Henry Harris

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Sir Henry Harris (detail of portrait by Michael Noakes)

Professor Sir Henry Harris, FRS, (28 January 1925 -- ) is an Australian-born professor of medicine at Oxford University, now retired, who led pioneering work on cancer and human genetics in the 1960s.

Biography

Early life

Harris was born in Australia into a family of Russian immigrants. Educated in Sydney he first read modern languages in 1941, but was subsequently attracted to medicine through his literary interests. He studied medicine at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and began a career in medical research rather than clinical practice.

Medical research in Oxford

In the early 1950s, Harris moved to England to study at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford under Howard Florey. He completed his DPhil in 1954 and settled down to a career of academic research. In 1960 he was appointed as head of the new department of cell biology at the John Innes Institute, and in 1964 he succeeded Florey as Head of the Dunn School, and in 1979 he was appointed as Oxford's Regius Professor of Medicine succeeding Sir Richard Doll.

Harris's research interests were primarily focused on cancer cells and of their differences from normal cells, and later on the possibilities of genetic modification of human cell lines with material of other species in order to increase the range of genetic markers. Harris and his colleagues developed some of the basic techniques for investigating and measuring genes along the human chromosome.

In 1969 Harris showed that when malignant cancer cells were fused with normal fibroblasts, the resulting hybrids were not malignant, thus demonstrating the existence of genes that had the ability to suppress malignancy. Work on these tumour suppressor genes has become a world-wide industry.

Much of Harris's work has been supported by the Cancer Research UK (formerly the Cancer Research Campaign).

Works

Published works

• (The Romanes Lecture for 1993).

Letters

References

External links

• [Henry Harris in the Oxford Brookes Medical Video Archive]

• [History of the William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford]

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