John James Rickard Macleod - Biography

Biography

Macleod was born in Cluny, near Dunkeld in central Scotland. Soon after he was born, his father Robert Macleod, a clergyman, was transferred to Aberdeen, where John attended grammar school and enrolled in the study of medicine at the University of Aberdeen. He obtained a PhD in medicine in 1898 and then spent a year studying biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, Germany, on a travelling scholarship. After returning to Britain, he became a demonstrator at the London Hospital Medical School, where in 1902 he was appointed lecturer in biochemistry. In the same year, he was awarded a doctorate in public health from Cambridge University. Around that time he published his first research article, a paper on phosphorus content in muscles.

In 1903 Macleod emigrated to the United States and became a lecturer in physiology at the Western Reserve University (today's Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, where he remained for 15 years. During World War I he performed various war-time duties and served as a physiology lecturer for part of the 1916 winter semester at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After the war he went on to teach physiology at the University of Toronto, where he became director of the physiology lab and an assistant to the dean of the medical faculty. He researched various topics in physiology and biochemistry, among which were the chemism of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, electroshocks, creatinine metabolism and blood circulation in the brain. In 1905 he became interested in carbohydrate metabolism and diabetes, publishing a series of scientific papers and several monographs on the subject since then. Apart from that, Macleod actively engaged in education: he was a popular lecturer and an influential contributor to the development of the six-year course in medicine at the University of Toronto.