| Authorised form of name | Lyon; Mary Frances (1925 - 2014); geneticist |
| Dates | 1925 - 2014 |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of birth | Maternity Home, 3 Aspland Road, Norwich, England |
| Date of birth | 15 May 1925 |
| Place of death | Her home, Crabtree Cottage, Crabtree Lane, Drayton, Oxfordshire, England |
| Date of death | 25 December 2014 |
| DatesAndPlaces | Cremated in Oxford, England (16 January 2015). |
| Occupation | Geneticist |
| Research field | Biology |
| Genetics |
| Activity | Education;
Primary school in Bradford and Norwich; King Edward VI High School, Birmingham (1936); Woking Grammar School for Girls (1939); Girton College, Cambridge (titular degree 1946); PhD (1950)
Career:
Awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) grant to work in the team led by Toby Carter, studying the genetic effects of radiation in mice (1950); team relocated to MRC Radiology Unit at Harwell, Oxfordshire (1955); Head of the Genetics Section of the MRC Radiology Unit at Harwell (1962-1987); Clothworkers' visiting research fellowship at Girton College, working with Richard Gardner (1970-1971); retired but remained active in the laboratory (1990); died at home from bronchopneumonia and Parkinson’s disease.
Awards/Medals:
William Allan Award (1986)
Wolf Prize in Medicine (1997) |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 15/03/1973 |
| Age at election | 47 |
| RSActivity | Medals and prizes:
Royal Medal 1984 |
| Relationships | Parents: Clifford James Lyon (1896–1963), tax office clerk, and Louise Frances, née Kirby (1893–1986). |
| OtherInfo | Distinguished for many important contributions to mammalian genetics, notably on the mutagenic effects of irradiation as measured in mice, and on the building of the hypothesis that one of the two X chromosomes of the female is inactivated at an early stage of embryogenesis. The hypothesis, which is now almost universally accepted as proved, offered a solution to the long standing problem of X-dosage compensation in the female mammal, has thrown much light on the nature of sex-chromosome aneuploidy, has influenced ideas on the origin of certain tumours and of chronic granulocytic leukaemia in man, and has provided food for thought about the fundamental mechanism of switching off genes. |
| Royal Society Obituary or Memoir | Click to view (may be contained within a meeting notice, presidential address or list of death notices) |
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| Virtual International Authority File | http://viaf.org/viaf/27731364 |
| Code | NA165 |
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