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Francis John Worsley Roughton

1899-1972. Professor of Colloid Science.

F.J.W. Roughton was born in Kettering; his father was the fifth consecutive Roughton to practise medicine there.  As a young man he suffered from attacks of paroxysmal tachycardia, and was therefore unfit to serve in World War I; instead, on leaving Winchester, he came up to Cambridge as a scholar in 1917, and was awarded a research fellowship.  His plan to pursue a practical career in medicine was thwarted since it appeared that his physical stamina would not be adequate to support the stresses involved, so instead he developed a career in research in physiology.  In his first published paper, on respiration and circulation during  paroxysmal tachycardiac attacks, he served as both (joint) author and subject.  In 1940 he joined the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, where his war-related research focused on the effects of carbon monoxide upon respiration.

At Cambridge, where he spent his whole adult life, he was Lecturer in Biochemistry 1923-27, Lecturer in Physiology 1927-47, and finally Professor of Colloid Science, holding the chair for twenty years. His experimental work was mainly concerned with the haemoglobin-oxygen equilibrium. During the last few years of his tenure he tried to direct the work of his department towards the study of membranes and biological surface effects, which he saw as a key area in biology; but on his retirement the doubts about the existence of Colloid Science as a definable subject were so strongly and widely shared that the title of the department was extinguished in favour of Biophysics. He was a visitor to the British Gelatine and Glue Research Association, and spent considerable amounts of time in California (working on basic problems of respiratory physiology) and Milan (where he worked on carbon dioxide-haemoglobin interaction).