Lionel Penrose

Lionel Sharples Penrose was an English psychiatrist, medical geneticist, paediatrician, mathematician and chess theorist who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of intellectual disability. Born on 11 June 1898, he served as a conscientious objector with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France during the First World War, read moral sciences at St John's College, Cambridge, and studied in Vienna before qualifying in medicine at St Thomas' Hospital. His 1938 Colchester Survey, a clinical and genetic study of 1,280 cases of what was then called mental defect, was the earliest serious attempt to study the genetics of intellectual disability, and he went on to investigate genetic and chromosomal causes, including Down syndrome, and was one of the earliest investigators of phenylketonuria. From 1939 to 1945 he directed psychiatric research at the Ontario Hospital, and from 1945 to 1965 he held the Galton chair at University College London, first titled Professor of Eugenics and later, at his request, Professor of Human Genetics. He received the 1960 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the 1964 James Spence Gold Medal, and he died on 12 May 1972.