DAME HONOR

Albert I. Farbman

Chicago Literary Club

October 20, 2008
INTRODUCTION

In 1968, I had the good fortune to receive a federal grant for five years that paid my salary at my home institution, Northwestern University, and enabled me to spend up to a year at another research facility to learn new methods. At the time I wanted to learn the method of tissue culture, i.e., how to grow tissues in a dish, in isolation from the rest of the body. Many laboratories all over the world used this method and I thought it would be particularly useful in my own research.

I decided that the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge, England, would be a good place to learn for several reasons: 1) over the years this laboratory was the first to develop many of the culture methods, 2) the scientists at Strangeways had excellent reputations and, 3) quite frankly, as an unapologetic Anglophile, I wanted the life experience of living in England for a year. So I wrote to the lab director, Dame Honor Fell, to request a one year visit to the lab and after a few cordial exchanges of correspondence she responded favorably.

STRANGEWAYS

A brief history of this laboratory. During World War I it had been converted from a private home into a hospital for soldiers injured in the war. It was still known locally as the Red Cross Hospital, despite the fact that the war had ended 50 years earlier, and the building had been rechristened The Strangeways Research Laboratories and was known by that name all over the world. But to the Cantabridgians the old name was so ingrained and the new one never used, so that if you asked a local for directions to the Strangeways Labs you would get a blank look, but if you asked for the Red Cross Hospital … It was located at the end of a bus line which went from the Cambridge city center to the Red Cross Hospital.

After World War I the director of the hospital, Dr. Thomas Strangeways, a prominent Cambridge physician, became interested in research on bone and joint diseases and experimented with growing fragments of chick embryo tissue in culture. Honor Fell’s mentor at Edinburgh University, Frank Crew, sent her to Cambridge to learn the method. She rapidly mastered the technical aspects, and impressed Dr. Strangeways with her quick intellect. Before she officially received her doctoral degree in Edinburgh she returned to Cambridge to take up a position as Dr. Strangeways’ assistant. Miss Fell won an appointment as Senior Beit Scholar, which paid her own salary and made it possible for the Medical Research Council to accommodate the budget for the laboratory. She worked as Dr. Strangeways’ assistant for only a couple of years until his untimely death in 1926, when Honor Fell was only 26 years old.

Dr. Strangeways’ death provoked the Medical Research Council (MRC) to consider the feasibility, both scientific and economic, of continuing to support the lab. Dr. Strangeways had required no salary as he had independent means. Honor Fell’s Beit fellowship took care of her stipend so that she required no salary. To survive the laboratory needed funds for a technical/clerical assistant, research equipment and supplies and building maintenance. A member of the MRC, Dr. F. G. Spear, was convinced that the research in the laboratory was very worthwhile and championed continuity of support. The Council offered the job of laboratory director on a temporary basis to a Dr. Andrews, a retired Scottish physician, then, in 1929, to Miss Fell. Further support came from several sources, including the Rockefeller Foundation.

The appointment of Honor Fell as director was extraordinary on two counts: one, her youth – she was only 29 years old; second, at the time in Great Britain few women professionals in science could be found, and to entrust administration of a laboratory, albeit a small one, to an untested woman was indeed extraordinary. The likelihood that this would have happened in the U.S. in the 1920’s was equally rare.

The laboratory was housed in a red brick building about the size of a four bedroom house in our suburbs. When I arrived, in August, 1968, the lab had undergone two significant expansions. The first, in 1929 when Miss Fell became director, was designed so that it could be easily converted into a garage if ever the building had to be sold as a private residence. In 1938 the Rockefeller Foundation provided a new wing. Honor Fell’s talents as an administrator and as a scientist were responsible for the huge success of the laboratory. One member of the scientific staff attributed this success to her persona, “…like an iron fist in a velvet glove”.

