Professor Sir David Weatherall
Doctor of the University (HonDUniv)
Year conferred: 1995
David Weatherall is Regius Professor of Medicine Emeritus and retired Honorary Director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford. As Chancellor of Keele University, Sir David has helped to set up a new School of Medicine. His other activities include working through the support of the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council on the development of international programmes with the developing countries to establish facilities for the management of common inherited anaemias. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
In 2010 he was awarded the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science. The Lasker Awards, known as the "American Nobels," have been awarded annually since 1946 to living persons who have made major contributions to medical science or who have performed public service on behalf of medicine. They are administered by the Lasker Foundation, founded by advertising pioneer Albert Lasker and his wife Mary Woodard Lasker (later an influential medical research activist). Professor Weatherall began work on the blood disease thalassemia in the 1950s. It took 20 years to understand its biochemical basis. An inherited, recessive disorder, thalassemia causes the body to make abnormal haemoglobin molecules, resulting in anemia. He developed tests and clinics worldwide for affected children. More than 100,000 babies worldwide are born each year with the severe forms of the disease, according to recently published figures.
