Background
MOURANT, Arthur was born on April 11, 1904 in Jersey, Imperial Order of the Crown of India Son of Ernest Charles Mourant and Emily Gertrude Bray.
MOURANT, Arthur was born on April 11, 1904 in Jersey, Imperial Order of the Crown of India Son of Ernest Charles Mourant and Emily Gertrude Bray.
Mourant graduated from the University of Oxford with honours in chemistry and a Doctor of Philosophy in geology in 1931. He later studied medicine and surgery at Street Bartholomew"s Medical College, London, joining the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit in 1946 and then founding the Blood Group Reference Laboratory in London, where he was director for 20 years.
He was an early advocate of the then discredited Wegener theory of continental drift, which subsequently gained acceptabtability as plate tectonics. When he left Oxford he failed to find a position in his chosen discipline and returned to his childhood home of Jersey, where he set up a pathology laboratory. He pioneered a study of hematology of the worldwide distribution of blood groups.
This work help build the genetic map of the world by studying and classifying blood groups across many populations and ethnic groups.
His book, The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups, definitively drew together current knowledge on blood groups and their distribution. lieutenant launched anthropology on a new scientific basis as it described the genetic evidence for biological relationships, and allowed theories of population genetics to be developed and examined.
This had far-reaching effects on medicine, research into genetic diseases, blood transfusion, and public health. Mourant also studied the new blood group antigens of the Lewis, Henshaw, Kell, and Rhesus systems, biological polymorphisms, and animal serological characteristics for fish stocks and cattle breeds.
Academy, des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Toulouse 1970. Society Peruana de Patologia 1955, Society Jersiaise 1961, Institute Society of Blood Transfusion 1975, British Society for Haematology 1976, Society for the Study of Human Biology 1978, Human Biology Council (United States of America) 1987.
Married Jean Elizabeth Cameron Shimell Inoe Dickson) in 1978.