In addition to the resident scientific staff several foreign visitors, all working scientists, studied there for variable periods of time. Four or five other Americans worked there during the year I visited. I don’t remember what kinds of financial arrangements they had; in my own case the NIH award paid my salary and I received a small grant from a private agency, about $2,500 as I recall, to defray the cost of research supplies (remember, this was 1968!). Over the years the resident scientific staff managed to support their needs from external funds including substantial support from the Medical Research Council. In the annual reports for 1968 and 1969 about 60 scientists (including visitors and graduate and post-doctoral students), and 30 technicians are listed. To this day the laboratory enjoys good relations with Cambridge University but remains financially autonomous as a stand-alone research laboratory. Its major emphasis is now on research on cancer and genetics.

My lab and desk space was in a moderate-sized room in the newest wing. There were two desks, both facing floor to ceiling windows overlooking the garden. I shared this lab with Dr. Kern Wildenthal, a young physician who was an instructor in the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Later he became Dean of that Medical School. Kern spent 3 years at Strangeways and received a PhD from Cambridge University.

STAFF

The technical and clerical staff members of this laboratory were an unusual and interesting bunch. On my first day the office secretary delivered me to the resident caretakers who gave me a guided tour of the building. Mr. and Mrs. Stebbins lived in a small apartment in the building with their nine year old son. Mr. Stebbins, a tall, taciturn, mild-mannered man took care of the animals in the vivarium, looked after the lovely garden and served as maintenance man for the buildings. Mrs. Stebbins, a stout, jovial, outgoing woman, was responsible for preparing the tea twice a day and providing some hot water for instant coffee for those, mostly the Americans, who preferred that drink. She gave me an overview of how things worked. Most people arrived about 9:30 AM, there was tea at 11:00 AM and at 4:00 PM. I was ushered into the room that served as a conference room, tea room, and library. There was a long table and about 15 or 20 chairs around it and a second concentric ring of chairs against the wall. I was shown which chair was Dame Honor’s, which chair was usually occupied by Dr. Glucksmann, the Associate Director, and which by the invited guest, if there happened to be one. The guest sat at the head of the table, with Dame Honor on his right and Dr. Glucksmann on his left. As time went on I observed that when Dame Honor was traveling, nobody sat in her chair, as if it were sacred. But, as will happen, one day, when Dame Honor was away, an American visitor came in for tea and, avoiding the empty space at the head of the table, plunked himself down in Dame Honor’s chair. You could almost hear a collective intake of breath as people reacted to this blasphemy. The visitor was sensitive to this reaction and asked if something was wrong. “No, no, everything is alright” was the polite, if strained, response. If a visitor sat in Dr. Glucksmann’s chair there was little reaction.

People lunched from 12:30 PM until 2:00. The resident staff went home for lunch whereas most of the visitors either brought a brown bag or went down the hill to one of the university buildings that had a cafeteria. Most people went home for the day around 6:15 or 6:30 PM. I learned that Dame Honor usually stayed until around 9:00-10:00 PM.

Mrs. Stebbins cheerfully showed me around the building and made sure I understood the rules. At the end of the tour she showed me the door to her apartment and told me that if I needed anything, “…just knock me up”. I hope my jaw did not drop as obviously as I thought it did.

Victor Norfield, an elderly, usually dour gent in his 70’s, had worked as a lab assistant for Dr. Strangeways when he was a lad, fifty five years earlier, before Miss Fell was hired. In 1968, during my visit, Mr. Norfield was the administrative secretary for the laboratory. He was also purchasing agent and his domain included supplies of expendables – paper, pencils, glass slides, tissue culture plasticware, chemicals – things that almost everybody used. Mr. Norfield had worked in the lab during the early, lean years, all through the depression and World War II when little money was available for research supplies. Mr. Norfield had to be very frugal. One experience will serve to illustrate just how frugal. Near the end of my term I packed a couple of cardboard boxes to take home notebooks and slides and some instruments. I went to Mr. Norfield for some twine to tie the boxes. He pulled out a small box filled with heterogeneous bits of string anywhere from 12 to perhaps 30 inches long, all harvested from previously opened packages. When I noted that none of these fragments was long enough for my needs Mr. Norfield suggested I piece them together. I believe I gave no verbal answer to that suggestion, just looked at him with incredulity and turned and left. I bought a ball of twine at a local market, took as much as I needed and brought the remaining ball of twine to Victor and presented it to him as my parting gift to his supply cabinet.

