Rosalind Pitt-Rivers

Early life and education Pitt-Rivers was born Rosalind Venetia Henley on 4 March 1907 at 18 Mansfield Street, London, the eldest of four daughters of the Hon. Anthony Morton Henley, a Captain in the 5th Lancers, and his wife the Hon. Sylvia Laura Stanley. and her mother the daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley.

Career After she separated from Pitt-Rivers in 1937, she returned to study and gained a PhD in biochemistry from University College medical school in 1939. She joined the scientific staff of the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill London in 1942, the largest institute of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC).

After working with Jack Gross on the discovery of the T3 hormone and publishing their findings in The Lancet in 1952, she gained international recognition.

Personal life In 1931, she married, as his second wife, George Pitt-Rivers (1890–1966), anthropologist and eugenicist, one of the richest men in England and a grandson of Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827–1900), who founded the anthropology museum named after him in Oxford. She became stepmother to the two sons from his first marriage, Michael and Julian. She gave birth to a son, Anthony Pitt-Rivers, in 1932, but the marriage was dissolved in 1937.

During their marriage, her husband had become increasingly pro-eugenics and antisemitic, drawing closer to German eugenicists and praising Mussolini and Hitler; by 1940 he was interned under Defence Regulation 18B.

She died on 14 January 1990, aged 82, at Hinton St Mary, Dorset, England.