Sir William MacGregor Henderson FRS FRSE MRCVS (17 July 1913 – 29 November 2000) was a Scottish

veterinary Veterinary medicine is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, management, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, disorder, and injury in animals. Along with this, it deals with animal rearing, husbandry, breeding, research on nutri ...

expert on

foot and mouth disease Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or hoof-and-mouth disease (HMD) is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids. The virus causes a high fever lasting two to six days, follow ...

. He was also President of the

Zoological Society of London The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. It was founded in 1826. Since 1828, it has maintained the London Zoo, and since 1931 Whipsnade Park. History On 29 ...

, 1984–1989. He was in charge of controlling foot and mouth disease in South America from 1957 to 1966. In his life he was generally called Gregor Henderson.

Life

Henderson was born in Edinburgh, the son of William Simpson Henderson and his wife, Catherine Alice Marcus Berry. His father was managing director of the company which printed bank-notes for the Royal Bank of Scotland. They lived at 123 Dalkeith Road in the south of the city. He was educated at

George Watson's College George Watson's College is a co-educational independent day school in Scotland, situated on Colinton Road, in the Merchiston area of Edinburgh. It was first established as a hospital school in 1741, became a day school in 1871, and was merg ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of t ...

. He studied at the

Royal (Dick) Veterinary College The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, commonly referred to as the Dick Vet, is the veterinary school of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and part of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine the head of which is Moira Why ...

. During his career at the

Animal Virus Research Institute Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and go through an ontogenetic stage in ...

Pirbright Pirbright ( ) is a village in Surrey, England. Pirbright is in the borough of Guildford and has a civil parish council covering the traditional boundaries of the area. Pirbright contains one buffered sub-locality, Stanford Common near the nati ...

, which he joined in 1939, Henderson developed an improved foot and mouth vaccine and developed a method of determining the virus content in a sample of infected material, which became known as the Henderson Method. He obtained his DSc from the University of Edinburgh in 1945 with a thesis entitled “The quantitative study of foot-and-mouth disease virus”. Henderson remained at Pirbright until 1956. From 1972 to 1978, he was Secretary of the Agricultural Research Council. He was knighted in 1976. Henderson was elected as 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 1976 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1977. His proposers for the latter were Sir William Weipers, Sir John N Ritchie, Sir Alexander Robertson, and Robert Comline. Following retirement he became the Director of London Zoo.

Family

In 1941 he married Alys Beryl Goodridge; they had four sons.

References

1913 births Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the Royal Society 2000 deaths Knights Bachelor Veterinary scientists Scottish veterinarians Presidents of the Zoological Society of London Alumni of the University of Edinburgh {{Scotland-bio-stub