Martin Johnson

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Martin H Johnson MA PhD FRCOG started his career in reproductive science in 1965 when he encountered Bob Edwards for the first time. Martin had gone to Cambridge University in 1963 to read medicine, and after two years learning basic anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology had specialized in advanced physiology. Bob Edwards had arrived in the Physiology Department in 1963 as a Ford Foundation Fellow. He gave a third-year course on Reproduction that fired the imagination and interest of two students in particular, Martin being one and (now Professor) Richard Gardner the other. Together they did a voluntary project in the evenings and at weekends, under Bob’s guidance, involving the vital staining of cortical granules with acridine orange in hamster and mouse eggs. Although the project was not an unqualified success, their appetites for research were stimulated and so, in 1966, instead taking up his clinical place at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, Martin, together with Richard, became Bob’s first graduate students.

Bob’s approach to PhD supervision was benign. “What are you going to work on? When you have decided come and tell me” was his opening remark. Bob’s interests were wide, and so the reproductive field available to Martin was almost unlimited. Also, the subject of reproduction in mammals was then still pretty much in its infancy, and had a close relationship to clinical, social, and ethical issues – all potentially controversial and of passionate interest to Bob in addition to his science. Martin chose initially to work on a then fashionable problem of population and fertility control and studied the impact of sperm vaccination on male and female fertility.

After gaining his PhD in 1969, Martin secured a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship from the Harkness Foundation for work in the USA, where he studied implantation and uterine secretions with Joe Daniel in Colorado and Tennessee, and then teratomas and histocompatibility antigens with Michael Edidin at Johns Hopkins University – which, later in 1993, elected him to its Society of Scholars. Returning to Cambridge, he took up a fellowship at Christ’s College, of which he is now President, and became University lecturer (1974), reader (1984) and Professor of Reproductive Sciences (1992). The graduate students and post docs who trained with him include Alan Handyside, Peter Braude, Virginia Bolton, Tom Fleming, Bernard Maro, Carol Ziomek, Hester Pratt, Sue Pickering, Evelyn Houliston, Sarah Howlett. Mohammed Nasr-Esfahani, Nikki Winston, Margot Day, Catherine Aiken and Hamid Dolatshad.

Martin’s academic interests in reproduction have ranged widely beyond his early studies and resulted in over 250 papers: some of the earliest molecular studies on maternal inheritance and gene expression in early mouse development; cell lineage studies using rat:mouse chimearas; the polarisation model to explain the divergence of trophoblast and ICM tissues; oxygen-free radicals in embryo culture; oocyte cryopreservation; parthenogenetic activation and calcium pulsing in the oocyte; transgenic mouse models for studying brain repair and erythropoietin secretion; circadian rhythms in the female reproductive tract; and early marsupial development. Inspired by Bob Edwards, Martin has also undertaken original research in, and engaged with, ethics, law, politics, medical education and, latterly, the history of assisted reproduction treatment and mammalian reproduction. He is author of the now classic teaching text Essential Reproduction (seventh edition, Wiley–Blackwell due 2011), and has edited many books including Sexuality Repositioned (2004), Death Rites and Rights (2007), and Birth Rites and Rights (2010).

Martin is delighted to be joining Reproductive Biomedicine Online as co-editor responsible for science, ethics, and sociology exactly 10 years after it was founded by Bob Edwards – the man who inspired him to enter this field 45 years ago.