In Memoriam: Isabel A. Forsyth 1936-2016

Abstract

Isabel Forsyth grew up in Nottingham, England, and attended Somerville College at Oxford University receiving a B.A. in Zoology in 1958 and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from that institution in 1962. Her first published papers were on seasonal breeding cycles in voles with J.R. Clarke [1]. In 1962 she took up a Research Scientist position in S.J. Folley’s department at the National Institute for Research in Dairying in Shinfield, Reading, becoming Head of the Physiology Department in 1983. When Shinfield closed in 1985 she became head of Endocrinology and Physiology at the AFRC Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at Hurley, Maidenhead, a position she held until 1991 when this institution also fell victim to the downsizing of agricultural research in the United Kingdom. Fortunately, the AFRC Institute at Babraham, Cambridge, continued to lead in Agricultural Research at that time and she moved her laboratory there; she was Head of the Reproductive Physiology Laboratory until her retirement in 1996. Isabel travelled widely. Supported by the Fulbright Commission she worked at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975-6. In 1992 she was a visiting researcher at the University of Western Australia. The endocrine control of lactation was an important focus of research at Reading where Folley and Alfred T. Cowie had already spent nearly two decades studying the effects of ablation of endocrine organs and the effect of exogenous hormones on lactation in rats, goats and cows. The question was, however, what was the nature of the pituitary hormones that mediated these effects. On arrival at Reading in 1962, Isabel immediately began developing assays for the lactogenic activity of pituitary hormones, using both the pigeon crop sac and organ culture of the mouse mammary gland to differentiate between pituitary growth hormone and prolactin. Within six years she had written 12 papers analyzing the concentration and lactogenic activities of growth hormone and prolactin * Margaret C. Neville peggy.neville@ucdenver.edu