Francis Gerald William Knowles

Sir Francis Gerald William Knowles, 6th baronet (9 March 1915 – 13 July 1974) was a distinguished British research biologist and zoologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who held the chair of anatomy at King's College London where he was Dean, to which he had come by a somewhat unorthodox route. He was, as The Times put it, "a fundamental scientist of outstanding calibre".

Family and early life

Knowles was born at Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where his father Francis Howe Seymour Knowles, 5th baronet (1886–1953) held the post of Physical Anthropologist for the Anthropological Division of the Geological Survey of Canada (now part of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation) from 1912 to 1919, when he returned to England on his succession to the baronetcy.

Knowles was educated back in England, at Radley College and at Oriel College, Oxford, reading zoology and graduating in 1936. Following graduation, he was awarded the Oxford University Naples scholarship, which enabled him to carry out research at the Stazione Zoologica, Italy, in 1937–8, where he began investigating the role of hormones in the regulation of colour change in lampreys and crustaceans. He was awarded his MA and PhD in 1939.

Career

After his scholarship ended in 1938, Knowles took up the post of senior biology master at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. Whilst at Marlborough he published several biological texts, including Man and other Living Things (1945), Diagrams of Human Biology (1950), Biology and Man (1950), Freshwater and Salt-water Aquaria (1953), and Endocrine Control in Crustaceans (1959, with David B. Carlisle). He also continued his researches on crustacean colour change, working during school holidays at marine biological laboratories with support from the Royal Society and the Nuffield Foundation. During this period he published many papers, most of them dealing specifically with the control of pigment movement and colour change. The choice of crustaceans as his experimental animals (made, as he remarked, because no Home Office licence was required for invertebrates) was a happy one. These activities gave his pupils an insight into scientific research that would have been found in very few other schools during this period.

In his later years at Marlborough, Knowles became aware of the new perspectives that had been opened in comparative endocrinology through the discovery of neurosecretion: the process by which certain nerve cells secrete hormones into the bloodstream. He was quick to exploit this concept, making skilful use of a variety of new techniques, including use of the electron microscope, which became his special interest. Meanwhile, by 1939, he had both an M.A. and D.Phil., and in 1949 was awarded the Browne Fund Scholarship of the Royal Society. He then spent a sabbatical term in Bermuda, Knowles expanded his researches to include the study of neurosecretory pathways in the brain and pituitary gland of the dogfish and, later, of the rhesus monkey. His observations and his manner of presenting them provided a strong (and sometimes provocative) stimulus to the many biologists who had also discovered the fascination of neurosecretory systems. His papers at scientific meetings were remembered as clear expositions of his theses, and usually gave rise to lively discussion.

He died suddenly in 1974 at the comparatively young age of 59, before completing the editorial work on the volume summarising the proceedings of the symposium (Neurosecretion – the final endocrine pathway).

Personal life

In 1948 Knowles married Ruth Jessie Brooke-Smith, the daughter of the Rev Arthur Brooke-Smith. They had one son, Charles Francis (b. 1951) who succeeded to the baronetcy, and three daughters, as well as a stepdaughter born to Ruth and her first husband, Dickie Hulse, an RAF fighter pilot killed in action during the Second World War.

In 1953 he succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his father, and in 1955 purchased Avebury Manor from Alexander Keiller, whose excavations of the Avebury stone circle had been ended by the outbreak of war in 1939. Restoration of the house became an absorbing love. "Many would remember Francis as a most excellent host, whether in the elegantly furnished rooms of his house in Edgbaston or in later years at his flat in Mayfair. Particularly memorable, however, was his hospitality at his beautiful Elizabethan house at Avebury, where he and his wife, Ruth, entertained so many people".

Knowles died in London on 13 July 1974. He is buried in the churchyard of St James, Avebury, next to the house he had restored.