Faced with an increasingly violent animal rights movement, most scientists who worked with laboratory animals in the 1980s and 90s kept their heads down. Not Colin Blakemore. Despite threats to himself and his family, including a parcel bomb opened by his children (which failed to detonate), he continued to defend the use of animals in his research on the brain.
Blakemore, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 78, was a persuasive communicator. He wrote and spoke about science with warmth and easy elegance and these qualities, evident early in his career, made him much in demand in print and broadcast media. In 1976, aged 32, he became the youngest person to give the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures. Entitled Mechanics of the Mind, the six lectures linked neuroscience to society through topics including sleep, language, consciousness and mental illness. Blakemore subsequently presented a 13-part series, The Mind Machine, on BBC Two in 1988, and published a number of popular books. He received several awards for science communication, including the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize.