In fairness however economic conditions in England, at least what I saw in and around Cambridge and in London, suggested the Brits were still feeling the effects of World War II, more than twenty years later. There was a drab look to Cambridge, as there was in London. Salaries of academic scientists were about a third of what they were in the U.S. Victor’s thriftiness was based on the continued need to make the support for the lab go as far as possible. The lab ran on a shoestring ever since he started working there, so he was not just trying to give me a hard time.

HONOR FELL

Honor Bridget Fell was born on May 22, 1900 at Fowthorpe near Filey in Yorkshire, England. She was the ninth and last child of Colonel William Edward Fell and Alice Picksgill- Cunliffe. William Fell was a minor landowner, but his efforts to cultivate the land met with little success. He did have a major interest in horses; in fact, during the Boer wars he spent much of his time in the United States purchasing horses for the British army in South Africa. Honor’s mother raised eight children, often single-handedly and with limited finances. (One of the boys died as a child). A practical, independent and creative woman, she used her skills as an architect and carpenter in overseeing the construction of the family home in Yorkshire.

Honor attended Wychwood School, Oxford, a school distinguished by its emphasis on teaching science, especially biology. School records indicated that she kept ferrets in the school gardens. A family journal described an incident where, at 13, Honor brought her favorite ferret, Janie, to her sister’s wedding. These early antics demonstrated her love of nature and an adventurous spirit which permeated all aspects of her life.

At age 16 Honor went to Madras College, St. Andrews, and at 18 to Edinburgh University to read Zoology. She was awarded a B.Sc. at 23, a Ph.D. at 24, and a D.Sc. in 1932. While at Edinburgh Fell’s mentor, Dr. Frank Crew, sent her to Cambridge where Dr. T.S.P. Strangeways was developing the new art of tissue culture. This fortuitous visit marked the beginning of Fell’s long and distinguished career in Cambridge.

While the letters between my office and Cambridge were flying back and forth across the Atlantic I met one of the prominent staff scientists from Strangeways. When I heard that this woman was passing through Chicago I contacted her and invited her to give a talk and visit my laboratory at Northwestern University. In fact she stayed at my home for a couple of days and we had a pretty good opportunity to become acquainted. Unfortunately my impression of her as a scientist was that her best years were behind her. The visit was quite discouraging because if she were representative of the quality of science in the laboratory my visit would not be fruitful. I suspected she may have been like the professor who had a few good years, was awarded tenure, and then had become unproductive. But we persevered.

In July, 1968 my wife and I packed up our three youngsters, 1, 3 and 5 years old, and boarded the passenger liner, Hanseatic, in New York to cross the Atlantic. The plan was to sail to Germany, take a train to Copenhagen, attend a scientific meeting in that wonderful city, pick up a Volvo station wagon which we had prearranged, and spend the next six weeks driving through Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, back by ferry to Denmark, down through Germany, Holland and Belgium, and from there take a ship across the North Sea to England. To help us with the children we added my wife’s 16 year-old cousin to the traveling party. After our hectic tour of northern Europe we arrived in Cambridge in early September, 1968.

Dame Honor had a kindly face with sparkling, honest eyes and a ready smile. She was an engaging person, not at all stuffy as I thought she might be. In my first interview with her, one morning after “elevenses” (11:00 tea – this seemed to be her favorite time of day to deal with people in the lab), she questioned me thoroughly about my scientific interests and what I hoped to accomplish during my visit. My aim was to develop a new culture method, one that had not been done before. She was intrigued and encouraging – I thought enthusiastic. (Long story short, I did not achieve a huge success but learned enough about tissue culture to apply the method fruitfully in other ways for the next thirty five years of my active career. To date, 40 years later in 2008, nobody has yet succeeded to do what I had attempted ).

