Sir Percival Hartley

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

MC FRS (28 May 1881 – 16 February 1957) was an English immunologist who was head of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biological Standards Division for 44 years.

Early life

Harvey was born at

Calverley Calverley is a village in the City of Leeds metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England, on the A657 road, about from Leeds city centre and from Bradford. The population of Calverley in 2011 was 4,328. It is part of the City of Leeds wa ...

Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...

, England, the son of William Thompson Hartley, a

coal merchant Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when dea ...

.''1901 England Census'' He attended

Bradford Technical College The University of Bradford is a public research university located in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. A plate glass university, it received its royal charter in 1966, making it the 40th university to be created in Britain, but ...

and then the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

where he qualified BSc in 1905. He then won a scholarship to the

Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine The Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, informally known as the Lister Institute, was established as a research institute (the British Institute of Preventive Medicine) in 1891, with bacteriologist Marc Armand Ruffer as its first director, u ...

in London from 1906 to 1908. He gained a

Doctor of Science Doctor of Science ( la, links=no, Scientiae Doctor), usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D., or D.S., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, "Doctor of Science" is the degree used f ...

degree from the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

in 1909.'HARTLEY, Sir Percival', ''Who Was Who'', (Subscription based) A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012 ; online edn, Nov 2012, accessed 21 April 2013

Career

Hartley worked in India for four years then returned to the Lister Institute in 1913 but joined up with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and served as a captain from 1915 to 1919 during the First World War. He won the

Military Cross The Military Cross (MC) is the third-level (second-level pre-1993) military decoration awarded to officers and (since 1993) other ranks of the British Armed Forces, and formerly awarded to officers of other Commonwealth countries. The MC ...

in 1917. Hartley then worked for three years at the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories and in 1922 joined the

National Institute for Medical Research The National Institute for Medical Research (commonly abbreviated to NIMR), was a medical research institute based in Mill Hill, on the outskirts of north London, England. It was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC); In 2016, the NIMR b ...

where he became director of biological samples. He stayed till 1946 when he joined the

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public research university in Bloomsbury, central London, and a member institution of the University of London that specialises in public health and tropical medicine. The inst ...

. He worked at the

Sir William Dunn School of Pathology The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology is a department within the University of Oxford. Its research programme includes the cellular and molecular biology of pathogens, the immune response, cancer and cardiovascular disease. It teaches undergra ...

from 1949 to 1953 and at the Lister Institute again from 1949 to 1953. In the 1940s he worked with

Ralph Kekwick Professor Ralph Ambrose Kekwick (11 November 1908 Leytonstone Essex – 17 January 2000 Woodford). was a British biochemist who did pioneering work on human plasma fractionation, including the first production of Factor VIII. Early life and e ...

Awards and honours

He was awarded the

in 1922 and elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in 1937. He was knighted in 1944 for work on penicillin.

Personal life

He married Olga Parnell (d.1950) in 1920 and they had two daughters. He died in London.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hartley, Percival Fellows of the Royal Society Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Recipients of the Military Cross Knights Bachelor Alumni of the University of Leeds 1881 births 1957 deaths People from Calverley British immunologists