EMBO began as an idea enthusiastically endorsed by leading scientists from across Europe, but with no funding and no central administration. By offering to run it as a part-time job, Raymond Appleyard enabled it to become established while senior figures in the organization set about obtaining the intergovernmental agreement that would secure its long-term future.
Appleyard, who died aged 94 on 22 January 2017, was born in Birtley, County Durham, UK, on 5 October 1922, the only child of Kenelm Charles Appleyard, an officer in the Royal Engineers (he rose to the rank of Major General), and his wife Monica Mary (née Louis). Bright and ambitious, Appleyard won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to read natural sciences, graduating with a first in physics. After wartime service in the Royal Signals, he returned to Cambridge to complete his PhD.
In 1947 he married Joan Greenwood, a biochemist working on prostate cancer at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. In 1949 he crossed the Atlantic for a two-year period of postdoctoral research in biophysics at Yale, after which he and Joan drove from New Haven to Pasadena with their six-week-old daughter to join the pioneering group of molecular biologists at Caltech led by Max Delbrück.
There he was the first to demonstrate that when phage lambda entered a bacterium, it became integrated into the host chromosome. He briefly took his expertise in working with lambda to the genetics group at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario, Canada. Appleyard found his métier in scientific administration when, in 1956, he was unexpectedly invited to become secretary of the new United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in New York.
He loved the UN, which he saw as a ‘beacon of hope’, but like all staff had to move on after four years. In 1961 he moved to Brussels as Director, Biology Services in the directorate responsible for training at the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). In his first Euratom five-year report, he wrote: “Real coherence needs to start from the roots. In a Europe in which, because of linguistic, national, institutional or other boundaries, far too few people talk to each other, this means a continuous series of discussions, at the level of the individual research worker, between those who … face the same technical problems.”
This was exactly the credo that was being developed by the founders of EMBO. Appleyard was drawn into their circle by Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, an influential Italian geneticist who worked on the effects of radiation. Appleyard was invited to the founding meeting at Ravello in September 1963, but was unable to attend: instead he sent a memo outlining his views on the proposals for a federal organization (in favour) and a laboratory (against).
In December 1963, Appleyard hosted and paid for the first meeting of the EMBO Federal Organization subcommittee at Euratom’s offices. Jeffries Wyman, first Secretary General of EMBO, reported to Max Perutz, its first Chairman, that Appleyard was “an extremely nice person whom I believe we can count on to help us in any way he can through Euratom.” Two years later, after Perutz and others had secured a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, Appleyard was formally appointed Executive Secretary of EMBO.
As a family man, he felt he could not give up a permanent post to take on something that only had three years funding. So with the European Commission’s blessing, he kept his post at Euratom and ran EMBO extremely efficiently as a part-time job. “I called my key staff together,” he remembered, “and said… I would like to take it, but it means you all doing a bit more work, are you willing? And they all said yes.”
Appleyard and his team did all the administration of the fellowships of EMBO, courses and discussion meetings, reporting to the Chair or other EMBO Council members. Appleyard also provided administrative support to the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) once it was established in 1969, working alongside John Kendrew.
He helped to draft the document recommending that the German science ministry choose Heidelberg over Munich for the location of EMBL. The same year, 1973, on the UK’s admission into the European Economic Community, he was promoted to Director General, Scientific and Technical Information and Information Management at the European Commission. It was no longer practical for him to run EMBO, and he was succeeded as EMBO Executive Secretary by John Tooze.
On his retirement from the European Commission in 1986 Appleyard received a knighthood, and settled in East Sussex. His wife Joan died in 2015. He was survived by his three children.
References
- Appleyard, R. K. (1953), Segregation of lambda lysogenicity during bacterial recombination in E.coli K. 12. Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 18, 95
- Ferry, G. (2014) EMBO in Perspective: A half-century in the life sciences, EMBO, pp. 18–19
- Wyman, J. to Perutz, M., 18 December 1963, Bodleian Library MS Eng. c. 2418, NCUACS F.9
- Ferry, G. (2014) EMBO in Perspective: A half-century in the life sciences, EMBO, p. 37
