Like his two older brothers, Mellanby attended Barnard Castle School with support from a bursary. He spent four years there, leaving in 1902 as head boy, having also won the upper school prize and a prize for theoretical and practical physics. He enjoyed perhaps even greater celebrity as an athlete, not only as captain of the cricket and football teams but also in track and field.
College/University
Gallery of Edward Mellanby
St Andrew's St, Cambridge CB2 3AP, United Kingdom
In the Michaelmas term of 1902, Mellanby entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he had won an open exhibition in natural science and where his expenses were further defrayed by a leaving exhibition from Barnard Castle School. At Cambridge, Mellanby took a second class in part I of the natural sciences tripos in 1904 and the first class in part II in 1905, his special subject being physiology. After graduating with Bachelor of Arts in 1905, he remained at Cambridge with a research studentship from Emmanuel College and pursued biochemical research under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who had been his college tutor.
In 1907, to complete his clinical training and become medically qualified, Mellanby went to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. While in London he continued to receive prizes and degrees from Cambridge - the Walsingham Medal (1907), the Gedge Prize (1908), and the Raymond Horton-Smith Prize (1915), as well as the degrees of Master of Arts and Bachelor of Medicine in 1910, and Doctor of Medicine in 1915.
Career
Gallery of Edward Mellanby
1943
United Kingdom
Portrait photo of Sir Edward Mellanby.
Gallery of Edward Mellanby
United Kingdom
Portrait of Sir Edward Mellanby.
Gallery of Edward Mellanby
United Kingdom
Sir Edward and Lady May Mellanby.
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society
Edward Mallenby became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1925.
Royal College of Physicians
Edward Mallenby became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1928.
Like his two older brothers, Mellanby attended Barnard Castle School with support from a bursary. He spent four years there, leaving in 1902 as head boy, having also won the upper school prize and a prize for theoretical and practical physics. He enjoyed perhaps even greater celebrity as an athlete, not only as captain of the cricket and football teams but also in track and field.
In the Michaelmas term of 1902, Mellanby entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he had won an open exhibition in natural science and where his expenses were further defrayed by a leaving exhibition from Barnard Castle School. At Cambridge, Mellanby took a second class in part I of the natural sciences tripos in 1904 and the first class in part II in 1905, his special subject being physiology. After graduating with Bachelor of Arts in 1905, he remained at Cambridge with a research studentship from Emmanuel College and pursued biochemical research under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who had been his college tutor.
In 1907, to complete his clinical training and become medically qualified, Mellanby went to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. While in London he continued to receive prizes and degrees from Cambridge - the Walsingham Medal (1907), the Gedge Prize (1908), and the Raymond Horton-Smith Prize (1915), as well as the degrees of Master of Arts and Bachelor of Medicine in 1910, and Doctor of Medicine in 1915.
Sir Edward Mellanby was a British biochemist, physiologist, and educator. He is remembered for discovering vitamin D and its role in preventing rickets in 1919. After that, he served as secretary (chief executive) of the Medical Research Council from 1933 to 1949.
Background
Edward Mellanby was born on April 8, 1884, in West Hartlepool, Durham, United Kingdom. He was the fourth son and sixth and last child of John Mellanby, an amateur boxing champion from Yorkshire who managed the shipyard of the Furness-Withy Company in West Hartlepool, and his wife, Mary Isabella Lawson of Edinburgh. His father was a Yorkshireman who was noted for his management of men in the shipyard and for his ability in handling people, and he no doubt passed on some of his knowledge of human nature to his sons when he enjoyed his evening stroll with them.
Reared in religious nonconformity of an evangelical cast, all three sons who survived to maturity became professors in scientific or technical disciplines. His eldest brother, Alexander Lawson Mellanby, was a Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering in the Royal Technical College, Glasgow. John, who preceded him to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ultimately succeeded Sir Charles Sherrington in the Chair of Physiology at Oxford.
Mellanby’s sister described Edward in his early days as being very lively, as always being in evidence in the home, being the youngest, and a mimic of all the visitors. He grew up with this streak of mischief in him.
Education
Like his two older brothers, Mellanby attended Barnard Castle School with support from a bursary. He spent four years there, leaving in 1902 as head boy, having also won the upper school prize and a prize for theoretical and practical physics. He enjoyed perhaps even greater celebrity as an athlete, not only as captain of the cricket and football teams but also in track and field.
In the Michaelmas term of 1902, Mellanby entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he had won an open exhibition in natural science and where his expenses were further defrayed by a leaving exhibition from Barnard Castle School. At Cambridge, Mellanby took a second class in part I of the natural sciences tripos in 1904 and the first class in part II in 1905, his special subject being physiology. After graduating with Bachelor of Arts in 1905, he remained at Cambridge with a research studentship from Emmanuel College and pursued biochemical research under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who had been his college tutor.
