George Macdonald Urquhart

George received an Agricultural Research Council Scholarship to work with Dr E L Taylor, in the parasitology department at the Ministry of Agriculture's Central Veterinary Laboratories at Weybridge. Dr Taylor was then external examiner

in parasitology at every UK veterinary school and had recognised George's talents while

an undergraduate.

George returned to the Glasgow Veterinary College in 1949 as assistant lecturer and completed his PhD thesis on the pathogenesis of liver fluke infection.

He was one of several men recruited by William Weipers and given the task of taking the old college into a university system. Research became an important part of the new veterinary school and George Urquhart played a leading role in its development and recognition as a veterinary research institution of international standing.

One of George's major interests was parasitic bronchitis, rife in young British cattle and without a satisfactory treatment at that time. George noticed the disease, caused by lungworm, was not present in older cattle and, working with his colleagues - Bill Jarrett, Bill Mulligan, Ian McIntyre, and Frank Jennings - applied a technique George had mentioned in an American research paper using X-rays. George applied this technique to the cattle to stimulate a strong immunity but not to the level where significant pathology and disease supervened.

As a result the lungworm vaccine Dictol was created and became the biggest selling biological product in farm animals in the UK. In the past 40 years, millions of doses of the vaccine have been used to immunise calves in many countries in Europe and it remains the only commercially available vaccine against a parasitic worm.

In 1957 George moved to Kenya where he spent four years as a veterinary hel-minthologist at the East African Veterinary Research Organisation laboratories. There he researched a range of parasitic diseases pertaining to wildlife and domestic animals, with a special interest in human tapeworm which infected cattle, causing a considerable financial loss to Kenyan agriculture. George's investigations pointed the way towards effective control of this parasite.

When he returned from Kenya in the 1960s, support for research into diseases of farm animals was readily available. With his colleagues who helped create the lungworm vaccine, a successful application was made to the then Agricultural Research Council for a grant to fund a study of parasitic gastritis in cattle. As the number of people - working on this study and another on ovine liver fluke - increased, new laboratory facilities were required. The Wellcome Trust supported the construction of a multi-purpose laboratory in the grounds of the veterinary school campus at Garscube. This became the base for George Urquhart's scientific activities over the next 26 years.

The following 20 years were highly productive. George Urquhart orchestrated studies on basic mechanisms of immunity to helminth parasites and on the pathogenesis, epidemiology, and control of important helminth diseases of cattle, sheep, and horses. Although he had able lieutenants running each project, George Urquhart's original thinking and encouragement, and his optimistic attitude to both work and life in general, were paramount to their success.

It is significant that since British universities moved into the era of research assessment, veterinary parasitology at Glasgow has received a starred rating on each occasion reflecting on the structure and scientific base which George put in place. George's real forte was in post-graduate education. He liked nothing better than the morning coffee sessions when he could interact with post-graduates, and conducted these sessions with great wit and good humour. His generosity extended beyond the laboratory and his home provided an open door to people of all nationalities. George believed passionately in the collegiate spirit, treating the university more as an intellectual club than a working place.

Two other events instigated by George in the 1970s are worthy of mention. In 1973, a meeting of leading veterinary parasitologists from universities and research institutes in Europe, was held in Glasgow University. For the first time the contrasting problems in the different countries were presented and published. Then in 1979, the first and only Chair of Veterinary Parasitology in UK was created at Glasgow to which George Urquhart was rightly appointed. The esteem in which his department was held was reflected in two of his colleagues, Jimmy Armour and Jim Duncan, being awarded personal Chairs; they all subsequently worked together with Angus Dunn and Frank Jennings to produce the successful textbook Veterinary Parasitology which was first published in 1987 and in which George was the senior author.

Towards the late 1970s grant support for the study of animal diseases was decreasing as the emphasis on molecular medicine began to predominate and only the Overseas Development Administration were keen to support the combined basic and applied approach which pervaded George's department. So an increasing amount of his time was spent on research in Africa and South America. These individual projects are too numerous to mention but one of George's main contributions was in the study of African trypanosomiasis in cattle, the bovine equivalent of human sleeping sickness.

George had a long-time love affair not only with Africa but with the world in general. During his pre-independence sojourn in Kenya in the late 1950s, George recognised the need to train Africans in veterinary medicine. As a result, the University of Glasgow Veterinary School, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, mounted a major initiative in 1963 led by Ian McIntyre, Bill Jarrett and George to restructure and expand veterinary education in East Africa. This initiative was extremely successful both from a training and research point of view. It led to the major expansion of the Veterinary School at Kabete, Nairobi and to the graduation of some 40 Kenyans, Ugandans, and Tanzanians as veterinary surgeons in November 1964, the first ever graduates of the University of East Africa.

The Veterinary School in Nairobi is now one of the major colleges in Africa. In addition, the world class multi-disciplinary philosophy to research that was created at that time eventually led to the establishment in Nairobi of the International Laboratory for Research in Animal Diseases which was officially opened in 1978 by the then Vice President, now President of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. George's love affair with Africa continued and following his retirement in 1990 he agreed to take up the appointment as Director General of the International Trypanotolerance Centre in The Gambia.

George held the Centre steady during difficult times and allowed it to emerge into the exciting Centre that exists today.

In the late 1980s the Wellcome Trust approached George and his colleagues with a view to expanding his laboratories to house a unit for the developing area of molecular parasitology. This was agreed with the proviso that links should be developed between the molecular work and the strategic and applied studies currently in place. When he retired in 1990 this was still his vision.

George Urquhart, although he disliked committees, did make a valuable contribution to the conduct of animal research in the UK by serving on the Wellcome Trust Panel and the Agricultural Research Council's Institute Advisory Body and Grants Committee. He was President of the World Association for the Advancement of Veterinary Parasitology from 1984-88 and was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1990. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and an Honorary Member of the British Society of Parasitology.

George Urquhart was, without doubt, one of the great academic leaders of his generation in parasitology. He was a wonderful colleague but his greatest achievement was his family and the circle of friends he established. He was a social aristocrat and his wife, Margaret, and his family, Andrew, Libby, and David, maintained a life of fun, humour, style, and love which we all admired and, may we dare to say, envied.

We have lost an intellectual giant but, George's influence in Animal Disease Research and his philosophy of how to approach research will carry forward throughout the next millennium.