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Dr Henry Foy was born in July 1900, and went to Oxford in 1918 to study physiology under Julian Huxley. After graduation he taught biology at Gresham's School, Holt and Malvern College. In 1925 he took up a teaching post at Imperial College, Trinidad, where he became involved in a leper colony in Manaus on the Upper Amazon and developed a keen interest in tropical diseases. In 1932 he was appointed to run the League of Nations Malaria Research Laboratory in Salonika, where Dr Athena Kondi was his laboratory assistant. She had gained her MB from Athens University in 1930, and her MD in 1933.
The League of Nations Research Laboratory was funded initially by the Rockefeller Foundation, and when funding ended in 1937, Foy gained Wellcome Trust funds via Sir Henry Dale. The laboratory was extended, with beds provided for clinical research on patients, under the care of Kondi. Foy and Kondi were to work together for the rest of their lives, so closely that they were known as 'Foyandkondi' by the local people in Nairobi. When Greece was invaded in 1941, they left to work first at the South Africa Institute for Medical Research in Johannesburg and then, after a brief return to Greece, their laboratory was established in Nairobi in 1948. Foy believed Nairobi provided excellent opportunities for the study of malaria and sickle cell anaemia - a condition they had begun to study in Greece at the end of the war. Despite being based in Nairobi, Foy and Kondi made lengthy visits to Assam, the Seychelles and Mauritius to carry out survey projects, and it was after observing the connection between hookworm infection and anaemia in the Seychelles that Foy decided to establish a colony of baboons at Nairobi to undertake more sytematic study of the phenomenon. In 1961 accomodation was built for 150 baboons and a breeding nucleus. The colony was subsequently employed in several research projects, chiefly into the various effects of B vitamin deficiencies, and research continued after the official retirement of Foy in 1970.
In addition to laboratory-based research with the baboons, Foy and Kondi also took part in large scale projects, including investigations of anaemias in children with kwashiorkor and marasmus, survey of the incidence of tropical sprue in East Africa and surveys of anaemias in India, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The achievements of Foy's laboratories in Salonika and Nairobi were praised by Sir Henry Dale, and the idea of a small expert team working on well defined projects using locally gathered data and with secure financial support was used as a model for planning research facilities in other tropical countries.