In 1907, to complete his clinical training and become medically qualified, Mellanby went to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. While in London he continued to receive prizes and degrees from Cambridge - the Walsingham Medal (1907), the Gedge Prize (1908), and the Raymond Horton-Smith Prize (1915), as well as the degrees of Master of Arts and Bachelor of Medicine in 1910, and Doctor of Medicine in 1915.
From 1909 to 1911 Edward Mellanby was a demonstrator in the department of physiology at St. Thomas’s Hospital, where from 1910 to 1912 he also held a Beit memorial fellowship for medical research. In 1913 Mellanby published a study of metabolism in lactating women and joined the faculty of King’s College for Women, a constituent institution of the University of London founded to provide an education in household science with a genuinely scientific basis and full academic status.
By most accounts, Mellanby’s work had an immediate and dramatic impact on the prevention and treatment of rickets in England. Indeed, for Henry Dale, Mellanby’s achievement represented a major milestone in the emergence of science-based therapy. Nonetheless, many clinicians had already linked rickets empirically with a deficiency of fats; and cod-liver oil had long been prescribed for its antirachitic properties. While acknowledging the work of his clinical predecessors, Mellanby insisted that competing theories and therapies had allowed rickets to remain a prevalent disease and a probable contributor to high infant mortality among the urban populations of Great Britain and the United States. By the early 1930s, presumably as a result of the impact of Mellanby’s work, no case of rickets could be found in the London clinics for trials of commercial vitamin D.
Toward the end of World War I, while conducting his work on rickets, Mellanby undertook another “mission-oriented” research project-this time at the request of the Liquor Control Board (established out of governmental concern over the effects of drunkenness on the war effort). Once again with financial support from the Medical Research Committee, he studied the “comparative rates of absorption of alcohol into the blood from different kinds of drinks, and when taken in different relations to the food of various kinds.” In 1920 Mellanby accepted the newly established chair in pharmacology at the University of Sheffield, attracted partly because of the clinical privileges made available to him through his simultaneous appointment as an honorary physician at the Sheffield Royal Infirmary. In fact, his career often reflects his concern to reap practical benefits from basic research and to promote the “interaction of clinical and experimental work,” a phrase that served as the subtitle for his book Nutrition and Disease (1934).
For some time after he became secretary of the Medical Research Council in 1933, Mellanby spent his weekends at Sheffield, engaged in productive research. Later, both while serving as secretary and after his retirement from the Council in 1949, he worked in its new nutrition building at Mill Hill. Especially during the 1930s Mellanby and his associates directed their efforts partly toward cancer, some of their results being recorded in the annual reports of the British Empire Cancer Campaign for 1934 through 1937. But most of Mellanby’s later research had its roots in his work on rickets. During the early 1920s, for example, he reported that dogs on rachitic diets often developed thyroid growths histologically similar to those of patients with exophthalmic goiter. He, therefore, treated such patients with cod-liver oil, claiming that it had a beneficial effect, especially when combined with the iodine therapy recommended by others.
More generally, although he took no direct part in the chemical separation of “fat-soluble A” into vitamins A and D, Mellanby did much to clarify their action and mutual relations. Having early noticed the directly rechitogenic action of certain cereals, even in dogs that seemed to have sufficient dietary vitamin D, he argued that such cereals must contain a toxic substance that actively interfered with the calcifying role of vitamin D. In the late 1930s, after a long search for this ”toxamin,” Mellanby and his collaborators implicated phytic acid, which in certain cereals blocks calcium absorption by forming highly stable calcium phytate.
A decade later Mellanby excited popular interest by exposing the possible toxicity of wheat flours bleached with nitrogen trichloride as part of the Agene process. In particular, he showed that the ingestion of such flours was regularly associated with “canine hysteria.” Although no decisive evidence established the toxicity of agenized flours in human diets, the process was eventually banned in Britain and the United States. Especially because of this work on agenized flours, the toxicity of which his associates traced more specifically to methionine-sulfoximine, Mellanby issued a prophetic warning against “the chemical manipulation of food.”
Perhaps the most fundamental and interesting outgrowth of Mellanby’s work on rickets was his study of the effects of vitamin A on infections, nerve degeneration, bony malformation, and embryogenesis. Although his search for specifically anti-infective properties in vitamin A was less than conclusive, it reinforced his conviction that improper nutrition plays a significant role in the etiology of infectious diseases. He achieved more decisive results in his investigation of the nerve degeneration and bony malformation associated with vitamin A deficiency. In an elegant series of papers, Mellanby and his collaborators linked the ataxia of vitamin A deficiency with nerve degeneration, especially in the cranial nerves and central tracts of the special senses. These degenerative changes were later traced to the destructive compression of the nerves and their ganglia by improper development of the skull bones and upper vertebrae - and ultimately to distorted events in the osteoblasts and osteoclasts.
