James Mourilyan Tanner

James Mourilyan Tanner (1920 to 2010) was a British paediatric endocrinologist, born in Camberley, Surrey, and educated at Marlborough College and University College of the South West of England. He attended St Mary's Hospital, London, and completed his medical studies in the United States with a Rockefeller Foundation funded group of British students, with an internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital. From 1948 he oversaw a British government study at an orphanage in Harpenden, where he charted and photographed the growth of the children and developed the Tanner scale of sexual maturation in puberty. The data led to the modern growth chart used by paediatricians worldwide. He did early research on human growth hormone for children whose growth was delayed, chose the few children in the UK treated with the cadaver derived supply, and stopped the therapy at once after patients died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in 1985. He was professor emeritus at the Institute of Child Health, University of London.