Cock, Alan Geoffrey

Alan Cock was born at Stratford in east London in 1926. After graduating in Zoology at Cambridge University in 1947, he worked for a decade as research assistant to Michael Pease at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Poultry Genetics Unit, Cambridge. Michael Pease had been the assistant of Reginald Punnett who, prior to becoming the first Professor of Genetics at Cambridge in 1912, had been the assistant of William Bateson. Thus, Cock could claim the latter as his scientific great-grandparent. The Pease laboratory was still using Bateson’s shorthand system for recording the characters of newly hatched chicks, so Cock was well prepared to analyze the original Bateson–Punnett notebooks held at the Cambridge Department of Genetics.

Cock’s switch to biohistory followed a distinguished scientific career. In 1957 he moved from Cambridge to the Poultry Research Centre, Edinburgh, where he obtained a doctorate in Genetics. In 1964 he joined Professor Leslie Brent as Lecturer in the Department of Zoology (later Biology) at the University of Southampton. Of undoubted interest to Brent, a transplantation immunologist (Brent 1997), would have been Cock’s collaboration with Morten Simonsen, which provided a fundamental understanding of the graft-versus-host reaction.

Around 1970 he made a decisive career shift from genetics to biohistory with the aim of writing a definitive Bateson biography. To this end, he repatriated the William Bateson papers from the USA in 1975 and began their curation and cataloguing. In the course of this work he corresponded with many leading mid- to late-20th century scientists and historians. Yet, while he wrote several important papers and made a start on the biography, dogged by illness (bipolar depression and a pituitary tumor) his aim was not achieved. He passed away in 2005.