Biochemist and Natural Historian

Born: October 19th, 1942

Died October 24th, 2017

The distinguished Glasgow-based biological scientist, John Knowler, who has died of pancreatic cancer soon after his 75th birthday, had a career in two distinct parts: first as a biochemist, and then, converting his childhood passion into a ‘retirement’ occupation, as a natural historian.

John’s route into academic science was unconventional. He was a farmer’s son, born near Faversham in Kent, and learned to love wildlife, especially birds, plants and insects, roaming his local countryside, especially the marshes. Having failed his 11 plus, he left school at 14 to work on the farm, but curiosity concerning the natural world took him back into education, first at Kent Farm Institute and then to Canterbury Technical College, where he took Zoology A level, and, just as important, met Penny, who became his wife in 1967.

His early employment was as a technician in pesticide development, which allowed day release to study for Membership of the Institute of Biology, a degree level qualification. His excellence in Biochemistry led to an Industrial Fellowship paid by Pfizer’s which allowed research towards a doctorate, supervised by Professor Martin Smellie at Glasgow University, and completed in 1972.

John and Penny had just settled into the resultant post-doctoral research positions in the USA, when John was offered a lectureship in biochemistry back in Glasgow.

His time as a lecturer, later senior lecturer, was happy and productive, researching the influence of steroid hormones and other substances on gene expression, investigating molecules important in diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, and studying the mobilisation of starch in potatoes: a very wide range of topics. During this time, John enjoyed research abroad spells in Australia and the USA. He was an enthusiastic teacher of undergraduates, particularly in laboratories, and of postgraduates; he supervised 20 postgraduates, published many research papers and contributed to two editions of The Biochemistry of Nucleic Acids (a key text whose first edition was written by Glasgow’s J.N.Davidson in 1950, three years before Watson and Crick’s momentous discovery of DNA’s structure). Postgraduates remember John’s laboratory as a happy place: productive with rigorous attention to detail, but also a lot of fun.

In 1990, John was appointed Professor of Biosciences and Head of the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University, with a remit to improve research rankings and expand both research funding and staff and student numbers.

These were all achieved, with the 1992 UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise grade of 1 (poor) increased to a very creditable 4 in 2001; staff increased from 22 to 43 and students from 211 to 760. However, all this was achieved at a cost to John’s personal research output, which slowed to a trickle. Academic management can be a bruising business, and John decided to take early retirement in 2001 at age 59.

John had always kept up his early wildlife interests, with family holidays often to places where he could increase his world list of birds personally seen in the wild (eventually over 6000 species). The most hair-raising was a near fatal shipwreck on a coral reef off Irian Jaya in New Guinea: worth it, however, for later sightings of Birds of Paradise.

Retirement allowed John to make this private passion into a new occupation, albeit unpaid. He was appointed Honorary Professor of Ecology back at the University of Glasgow and devoted his time and energies to a range of projects and organisations, especially the Scottish Ornithologists Club (SOC), Butterfly Conservation and Glasgow Natural History Society, for which he served a term as President. All this led to a new and distinctive list of publications mainly on the birds and insects of Scotland. Among these was a chapter on the short-eared owl in the SOC’s massive Scottish Birds (2007), and a meticulous checklist of the several hundred macro-moth species of north central Scotland, for which area John acted as official recorder from 2004.

The attention to detail required for this work was a hallmark of John’s approach to natural history. One prominent Scottish ornithologist rated John as ‘the best all-round naturalist that I know’. In his last years, he worked to catalogue and revise the moths in the extensive collections both of Glasgow Museums and the University’s Hunterian Museum.

In addition to his interests in science, especially natural history, John was a skilled photographer and amateur painter. He was also devoted to his family, Penny and their two daughters, Clare and Sheila and his grandchildren, who survive him.

In 2012, John was diagnosed to be suffering from oesophageal cancer; an agonising year of chemotherapy and surgery followed, but he emerged, remarkably well, to carry on with his natural history work. Sadly, he was struck with pancreatic cancer in 2017. He was glad to be able to survive to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary, his 75th birthday, and the award of Penny’s PhD for research into a neurological disease of dogs, supervised by their daughter Clare.

Roger Downie