Geoffrey H. Bourne

1909-1988

 

    Geoffrey H. Bourne was born in Perth, Australia on November 17, 1909. His father, Walter Howard Bourne, was a printer by trade and his mother was Mary Anne Mellon Bourne.  He attended Western Australia University from 1930-1935, where he earned a B. Sch. in 1930, B. Sc. with honors  in 1931, M. Sc. in 1932,  and a D. Sc. 1935. He worked as a biologist at the Australian Institute of Anatomy, Canberra, from 1933 through 1935. In 1935 he married psychologist Gwenllian Myfanwy Jones.

    Bourne was a biochemist for the Commonwealth of Australia Advisory Council on Nutrition from 1935 through 1937. From 1938 through 1941, Bourne was at Oxford University as a Beit Memorial Fellow in medical research. In 1943 he earned a D. Phil. degree from Oxford University.  From 1941-1944 he was at the Royal College of Surgeons in England and a Mackenzie-Mackinnon Research Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians in London, England. During the war, from 1944-1945, he supervised the research and development for Special Forces in South-East Asia for the British Army. He spent 1945-1946 as a nutritional advisor to the Military Administration of Malaysia. Bourne was a histology research analyst at the London Hospital Medical College from 1947 - 1957.  He was working as  an anatomist and biochemist in Australia when, in 1957, he moved to the United States to accept a position at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, as a professor and  chairman of anatomy. He taught at Emory University until 1962.

    Bourne did research on nutrition and primates and was internationally known for his work. He was "intimately concerned with the life, intelligence, relationships, of the great apes." When Yerkes Facility at Emory University was designated as the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center by the National Institute of Health, Bourne took a position  as the Director in 1962. Yerkes had the largest collection of apes in the world. He and Gwenllian divorced in 1964. In 1966 he married research scientist Maria Nelly Golarz. He retired from Yerkes in 1978 to accept a position at the 1500 student medical school in Grenada, in which most of the students were from the United States. In 1983 when the United States invaded Grenada because of a coup by a revolutionary council, Dr. Bourne was there with the students who were rescued.

    As an editor, Geoffrey contributed many articles to publications such as Physiological and Pathological Aging (1961), Human and Veterinary Nutrition (1977), and Sociological and Medical Aspects of Nutrition (1988).  He was the founder and editor of the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, an annual publication. Bourne also wrote many books. Some of his publications are:

    War-Time Food for Mother and Child (1942)

    Starvation in Europe (1943)

    How Your Body Works (1949)

    The Mammalian Adrenal Gland (1949)

    The Biochemistry and Physiology of Bone (1949)

    Vitamin C in the Animal Cell (1957)

    The Structure and Function of Muscle (1960)

    The Division of Labor in Cells (1962)

    Muscular Dystrophy in Man and Animals with M. N. Golarz (1963)

    The Ape People (1971)

    Non-Human Primates and Medical Research (1974)

 

    Bourne was a fellow of the American Gerontology Society, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, American Association of Anatomists, International Society for Cell Biology, British Interplanetary Society, and the Zoological Society of London. He founded the Zoological Society of Atlanta and served as it's president. He described how he taught chimpanzees to communicate by typing on a computer when he appeared on the "Johnny Carson Show" on television. Geoffrey Bourne was not only interested in research and writing. When younger, he was very physically active and took part in water skiing, boating, and running, in fact, at one time, he won the mile championship in Australia.

    Geoffrey H. Bourne died on July 19, 1988 of heart failure in Manhattan at Bellevue Hospital. His career spanned fifty-five years and he was still serving as Vice Chancellor and Professor of Nutrition at St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada when he died. He and his wife had homes in Atlanta and on the island of Grenada. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife, Dr. Nelly Golarz-Bourne and two sons by his first wife Gwenllian, Merfyn Bourne, a London Barrister and Dr. Peter Bourne, who had served as an advisor on drugs to President Carter. 

References:

New York Times

    1988 Dr. Geoffrey H. Bourne, Anatomist, Primate Expert, A Prolific Writer. Obituary. Electronic Document,  http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/21/obituaries/dr-geoffrey-bourne-anatomist-primate-expert-a-prolific-writer.html , accessed June 2, 2009.

 

“Geoffrey Howard Bourne,” in Contemporary Authors. (A profile of the author’s life and works)

 

News Copy from Emory University

    1978 Colloidal Minerals. Electronic document, http://www.eagle-min.com/faq/faq79.html , accessed June 2, 2009.

 

Written by: Andy Paulson, 2004

Edited by:Lillian Dolentz, 2009