Conrad Hal Waddington (1905-1975)

Early Life

Conrad Hal Waddington was born in Evesham on the 08 November 1905. The son of a tea planter, he spent the first three years of his life in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, South India before returning to England to live with an aunt and uncle on a farm in Sedgeberrow. Waddington attended Aymestrey House Preparatory School in Malvern Link from the age of nine before gaining a scholarship to Clifton College. Around this time Waddington moved to Weybridge to live with his grandmother, who encouraged his early interests in natural history, geology and archaeology. Waddington gained a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he took the Natural Sciences Tripos, gaining First Class in both parts in 1926. Early postgraduate years included studies in palaeontology, philosophy, geology, and embryology. He held the Arnold Gerstenberg Studentship in Philosophy in 1929 and gained the degree of DSc in 1938.

Early Career

Between 1934 and 1945 Waddington was Embryologist and Lecturer in Zoology at Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge (he was made Honorary Embryologist in 1936) and was a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1933 to 1945. During the Second World War, Waddington worked in Operations Research on photographic reconnaissance and with anti-shipping strikes.

Waddington in Edinburgh

In 1945 came an offer of a chair of genetics at Edinburgh University, but Waddington declined, feeling his future lay with the new National Animal Breeding and Genetics Research Organisation (NABGRO), established by the Agricultural Research Council to boost post-war food production and originally mooted for an Oxford location. When it was suggested however, that NABGRO (renamed ABGRO, then later ABRO) might be found permanent headquarters in Edinburgh, with Waddington combining the position of chief geneticist at the Organisation (under the directorship of R.G White) with the Chair of Animal Genetics at the University, he agreed. NABGRO took up residence in the Institute of Animal Genetics building on the King's Buildings site to the west of Edinburgh. However, the arrangement at the Institute was not to prove straightforward. Conflicts of aspirations and personalities - not to mention an unusual communal staff living arrangement at the nearby Mortonhall House - led to a division forming between the academically-oriented geneticists and the animal breeders. This split was to become consolidated in 1951, when the 'genetics section' became the officially separate ARC Unit of Animal Genetics under Waddington's directorship, located in the Institute. Meanwhile, the animal breeders moved to a mansion to the south of Edinburgh before becoming eventually installed on the King's Buildings site, opposite the Institute.

Into the 1950s, the Institute grew into the largest genetics department in the UK and one of the largest in the world, establishing Edinburgh's reputation as a world-class centre for genetics research. Waddington's laissez-faire directorship facilitated a great amount of research in many areas, particularly in quantitative inheritance. Waddington's own chief research interests were in developmental biology, and he gave widespread currency to the concept of canalisation (concerning the course of developmental processes), particularly with his experiments with Drosophila wings. By the end of the 1950s though, the research institute had become more and more compartmentalised, with Waddington himself becoming occupied with the setting up of an Epigenetics Laboratory. He also played a major role in the expansion of the biological faculty of Edinburgh University.

Later Life

In addition to his research and publications, Waddington was involved in many societies and organisations, and spent a lot of time travelling the world attending various conferences and events. Many of the organisations of which he was a member were concerned with the environment, bioethics and future planning. Waddington believed in the power of science to educate and inform a better future, and his 'systems thinking' approach led him to use biological and evolutionary reference models as a way of analysing issues concerning human population and settlement, as well as the environment. It was partly this thinking which led him to establish the School of the Man Made Future in 1972, part of the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. He also had a lifelong interest in art and architecture, and in 1969 he published a lavishly illustrated work on art and its relationship with the natural sciences, Behind Appearance.

Waddington had been awarded the CBE in 1958, and had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1948. He became a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959 and of the Finnish Academy in 1957. In 1974 he was elected a Fellow of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina. Waddington held honorary degrees from Aberdeen, Dublin, Geneva, Montreal and Prague. He had a long record of publication, from 1929 to the 1975, including authorship or editorship of 27 books. Waddington had two daughters, Dusa and Caroline, by his second wife, architect Justin Blanco White, and a son, Jake, by his first wife, Elizabeth Lascelles.

In 1970, he accepted an invitation from the State University of New York to spend two years in Buffalo occupying the Albert Einstein Chair in Science. Douglas Falconer took over the running of the Genetics Department as acting head from 1969 onwards. While in Buffalo, and shortly before his return to Edinburgh in 1973, Waddington suffered a heart attack. A second heart attack outside his home two years later proved fatal, and he died on 26 September 1975.

Notable publications

An Introduction to Modern Genetics, (1939)

Organisers and Genes (1940)

The Scientific Attitude(1941, revised 1948)

Science and Ethics (ed) (1942)

The Epigenetics of Birds (1952)

Principles of Embryology (1956)

The Ethical Animal (1961)

The Nature of Life (1962)

New Patterns in Genetics and Development (1962)

Biology for the Modern World (1962)

Principles of Development and Differentiation (1966)

Towards a Theoretical Biology, vols. I and II (1968-1969)

Behind Appearance (1969)

Towards a Theoretical Biology, vol. III: Drafts (1971)

Towards a Theoretical Biology, vol. IV: Essays (ed) (1972)

Gifford Lectures, the Nature of the Mind , with A.J.P Kenny, H.C Longuet-Higgins and J.R Lucas (1972)

Operational Research in World War Two: O.R against the U-boat (1973)

Evolution of an Evolutionist (1975)

Tools for Thought (1977)

Honours, Awards, Appointments

1934: Elected Fellow, Christ's College, University of Cambridge

1948: Elected Fellow, Royal Society

1957: Elected Member, Finnish Academy

1958: Awarded Commander of the Order, British Academy (CBE)

1959: Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

1974: Elected Fellow, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina

Sources

• Birse, Ronald M, Science at the University of Edinburgh 1583-1993, ( Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, 1994)
• Falconer, Douglas, 'Quantitative Genetics in Edinburgh: 1947-1980' in Perspectives: Anecdotal, Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics, ed.s James F. Crow and William F. Dove (Genetics Society of America, 1983), pp.137-142
• Robertson, Alan, Conrad Hal Waddington 1905 - 1975 (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 23, December 1977), pp.575-622
• Robertson, Forbes W., 'Genetics' in Two Hundred Years of the Biological Sciences in Scotland: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 84B, (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 211-229
• Programme of C.H. Waddington: Centennial Lectures and Reception held on 12 September 2005 at the College of Science and Engineering, the University of Edinburgh.