Professor John Thoday FRS (1916 – 2008)

Professor Thoday was committed to an experimental approach to genetics and he focused his research on the way in which individual species adapt and respond to their environment - a foundation for understanding almost all ecological and evolutionary processes.

He was appointed at a time when the Genetics Department was in its infancy, and it was largely due to his efforts that the Department expanded, moved to the Downing Site, and established the study of genetics as one of the fundamental biological disciplines in Cambridge.

Professor Thoday was born on 30 August 1916, the third son of botanists Professor David Thoday, FRS and Mrs Mary Gladys Thoday. He graduated in Botany at the University of Wales in 1939 and then entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a research student. He started research in the Botany School at Cambridge in October 1939 with the first investigation into the effect of neutrons on chromosomes.

He joined the Royal Air Force as a photographic intelligence officer in April 1941. He served in the Middle East, Algiers and Italy and reached the rank of Squadron Leader. Demobilised in 1945, he joined the cancer research staff at Mount Vernon Hospital Middlesex. He discovered, with John Read, the role of oxygen in Radiobiology and showed that the radiotherapeutic effect of X-rays on tissue growth was largely due to chromosome breakage.

He was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the University of Sheffield in 1947 and taught genetics in the Botany and Zoology Departments.

In 1959 he accepted the offer of appointment to the Arthur Balfour Professorship of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. In 1961 he moved the department from a house in Storey's Way to the old Veterinary School site in Milton Road. He established a formal place for the department's teaching in part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos. Such a place had hitherto been deemed inappropriate though the department was established in 1912!

In 1965 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society. In 1976, he moved the Genetics Department into the Downing site. From 1977 to 1981 he served on the General Board of the Faculties, and was Chairman of its Needs Committee.

He became a Professorial Fellow at Emmanuel College in 1959 and a Life Fellow in 1983. He played an active role in the social life in the College and is remembered, apart from anything else, as being an enthusiastic player of bowls - a game that has been played at Emmanuel since its foundation in 1584, to the College's own idiosyncratic rules.

He gave the college two chimeric trees - chimeras arise at graft junctions as branches that show characteristics of both of the grafted 'parents'. They have a layer of cells of one species around a core of the other. One had a layer of medlar on a hawthorn core; the other a layer of creeping broom on a laburnum core.

John Thoday left his wife, Doris, children Antonia and Jonathan, and grandchildren Zoe and Zachary.