David Whittingham
The Modern Laboratory · People
The Modern Laboratory
David Whittingham
A veterinarian turned embryologist, he made mouse eggs fertilise in a dish and showed that frozen embryos could become living young.
David Whittingham trained as a veterinarian before turning to the early embryo. In 1964, at the Worcester Foundation in Massachusetts, he met Ryuzo Yanagimachi, the start of a friendship that lasted almost sixty years.
Mouse IVF. In 1968 Whittingham reported in Nature the fertilisation of mouse eggs in vitro. His work led to the first live mice born from eggs fertilised outside the body. He went on to study how best to culture mouse eggs and early embryos.
Embryos that waited. In 1971 he reported that mouse embryos could survive freezing and thawing. A year later, with Stanley Leibo and Peter Mazur at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, he published the study described in Room 6. More than 2,500 early embryos were cooled slowly, at 0.3 to 2°C per minute, and stored at minus 196°C for up to eight days. When about a thousand survivors were placed in foster mothers, 65 per cent of the mothers became pregnant, and healthy young were born.
A life in London. Whittingham directed the Medical Research Council's Experimental Embryology and Teratology Unit at St George's Hospital Medical School from 1981 to 1998. He became Professor of Experimental Embryology in the University of London in 1990, and is now emeritus. He served on the first Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from 1991 to 1993, and later chaired the Progress Educational Trust. He is also a trustee of the Frozen Ark Project, which stores cells from endangered animals.
Looking back in 2018, he wrote: “Major advances in scientific research do not arise as a quantum event but are built upon the efforts and findings of many earlier workers.”
Also see: Stanley Leibo, Peter Mazur, Ryuzo Yanagimachi
About the sources
- Whittingham D. A personal tribute to Professor Ryuzo Yanagimachi. Progress Educational Trust, 19 February 2024.
- Progress Educational Trust, people page: Professor David Whittingham (emeritus professor at St George's, Frozen Ark trustee, former PET chair, MRC unit director, HFEA member; first successful IVF in mice; cryopreservation of all preimplantation stages).
- ESA-SRB 2018 Joint Annual Scientific Meeting, speaker page and abstract: David Whittingham, “A perspective of the contribution of my past research to current reproductive biology and medicine”, 20 August 2018.
- Progress Educational Trust. A new year and a new chair for PET, 10 January 2005 (HFEA 1991 to 1993, PET trustee from 1997).
- Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University). “Survival of Mouse Embryos Frozen to -196 ° and -269 °C” (1972), by David Whittingham, Stanley Leibo, and Peter Mazur.
- Whittingham DG, Leibo SP, Mazur P. Survival of mouse embryos frozen to -196 degrees and -269 degrees C. Science 1972;178(4059):411–414. PMID 5077328.
- Whittingham DG. Survival of mouse embryos after freezing and thawing. Nature 1971;233(5315):125–126. PMID 12058753.
- Whittingham DG. Culture of mouse ova. Journal of Reproduction and Fertility Supplement 1971;14:7–21. PMID 5285427.
- Whittingham DG. Fertilization of mouse eggs in vitro. Nature 1968;220(5167):592–593. PMID 5686738.
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