I noticed she had some equipment in her office on one table – the kind of lab equipment one would find in a research laboratory rather than an office. Although she had a full time technician, Mr. King, who had worked with her for more than thirty years, there were certain technical procedures she preferred to do herself, first, because she thought she could do them better and, second, because she loved to work in the lab.

At our next meeting I learned she used no fancy, expensive surgical instruments, only two instruments for dissecting out the tiny bits of tissue to be cultured from chick embryos. One was a fine watchmaker’s forceps with very sharp points, the other a cataract knife. The typical cataract knife has a thin stainless steel handle about 4-5 inches long and a flat blade, about one inch long and1/8 inch wide, with a sharp side curving near the tip to a point. The first lesson was how to keep the cataract knife sharp. She took out her sharpening stone and her knife – the latter had a blade about a quarter of an inch long. She had been using this same knife for more than two years and it had been sharpened so many times the blade was only a fraction of the original length, but it was sharp!!! She proceeded to show me, in detail, how to guide the knife blade over the stone to achieve her end. She joked that she liked to do things the “oldie woldie” way. (A disrespectful thought entered my mind, “I traveled 6000 miles to have this old lady show me how to sharpen a knife?”) The sharpening exercise was done not only for my benefit but for each of the visitors to Strangeways. It was always one on one although it could have been done for two or three at a time. In her own way she made each of us feel special. Just as, later, she found time to take each of us to lunch at the college of her affiliation in Cambridge University, Girton College.

Dame Honor was solicitous about how her charges were getting along outside of the laboratory and concerned that their experience include non-laboratory enjoyment. She prevailed on one of the younger faculty members to introduce me to High Table at Fitzwilliam College. Twice a week students and faculty associated with the college had High Table, a formal dinner. I was told I had to wear an academic gown and it would have to be a “Master’s Gown”, not a “Doctoral Gown”. The only wearers of the Doctoral gown were those who received doctoral degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. The difference between the gowns were the three black velvet stripes on each sleeve of the Doctoral Gown.

In my borrowed gown I went with Dr. New, my host, to High Table. The evening began with a gathering in the common room for sherry, followed by a procession of faculty (and guests) into the dining hall while all the students stood. The Master of the college gave an invocation in Latin; he droned on for what seemed like an hour invoking I know not what. Dinner was served to students family style. They did not stay around for long after eating, (probably fearful of another Latin soliloquy), while the faculty enjoyed a more leisurely dinner served by waiters; ample time was left for conversation. After dinner the Master gave a brief closing statement or prayer in Latin, and we adjourned to the common room where we had port, brandy and cigars. We were seated in a semi-circle with the Master at the midpoint, and the rest, in order of seniority, emanating from the Master. The youngest faculty sat at the ends of the semi-circle and were assigned the task of pouring the brandy or port for all the others. Guests were seated with their hosts. The faculty addressed the Master not by name but simply as ‘Master’.

Dame Honor acted as a mother hen to me and my family as well as to the other visitors. Several times during the year she asked after my family. She was very solicitous when my wife became ill. She suggested weekend journeys within a short drive of Cambridge that would be of interest to us, and specifically to the children. I remember one outing to a village called Lavenham, once the center of a thriving wool industry. An informative museum told about the processing of wool from the sheep to the knitting machine. Of interest to the children was a small sheep farm where they could pet the animals. Lavenham was an old village and many of the houses that were more than one story high showed signs of leaning, i.e., the timbers were no longer plumb, and some were at angles suggesting they might tip over any minute, eliciting “why don’t they fall down?” from the children.

Dame Honor kept up with the progress of each of the visitors by sitting down with each of us on a particular day of the week. On the appointed day she could be heard clumping down the wooden corridor bridging the old and new parts of the laboratory to visit each of us, again individually, to see how we were getting along. During this almost weekly visit, near the end of the day, usually between 5:00 and 6:00 PM, she gave us each full attention as we discussed progress or lack of it. She usually had a, “…why don’t you try …” near the end of these sessions. One time I failed to try what she suggested, because I didn’t care for the idea. She had an uncanny memory and when later she drew out of me that I hadn’t followed her suggestion her face showed fleeting disappointment, but she did not pass judgment or hold a grudge. However a few weeks later she did come back with the same suggestion, and this time I did comply.

