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Haematologist and inventor of liposomes. Born in Manchester, UK, on Nov 10, 1921, he died in Great Shelford, UK, on March 9, 2010.
It was in the 1950s that Alec Bangham developed an interest in cell membranes, but another decade before he made his key discovery that phospholipid molecules dispersed in water could organise themselves into double layers resembling these membranes. At the Institute of Animal Physiology in Babraham near Cambridge where he worked, the electron microscope revealed that the dispersions took the form of cell-sized closed vesicles. Here, Bangham suspected, was a model for studying membranes-and also perhaps a vehicle for delivering drugs and other materials to the cell. Both possibilities were to be realised.
With colleagues Jeff Watkins and Malcolm Standish he wrote the 1965 paper that effectively launched the liposome "industry". Around this time he was joined at Babraham by Gerald Weissmann, an American physician with an interest in lysosomes. Now an emeritus professor at New York University School of Medicine, Weissmann recalls the two of them sitting in a Cambridge pub and reflecting on the role of lipid...