Dame Anne McLaren, a geneticist and reproductive biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who was one of the first to culture mouse embryos outside the womb, was killed in a car crash outside London on July 7. She was 80 years old. McLaren helped craft the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, and was the first female officer of the Royal Society.
“At 80, she was still very much a force in the field - intellectually and spiritually,” David C. Page, director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, told The Scientist. In the areas of reproductive biology and mammalian developmental biology, he said, “she was an entirely positive influence on the field.” At the end of her career, McLaren focused on primordial germ cells, working to understand what determines cell differentiation. McLaren was the daughter of Henry McLaren, second Lord Aberconway. She studied zoology as an ...
