Dame Anne McLaren and Donald Michie - Scientists were couple of the future
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Renowned British scientists Anne McLaren and her ex-husband Donald Michie died together July 7, 2007 in a solo car crash on England’s M11 while they were traveling from Cambridge to London. Their car left the road and hit a tree.
Anne McLaren and Donald Michie met and married in 1952 while students at Oxford. Anne was Donald’s second wife (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1949.) He and McLaren divorced in 1959 but resumed their relationship and shared a house after the death of Michie’s third wife from cancer in 2002.
Given each of their pioneering, independent impacts on some of the most notable technologies of our times, they could easily be seen as a couple of the future from a scientific point of view. Personally it was the same, even though they divorced early on, they ended up back together again late in life. And of course, as said above, they were together at the time of their deaths. They are a love story of modern times.
Dame Anne McLaren, developmental biologist and embryo expert.
In 1958, as part of an effort to distinguish between the effects of genes on an embryo’s development and any effects that the host uterus may introduce, Anne McLaren and John D. Biggers, removed mouse embryos and held them in culture for a period of time before implanting them in the uterus of another mouse. The outcome was an offspring that had a different number of vertebrae than the genetic mother, indicating an unknown influence in the host uterus and a great advance in our understanding of reproduction.
Her husband Michie worked together with her in these formative years developing techniques for transplanting embryos to in-vitro fertilization. Between the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby born in 1978 in England, and today, more than 115,000 in vitro births have occurred in the United States alone.
Another area of investigation for Anne McLaren was chimeras in mice. According to Wikipedia, a chimera is “an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes. ” McClaren’s book, Mammalian Chimaeras (1976), is an important work in the field. A later book, Germ Cells and Soma: A New Look at an Old Problem (1980), was also held in esteem.
Increasingly she was asked to comment on the ethical questions surrounding biological research. Anne McLaren favored using both adult stem-cell lines and human embryos, as one may yield results that the other may not. In 2001 she wrote in the journal Nature: “Let a thousand stem cell lines bloom — but let them bloom in full view of all…so that they can be subject to scientific and ethical review, freely available for research and one day, perhaps, for treating diseases.” I’m guessing that Anne McLaren may also have been a gardener.
Donald Michie, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Expert.
During WWII, Michie attended the School of Codes and Ciphers in Bedford, England where he was trained in cryptography. Soon he was transfered to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where he was assigned to the “Testery”, a group working on solving the German high-level teleprinter cipher, code-named Fish.
There Michie met and befriended Alan Turing, a coworker at the Testery who eventually went on to be regarded as the father of modern computer science. The two spent hours discussing the possibility that computers could be programmed to display intelligence. It was these discussions that formed the basis of his groundbreaking work in Artificial Intelligence.
Michie’s greatest achievement at the “Testery” came in April 1944 when he invented a technique that used the Colossus computer (an early computer developed there during the war) to automatically decode the secondary wheel of the Lorentz machine, the machine the Germans used for encoding Fish. His invention gave the Allied Forces a substantial advantage by radically reducing the time needed to decode German messages.
After the war Michie attained a DPhil in mammalian genetics from Oxford, where he and Anne McLaren met and fell in love. They worked together in the 1950’s pioneering techniques related to in-vitro fertilization at London University and at University of Edinburgh.
Michie’s attention returned to the field of Artificial Intelligence in the early 1960s, after his divorce from Anne McLaren in 1959.
To determine whether computers could be programmed to learn from experience, Donald Michie developed a game playing machine called Menace, for which he developed a general-purpose learning algorithm called Boxes. Because no computers were available to him in the early 196o’s, he hand-simulated the Boxes algorithm, using a device made from an assembly of matchboxes. Menace stood for Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine and it well demonstrated the capability of machines to learn and apply feedback to achieve continued learning.
By 1963 Michie had formed an artificial-intelligence research group in Edinburgh. With the support of the Edinburgh vice-chancellor, Sir Edward Appleton, Michie established the Experimental Programming Unit in 1965. In 1967 he was appointed to a personal chair of machine intelligence and became the first director of the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception. The pace continued until 1973 when circumstances conspired to quell the activity in AI research in Edinburgh and elsewhere.
His most visible achievement of the period was Freddy II, the world’s first laboratory robot that used computer vision feedback to assemble complex products from a pile of parts. Industry was not quick to catch on though and this work did not find the audience it deserved until the 1980s. Eventually manufacturing firms, like auto manufacturers in Japan, began to embrace the technologies he developed and he spent many years helping industry apply concepts regarding robotics, learning and artificial intelligence.
Having been made the head of the Turing Trust in Cambridge, Donald Michie founded the Turing Institute in Glasgow in 1986, in honor of Turing’s key contributions to the field of computer science. He continued to work after his retirement in the early 1990s.
For more information:
Read Donald Michie’s CV
View Donald Michie’s website
Read Anne McLaren’s profile at the Royal Society website
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