Colin Blakemore
Colin Blakemore was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in June 1944. After winning a place
at the King Henry VIII grammar school in Coventry, he went on to win a scholarship
to study natural science at Cambridge and then completed a PhD at the University
of California in Berkeley. After 11 years in the Department of Physiology at Cambridge
University, he became Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford University in 1979.
From 1996–2003 he was Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive
Neuroscience at Oxford, and he has been Chief Executive of the MRC since 2003.
Professor Blakemore was President of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science in 1997-1998 and its Chairman in 2001-2004. He has been described by the
Royal Society as “one of Britain 's most influential communicators of science”, and
he has been awarded many prizes from medical and scientific academies and societies.
He is committed to promoting dialogue between scientists and the public, and to defending
medical research using animals despite regularly receiving threats of violence from
animal rights extremists. Over the years he has been a frequent contributor to radio
and television programmes, including the BBC Reith Lecture in 1976 and the 13-part
BBC2 series The Mind Machine. His books for the general public include Mechanics
of the Mind (for which he won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science), Images and Understanding
, Mindwaves, The Mind Machine , Gender and Society and The Oxford Companion to the
Body.
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 he was one of the 43 scientists and philosophers who signed
and sent a letter to Tony Blair and relevant Government departments, concerning the
teaching of Creationism in schools in March 2002. He was also one of the signatories
to a letter supporting a holiday on Charles’ Darwin’s birthday, published in The
Times on February 12, 2003, and sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.
He is also an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association.
