Muriel Robertson

Muriel Robertson , was a Scottish protozoologist and bacteriologist at the Lister Institute, London from 1915 to 1961. She made key discoveries of the life cycle of trypanosomes. She was one of the founding members of the Society for Microbiology along with Alexander Fleming and Marjory Stephenson.

Early life and education Robertson was born in Glasgow, the seventh of 12 children of Elizabeth Ritter and her husband, engineer Robert Andrew Robertson. Preliminary scientific courses could be included in such a degree, and it was there she acquired her first formal scientific teaching. It was in studying with Graham Kerr that she was given her first chance to work on the life cycles of protozoa. Three successive commissions were sent to study the disease, under the auspices of the Royal Society. Robertson was appointed protozoologist to what was then the Uganda Protectorate, from 1911 to 1914. She worked in the Royal Society laboratory at Mpumu, close to Lake Victoria Nyanza: the epicentre of the disease. At the laboratory she researched the lifecycle of Trypanosoma gambiense (which causes African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness) in blood and in its insect carrier, the tsetse fly, publishing her ground-breaking results, which involved cytological studies of extreme delicacy. A review of this research in her obituary, in the journal Nature, states: Her work on this subject has never been superseded nor indeed equalled, and the accuracy of some of her conclusions ... is only now being fully appreciated.".

On the creation of the Tropical Medical Research Committee by the Medical Research Council in 1936, Robertson was amongst the first of those elected to the Committee.

Robertson returned to the Lister Institute in 1914 shortly before World War I. Except for a period at the Institute of Animal Pathology in Cambridge during the Second World War, she worked at the Lister Institute until 1961. Most of her work was as a protozoologist, but she worked on bacteriology during both world wars. Her work helped clarify and classify the anaerobic bacteria (Clostridia) primarily responsible for gas-gangrene.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947, She suffered from acute glaucoma in the 1950s and one eye was removed.

Commemoration Robertson is described as a "Trailblazer" by the tour company Gallus Pedals, which organises bicycle tours in Glasgow. The company state on their website that ten women inspired the individual names of the bikes, and include a biography of each in several different categories. The category "Pioneers in Science and Medicine" includes Robertson, Marion Gilchrist and Dorothea Chalmers Smith.