Honor Fell

Dame Dr. Honor Fell, DBE, Ph.D, DSc (1900 - 1986) was a British scientist and zoologist. Her contributions to science included the development of the organ culture method, similar to stem cell research.

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Organ Culture Method

This enabled scientists to grow living diffentiated cells, largely obtained from the embryos of warm blooded animals, to create cultures that mimic the behaviour of organs in the animal body (see stem cell research). She attended St Andrew's University and Edinburgh University. In 1922 she graduated in zoology.

While working with a Dr. Strangeways at Cambridge in 1923 she went on to earn her Ph.D the following year, and later her DSc in 1932 from the University of Cambridge. The development of specific cell groups or organ cultures enabled the exploration of the life, characteristics and reactions of cells to beneficial and adverse substances without the risks involved in exposing the cells of living human organs.

Fell specialised in the cells of bone and cartilage. Her most significant work was in the role of the immune system in causing rheumatoid arthritis. Her second contribution to science was the direction, with Dr F.G. Spears, of the Strangeways Laboratory. Originally this was a small laboratory founded next to the Cambridge Research Hospital for investigating the pathology of rheumatoid arthritis and linked diseases. Honor became director in 1927. The laboratory's survival was partly due to her skilful financial management of research grants from the Medical Research Council and donors.

In the 1930s the Laboratory pioneered the development of radiobiology - the effects of X-rays on living animal tissue. This was a direct result of Dr. Fell's offer of study facilities to scientists who were refugees of the Second World War.

Despite limited resources the laboratory expanded, particularly with the construction in 1938 of a new wing funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1970 the Laboratory was held in international esteem and comprised 62 scientists and 29 technicians from all over the world.

In retirement, in the role of a research worker at the Department of Immunology at Cambridge University Department of Pathology, she once again took up the immunobiology of rheumatoid disease. She returned to Strangeways in 1976 and remained there, still working in the laboratory, until within four weeks of her death in 1986.

Honor Fell published works on organ culture techniques; on the effects of Vitamin A and cortisone on tissue culture; and rheumatoid work.

Affiliations

• 1943: Appointed Foulerton Research Fellow, Royal Society
• 1953: Elected Fellow, Royal Society of London
• 1955: Elected Fellow, Girton College, Cambridge University
• 1957: Elected Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston
• 1959: Awarded Honorary LL.D, Edinburgh
• 1963: Awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• 1963: Appointed Royal Society Research Professor
• 1964: Awarded Honorary D.Sc, University of Oxford
• 1964: Awarded Honorary Sc.D, Harvard University
• 1975: Awarded Honorary MD, University of Leiden
• 1977: Appointed, Walker-Ames Professor, University of Washington, Seattle

References

• Vaughan, Janet. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1987, vol. 33, pp. 237-259

Links

• Biography