William Ogilvy Kermack

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William Ogilvy Kermack (born April 26, 1898 in Kirriemuir , † July 20, 1970 in Aberdeen ) was a British biochemist , epidemiologist , mathematician and stochastic .

Life

Kermack was the son of post office clerk William Kermack and Helen Ogilvy and went to school in Kirriemuir, a small town at the foot of the Grampian Mountains . His mother died in 1904 and he was raised by his paternal aunt. From 1914 he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Aberdeen , interrupted his service with the Royal Air Force in 1917/18 during the First World War. After graduating in 1918 (MA and B.Sc. with top grades - at the university he won several prizes) he went to the Dyson Perrins Laboratory at Oxford University , where he researched the alkaloid harmaline with William Perkins junior . From 1919 to 1921 he was also in the research laboratory of the British Dyestuffs Corporation in Oxford. From 1921 he was at the laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Edinburgh , where he worked as a chemist. In 1925 he received a PhD (D.Sc.) from the University of St. Andrews. In 1924 he became blind after a laboratory accident (explosion that brought caustic solution into the eyes). From 1949 to 1968 he was Professor of Biochemistry at Aberdeen University .

With Anderson Gray McKendrick, he was a pioneer in the development of mathematical models in epidemiology ( SIR model , also Kermack-McKendrick model).

In 1937 he received an honorary doctorate (LLD) from the University of St. Andrews . In 1925 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , served on its council from 1946 to 1949 and won the Mackdougall Brisbane Prize in 1928. In 1944 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .

In addition to works on biochemistry, anti-malarial agents ( mepacrine development in Great Britain during World War II), epidemiology and demography, he also published mathematical works (with Edmund Taylor Whittaker, among others ) and relativistic cosmology (1933 with William McCrea ). He also worked with Robert Robinson in 1922 on electron theory of chemical bonds ( electron displacement ).

In 1938 he published a popular science book on biochemistry with Philip Eggleton.

Fonts

  • with Philip Eggleton: The Stuff We're Made Of , London: Arnold 1938

literature

  • WH McCrea, JN Davidson: William Ogilvy Kermack. 1898-1970. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society , Volume 17, 1971, pp. 399-429. doi
  • GD Smith, D. Kuh: Commentary: William Ogilvy Kermack and the childhood origins of adult health and disease. In: Int. J. Epidemiology , Vol. 30, 2001, pp. 696-703
  • TH Pennington: Kermack, William Ogilvy (1898-1970). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . doi

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ McKendrick, Kermack: A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics I. In: Proc.Roy.Soc. A , Volume 115, 1927, pp. 700-721, Part 2, Volume 138, 1932, pp. 55-83, Part 3, Volume 141, 1933, SS 94-122, this work was published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology , Vol 53, 1991, pp. 33-55, 57-87, 89-118
  2. ↑ Kermack, McCrea, On Milne's theory of world structure, Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc., Vol. 93, 1933, pp. 519-529
personal data
SURNAME Kermack, William Ogilvy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British epidemiologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirriemuir
DATE OF DEATH 20th July 1970
Place of death Aberdeen