Toward the end of his life, Mellanby joined Honor Fell of the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge, in studying the effects of excess vitamin A on embryonic tissues cultivated in vitro. Among their exciting results, perhaps the most striking was the induced production of ciliated mucous - secreting epithelium from chicken ectoderm grown in a medium with high vitamin A content, followed by its reversion to normal skin when transferred to a normal medium. These and other metaplastic effects of vitamin A led Mellanby to suggest that it could be considered the “director” of basal cell development, comparable with the “organizers” in embryological growth. To the end of his life - even on the day of his death - Mellanby continued to pursue these studies of the role of vitamin A in embryogenesis and metabolism, having turned at the very end to its effects on sulfate metabolism.
As Henry Dale emphasized, Mellanby’s distinguished career in research becomes all the more impressive when one realizes that he simultaneously held, for sixteen years, the most important post in the administration of medical research in Great Britain. To be sure, when he succeeded Sir Walter Morley Fletcher as secretary of the Medical Research Council in 1933, he inherited a stable, efficient, and highly regarded organization. But the immense expansion of funds for medical research, together with the heavy burdens placed upon the Council during World War II, made his task a demanding one. Some appreciation of its full dimensions can be gained from the annual reports of the Council and from A. L. Thomson’s two-volume history of the Council. At the time of his selection as secretary, Mellanby was already a member of the Council, with which he had been associated as a major recipient of research funds and as a leading contributor to its work since its origins as the Medical Research Committee. According to Thomson, his selection as secretary “was virtually settled by the scientific members in private meetings”; and he accepted with the understanding that every possible provision would be made to enable him to continue his own research with support from the Council.
During World War II, Mellanby played a major role in the administration medicine and in the setting of dietary standards for British civilians and military personnel. He was a leading international force in efforts to improve nutrition and in the standardization of vitamins, and he undertook advisory missions to South Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Mellanby was raised in a religious Evangelical atmosphere but it is unknown whether his beliefs remained throughout his life.
Views
Even though Mellanby studied under Hopkins (who in 1929 won a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamins), and even though his own initial research concerned disordered metabolism, his work on rickets did not evolve directly from his earlier interests. His first publications (1907-1908) dealt with the metabolism of creatine and creatinine under embryonic, normal and pathological conditions. He was particularly struck by the fact that creatine (ordinarily stored in voluntary muscle) appeared in the urine of patients with hepatic cancer, whereas creatinine alone was excreted in the urine of those with healthy livers or with such noncancerous hepatic diseases as cirrhosis. On this basis, Mellanby hoped that urinary creatine could serve as an aid in the diagnosis of cancer of the liver. During the next decade, he pursued his interest in creatine metabolism and (partly in collaboration with Frederick Twort) investigated the possible role of intestinal bacteria in the destruction of creatine, in the production of histamine, and in etiology of infantile diarrhea and cyclical vomiting. He turned to rickets only when invited to do so by the Medical Research Committee (forerunner of the Medical Research Council) in 1914. According to Henry Dale, then a member of the Committee, it was Hopkins who urged that rickets be made an object of special study and that Mellanby be asked to undertake it.
Membership
Edward Mallenby became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1925 and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1928.
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
Royal College of Physicians
,
United Kingdom
Personality
As secretary, Mellanby was criticized for his brusque manner toward subordinates and outsiders, and for an alleged partiality toward the nutritional and applied fields in which he had made his own greatest contributions. His leading asset was his ability to distinguish promising avenues of research from other, less fertile competitors for Council funds.
Quotes from others about the person
"It was Mellanby’s special title to greatness that, having achieved his rank as an investigator of great originality and distinction, he continued to hold it, by maintaining the high level of his own activity in research, when he became, in addition, a great administrator of the public funds provided for the general support of research in his own field of the medical sciences, and a most determined and forceful advocate, in official circles and widely beyond them, of the proper use and application of the results of such research, for the promotion of health in the nation and throughout the world." - Sir Henry Hallett Dale, English pharmacologist and physiologist.
Interests
Sport & Clubs
football, cricket
Connections
In 1914 Edward Mellanby married May Tweedy, a fellow student at Cambridge who had taken a second class in both parts of the natural sciences tripos in 1905-1906, and who had since begun her own career in biomedical research at Bedford College, London. Their long and happy partnership, which had no issue in the usual sense, extended into the laboratory. No proper study of Mellanby’s career should overlook the important contributions of his wife, who survived him.