewis Wolpert died at the age of 91 on 28 January 2021.

He was a polymath and public figure, contributing to topics ranging from religion and depression to old age and philosophy. He made evolutionary thought more accessible and argued that the “truly most important time in your life” was not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation – the stage in which a uniform ball of cells folds to become differentiated layers with the beginnings of a gut.

He graduated with a civil engineering degree from Wits and after working for two years on soil mechanics as assistant to the director of the Building Research Institute in Pretoria, he left to hitchhike in Europe. He worked briefly for the water planning board in Israel and decided to study soil mechanics at Imperial College London. He was accepted as PhD student with biophysicist James Danielli at King’s College. He was later promoted to lecturer and reader (in zoology) at King’s before taking up the chair of biology at Middlesex (and transferred to University College London after the two institutions merged), where he remained until he retired at the age of 74. In a 2015 interview with Development he said: “Changing so many times, from civil engineering to biology and then to different systems, required me to work very hard. For example, during my PhD I had to learn quite a lot and pass exams in zoology. It was a little difficult but interesting.”

Wolpert was born in Johannesburg into a conservative Jewish family, the only surviving child of William, a manager in a newsagent and bookshop, and his wife, Sarah (née Suzman). Wolpert took Hebrew lessons, had a bar mitzvah, went to synagogue every Saturday – but turned away from the faith at the age of 16. He considered himself a secular humanist. In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (WW Norton & Company, 2006) he investigates the nature of belief, pondering the origins of religion.

In 1969 in a landmark paper he proposed that the way an embryonic cell interprets its genetic instructions depends on its position. The cell “knows” where it is in relation to sources of chemical signals called morphogens, because the strength of the signals varies with the distance from the source. It wasn’t well received at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, in the US. He recalled how fellow Witsie Sydney Brenner (BSc 1945, BSc Hons 1946, MSc 1947, MBBCh 1951, DSc honoris causa 1972) comforted him: “The next morning, while I was bathing, Sydney Brenner found me crying in the water and said ‘Lewis, pay no attention. We like your ideas. Pay no attention to people who don’t like it.’ And he’s the one who saved me. He gave me total encouragement, so I didn’t care that all these Americans didn’t like what I was doing. If Sydney liked it, that’s what mattered, because Sydney is an amazing man.”

Over the years Wolpert combined his interest in cell development with a career as science communicator. “Science is the best way to understand the world,” he said and frequently broadcast on BBC radio and TV as well as writing a number of popular books. The best known of these, Malignant Sadness (Simon and Schuster,1999), was an attempt to understand his own experience of severe depression at the age of 65 and compared the merits of drugs and psychotherapy. Other popular books included How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells (Faber & Faber, 2009), and The Triumph of the Embryo (Courier Corporation, 1991). In You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old (Faber & Faber 2012), he presented research arguing that happiness peaks at 74. He regularly cycled, ran and played tennis into his eighties.

As a theorist, Wolpert’s influence on the field of genetic biology was immense. He was lead author of the definitive textbook Principles of Development, now in its sixth edition. In 2018 the Royal Society awarded him its highest honour, the Royal Medal.

Wolpert married Elizabeth Brownstein in 1961, and they had four children, two of whom, Daniel and Miranda, also became at different times professors at UCL, in neuroscience and clinical psychology, respectively. The marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce, and in 1993 Wolpert married the Australian writer Jill Neville, who died suddenly of cancer in 1997.

In 2016 he married Alison Hawkes. She survives him, along with his children, Miranda, Daniel, Jessica and Matthew, two stepchildren, Judy and Luke, and six grandchildren.

Sources: The Guardian, FT, Development, drugdiscoverytoday.com