Read , John , 1908-1993 , radiobiologist

John Read was born in Hendon, Middlesex on 31 March 1908. He left school at 16 to work as a clerk in the Derbyshire County Council Education Department. Studying in the evenings, he took the University of London external B.Sc. in Physics and Applied Mathematics in 1929 and then won a scholarship to Nottingham University College where he took a B.Sc. in Special Physics in 1931. Read then won a teaching fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and worked for his Ph.D. on the attenuation coefficients of scattered radiation from a range of elements. He returned to the UK in 1934, joining the Radium Beam Research Unit as Assistant Physicist working with L.H. Gray at Mount Vernon Hospital in London. Gray and Read were awarded a grant from the British Empire Cancer Campaign to build a neutron generator for study of the biological action of neutrons. In the words of John Haggith's obituary of Read in Scope vol 3 (1994), 'The next five years were remarkable. It took them two years of toil and brilliant improvisation to build the neutron generator and then just three years to put neutron and alpha dosimetry on a sound footing and obtain the RBEs [Relative Biological Effectiveness] for neutrons, alpha particles, X- and gamma-rays'.

In 1939 Read moved to the British Institute of Radiology. In 1941 he was seconded to British Thomson-Houston Co. in Rugby for war work, after which in 1943 he took up the post of Hospital Physicist at the London Hospital. In the same year he played a leading role in the establishment of the Hospital Physicists Association. In 1946 he was made Head of the British Empire Cancer Campaign's Biophysics Research Group at the Mount Vernon Hospital and the Radium Institute, from 1948 serving as Combined Head of the Research Group and Physics Department. In 1950 the British Empire Cancer Campaign established a laboratory for research into radiation biology in Christchurch, New Zealand (moving to Dunedin in 1952). Read was appointed Director of the Radiation Biology Group. He remained in New Zealand for the rest of his life, making occasional return visits to Britain. As head of the Radiation Biology Group, with limited resources, Read pursued research into how ionising radiations destroy tumours and how this action could be influenced by other factors. He retired in 1974. Read was awarded the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Anderson-Berry Gold Medal in 1953 and gave the Douglas Lea Memorial Lecture in 1957. He died in Dunedin on 10 October 1993.