Frances Rotblat, role model

2 7 J u l y 1 9 4 6 t o 2 2 A p r i l 2 0 2 1

Jane Liddell-King As we prepared this magazine, we noticed a theme was emerging, “to love one’s neighbour”. The work of Frances Rotblat, an alumna of my school, transformed the lives, not only of her immediate neighbours but of millions of people throughout the world. Founded in the nineteenth century to enable girls to enter university and the professions, the education provided by GPDST (Girls' Public Day School Trust, now Girls' Day School Trust) schools was as close as possible to that enjoyed by boys. Nothing in the curriculum was gender specific but each school had to take account of its cultural environment. Today, 30% of the girls educated at South Hampstead High School are Jewish, and diversely so.

The question put to each of us remains: how to repay the community for the remarkable education which we enjoyed. No one achieved this more fully than Frances Rotblat.

For most of us, a cut or graze is not a problem. Our blood clots and new skin grows. But those suffering from haemophilia have a low level of protein Factor 8 and their blood flows unchecked. A small cut or a graze puts them at great risk. Frances played a key role in saving the lives of these people.

Those of us born just after the Second World War remember a London full of holes: bomb sites, hanging staircases, windows swinging high above our heads from broken latches exposing the intimate details of peoples’ lost lives, shreds of wallpaper and curtains. Rationing was our normal. It took a year to save enough coupons to buy a winter coat.

As Polish Jews, Frances’ parents, Mania and Michael, had been imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto where some 400,000 people lost their lives. With extraordinary courage, they escaped. Who can imagine

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what they then endured during two and a half years spent hiding in a house in Poland knowing that their immediate neighbour was a Nazi?

Having survived this ordeal, after the War the couple followed Michael’s brother Joseph to London. Joseph Rotblat described himself as a “Pole with a British passport”. A great physicist, in 1995 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize “for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs, and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms”. Conscience had persuaded him to resign from work on the Manhattan Project which was engaged in the production of nuclear weapons. Bravely, he rejected aggression.

Frances’ father, Michael, worked as a sewing machine engineer. I can picture Frances busy dissecting a frog or cow’s eye at the bench which ran alongside the room which also served as the school dining room. She was always smiling and kind and ready to talk. After leaving school, Frances went to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to study Medicine. She qualified in physiology and surgery as well as medicine itself. She went on to gain fellowships in pathology, haematology, and pharmaceutical medicine.

In 1979, Frances joined haematologist Edward Tuddenham in his work to find a treatment, less painful than the one on offer, for haemophilia. Based at the Royal Free Hospital, they collaborated with David Heath, founder of Speywood, the only blood products laboratory in the country. They worked with enough nerve gas to eliminate the population of Hampstead, so for safety’s sake they had to work in 24 hour stretches. It fell to Frances to bring in the takeaways. She and Edward invented a key process, and eventually they were able to send the purest sample of Factor 8 ever acquired to the American biotechnology company Genetech, which aimed to gene sequence and clone it in 18 months.

How did Frances’ colleagues react? Victor Hoffbrand, head of Haematology at the Royal Free said to her: “Frances, if this succeeds,

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you are going to be rich and famous”. But, no matter how skilled, how brilliant, and how dedicated, she knew how things stood for her as a woman in the early 1980s. How little was expected of her and how comparatively small would be her rewards. Pragmatically, she replied: “No, David Heath will be rich. Ted will be famous, and I’ll be out of work.”

Genetech completed its work in 1984. David Heath became rich. Ted became famous. And Frances?

Her laboratory lost its funding and no just recognition came her way. It’s true that the Department of Health immediately employed her as senior assessor of biological products at their Medicines’ Control Agency where she led the review of new blood products and vaccines. It’s true that she took a particular interest in new treatments for HIV and the regulatory challenges of new treatments for cancer. And it’s true that when mad cow disease was at its height, it was she who had the difficult task of reporting on the safety of those many vaccines which use beef products. I wish she were alive to confront those responsible for the import of contaminated Factor 8 into this country.

Not only was Frances intellectually brilliant but throughout her professional life, she was unfailingly generous in mentoring young colleagues. She was not tolerant of those who expressed opinions without evidence. I think this is something which binds our generation of school alumnae.

Frances made lifelong friends. She clearly inherited her parents’ courage. She made the most of her evident talents and opportunities. She expected everything of herself. Which of us can claim as much?

And if not, who are we? And what are we doing today to ensure equal rights in education for a globally safe tomorrow?

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