Colin Blakemore - Background

Background

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1944, he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry and then won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England, where he gained a first-class degree in medical sciences, then completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Physiological Optics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, as a Harkness Fellow in 1968. From 1968 to 79 he was a Demonstrator and then Lecturer in Physiology at the University of Cambridge, and was also Director of Medical Studies at Downing College. From 1976 to 1979 he held the Royal Society Locke Research Fellowship.

He was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology and a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in 1979, at the age of 35. He was also Director of the James S. McDonnell and Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He has served as President of the Biosciences Federation, now the Society of Biology, the British Neuroscience Association and the Physiological Society, and as President and Chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now the British Science Association. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Institute of Biology, the British Pharmacological Society, the Society of Biology and Corpus Christi College and Downing College of the University of Cambridge. He is Chair of the Selection Committee for The Brain Prize, Grete Lundbeck's European Brain Research Prize Foundation.

Blakemore is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He is also an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association. 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 12 February 2003, and sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

Blakemore has been honoured for his scientific achievements with prizes from many academies and societies, including the Royal Society, the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, the French Académie Nationale de Médecine, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, the Royal College of Physicians and the BioIndustry Association. In 1993 he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine and in 1996 he won the Alcon International Prize for research relevant to clinical ophthalmology. He has ten Honorary Degrees from British and overseas universities and is a foreign member of several academies of science, including the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of India, the Indian Academy of Neurosciences, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He won the 2010 Royal Society Ferrier Award and Lecture.

Despite a serious illness in his teens, Blakemore developed a lifelong interest in fitness and sport, especially long-distance running. He has completed 18 marathons and won the veteran's section for the British team at the Athens Centenary Marathon in 1996.