| AdminHistory | In an extremely influential career cut prematurely short Rosa Beddington contributed important principles and insights into the mechanism governing the acquisition of anterior-posterior fates in the mammalian embryo. She performed many technically difficult transplantation and grafting experiments and was a gifted illustrator and writer.
Born in Hurstboune Tarrant, Hampshire, 23 March 1956, Rosa attended Sherborne School for Girls, Dorset from 1968 to 1973. She graduated Brasenose College, Oxford University in 1977 attaining first class honours in physiological sciences. As a postgraduate student at Oxford in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology (1977-1981) she undertook her DPhil thesis, 'Studies on cell fate and cell potency in the postimplantation mammalian embryo' under the supervision of Dr V E Papaioannou.
Rosa remained at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology as a post-doctoral research assistant in Professor R L Gardner's laboratory (1981-1983). In 1982 Rosa was a visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Centre, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.
From 1983 to 1988 Rosa was a research fellow at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, Oxford, and in 1987 she married the Reverend Robin Denniston.
From 1988 to 1991 Rosa was a research scientist at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Oxford. In 1991 Rosa and her husband moved to Edinburgh where she took up the post of Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Genome Research. Here she extended her studies on gastrulation, a period of development in which a series of complex processes establish the founder tissues of the embryo and its recognisable vertebrate form. With her colleague William Skarnes, she adapted procedures for identifying and selectively mutating embryonic stem cells in a particular class of genes that are required for development, which have subsequently been extensively used in developmental biology.
In 1993 Rosa became Head of the Division of Mammalian Development at the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research. She co-authored 'Principles of Development' (1998) and the 'Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: a laboratory manual' (1994), both of which were illustrated by her meticulous drawings.
For many years Rosa co-organized the 'Molecular Genetics of the Mouse' meetings held annually on a rotating basis either at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories or the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Rosa was meetings secretary for the British Society for Developmental Biology (1990-1995), and also designed the Society's Waddington Medal. Rosa was awarded a Lister Institute for Preventative Medicine in 1983; an international scholarship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1993; and was elected to membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 1998. Rosa received the Waddington Medal of the British Society for Developmental Biology in 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year.
Rosa passed away at her home in Great Tew, Oxfordshire, 18 May 2001. |