Pollock, Martin Rivers, 1914-1999 (professor of biology, University of Edinburgh)

Biography

Martin Rivers Pollock was born on 10 December 1914, the son of Hamilton Rivers Pollock and Eveline Morton Pollock. He attended Winchester College before gaining a place at Trinity College Cambridge in 1933 (Senior Scholarship 1936). At Cambridge he studied Medicine (pre-clinical), moving to University College Hospital Medical School, London to complete his medical training in 1937-1939. He qualified M.B., B.Chir. in 1940.

Pollock held hospital appointments at University College Hospital and Brompton Chest Hospital 1939-1941 before joining the Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service as a Bacteriologist in 1941. In 1943 he was seconded to a Medical Research Council unit to work on infective hepatitis. In 1945 Pollock was formally taken onto the staff of the Medical Research Council. He worked at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), Mill Hill, London, initially under Sir Paul Fildes before being appointed Head of the Division of Bacterial Physiology in 1949. He remained at the NIMR to 1965, spending two periods (1948 and 1952-1953) studying in the laboratory of Jacques Monod at the Institut Pasteur, Paris. Pollock had for some years being considering the possibility of establishing a unit for teaching and research in molecular biology, which would bring together bacterial genetics and biochemistry, and a number of possible locations had been evaluated. M.M. Swann, the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Edinburgh, persuaded Pollock to move north and in 1965 Pollock was appointed Professor of Biology at Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards, his colleague William Hayes moved from the MRC Unit for Bacterial Genetics at Hammersmith Hospital London. Together they established at Edinburgh the Department of Molecular Biology, the first such teaching department in the world. Pollock took early retirement in 1976, moving to Dorset. He took no further active part in scientific research but maintained his growing interest in the relationship between science and art, organising a major conference on the subject in 1981. He died in December 1999. Pollock's thirty years of scientific research from the end of the Second World War, both at the NIMR and Edinburgh University, focused on enzyme induction in bacteria. He studied the mechanism by which beta-lactamase enzymes (particularly penicillinase) are involved in the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. For his contributions in this area Pollock was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1962. In the 1970s Pollock became interested in developments in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, encouraging interdepartmental cooperation in these areas.

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