Dame Dr Honor Bridget Fell, DBE, Ph.D, D.Sc, FRS (1900–1986) was a British scientist and zoologist. Her contributions to science included the development of the organ culture method, similar to stem cell research.
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She was educated at Winchcliffe School and Madras College before earning a BSc in Zoology at the University of Edinburgh in 1922 and a PhD in 1924. Most of her long career was spent at the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge, where she was Director from 1927 to 1970.[1] While working at Cambridge she earned her Ph.D in 1924. In 1932 she earned her D.Sc from the University of Cambridge.
This enabled scientists to grow living differentiated cells, largely obtained from the embryos of warm blooded animals, to create cultures that mimic the behaviour of organs in the animal body (see stem cell research).
Her second contribution to science was the direction, with Dr F.G. Spears, of the Strangeways Research Laboratory at Cambridge University. She was named Director at Strangeways Laboratory in 1927.
In the 1930s the Laboratory pioneered the development of radiobiology - the effects of X-rays on living animal tissue. This was a direct result of Dr. Fell's offer of study facilities to scientists who were refugees of the Second World War. Despite limited resources the laboratory expanded, particularly with the construction in 1938 of a new wing funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1970 the Laboratory was comprised 62 scientists and 29 technicians.
In retirement Dr Fell once again took up the immunobiology of rheumatoid disease. She returned to Strangeways in 1976 and remained there, still working in the laboratory, until within four weeks of her death in 1986.