Dame Honor’s 62 years of research focused on the technique of organ culture which she used to uncover many aspects of differentiation of cartilage, bone and associated tissues. In fact she herself held that her major contribution to science was the development and application to biomedical research of the organ culture technique. The value of this technique, cited by Fell herself, was, in her own words, “…when some biologically active agent such as a hormone, vitamin or drug is found to have the same effect on a tissue in culture as it does on the same tissue in the body then the direct action of the agent on its target tissue can be analyzed in great detail under simplified, readily controlled conditions provided by a tissue culture.” On the other hand Fell also recognized the limitations of her method. Culture methods can “… tell us nothing about the physiology of the circulatory or excretory systems; nothing about the physiology of the brain or its sense organs; nothing about the complex interactions of the endocrine glands; nothing about the function of the lungs or the alimentary canal. In fact, when we consider the staggering complexity of the cell’s normal environment in the body, I think it is very surprising that they can be cultivated in vitro at all and that they survive the ruthless treatment at the hands of the cell culturist.”

A word about her title. In 1963, Queen Elizabeth II conferred upon Honor Bridget Fell the title, Dame of the British Empire, for her outstanding contributions to science and service to the country. Protocol dictated that thereafter she be addressed as Dame Honor. The title is the female equivalent of Knight of the British Empire, and the proper address of a K.B.E. would be Sir John, for example, if you were addressing John Gielgud. Although we Americans were respectful, even awed by this woman, I was a little amused to note that the laboratory staff who had worked at Strangeways before 1963 addressed her as Miss Fell, as, I assume, they always had before she became a Dame. Not even Dr. Fell, as would be appropriate. I strongly suspect that was her wish. So much for the stuffy formalism of the British.

During her long and distinguished career Dame Honor received recognition for her outstanding achievements in the form of honorary degrees from several universities and learned societies. Among these were honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Leiden, honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Research Professorship of the Royal Society, Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer, French Academy of Sciences, and others.

Another measure of the very high esteem the Brits had for her was her selection in the spring of 1969 to give the annual Linacre Lecture at Cambridge University. The lectureship was established in 1524 by Sir Thomas Linacre, physician to King Henry VIII. The Regius Professor of Physic (Medicine), a Professor Mitchell, introduced Dame Honor by noting that she was the first woman ever invited to deliver the Linacre Lecture at Cambridge University in the more than 400 years since the lectureship was established!!! Many of the luminaries of the Cambridge University faculty attended. They made an impressive sight as they marched into the lecture hall, in their academic splendor, as the rest of the audience stood. Among the faculty were Nobel laureates (Peretz, Klug, Huxley, perhaps others), Lord Adrian, the Chancellor of the University and others. Dame Honor’s shyness and embarrassment at being the center of attention was very apparent, but she soon collected herself. She spoke very precisely and carefully so that each member of the audience, even those who were not directly familiar with her research, could follow along. A remarkable performance by a remarkable woman!

Dame Honor retired as Director of the Strangeways Research Laboratories in 1970, at the age of 70, as was required by custom. The Head of the Pathology Department at Cambridge University arranged for her to have some laboratory space in his department; this generous gesture enabled her to continue her research. In 1971 I visited her in her new digs and found her exuberant with her new lab. Relieved of all administrative responsibilities she could focus on her research which she could carry out with minimal resources, as had been her wont for her entire career. Her replacement at Strangeways died after a couple of years and was replaced by John Dingle, a long-time colleague and protégé of Dame Honor. John offered Dame Honor laboratory space at Strangeways and she moved back and continued working there until her death in 1986.

Finally, I consider myself enormously lucky to have met and worked with this most remarkable woman. Her long and distinguished career in scientific research resulted in several ground-breaking papers. She played an important role in influencing and encouraging two generations of younger scientists. Starting with few resources she built an outstanding international center for scientific research. And she retained her humanity, her good humor and her love of her work.

HONOR BRIDGET FELL

(1900 – 1986)