Ruth Clayton (née Freedman;10 June 1925 – 2003) was a lecturer and researcher with an international reputation in eye research at the University of Edinburgh in the Institute of Animal Genetics. She was one of a group of scientists who joined the Institute at a time when it was led by C.H. Waddington and when many of the fundamental aspects of modern biology were being elucidated by forward thinking scientists at the university's King's Buildings campus. Leading a large and diverse research group, she applied the newly developing techniques of modern biology to fundamental questions in the fields of developmental biology and pathology of the eye and the brain. Her work was characterised by a rigorously conceptual approach, methodological innovation and a keen interest in the social and ethical implications of scientific and medical research.
Education and early life
Clayton was born in London on 10 June 1925. She studied zoology at the University of Oxford, gaining an MA.
Research and career
Institute of Animal Genetics
Clayton joined the Institute of Animal Genetics (University of Edinburgh) in 1947 at a time of rapid expansion under the leadership of the biologist and polymath C.H. Waddington. She was one of the original group of scientists there during the 1950s that included notable figures such as Charlotte Auerbach, Geoffrey Beale, Douglas Scott Falconer, Henrik Kacser, Eric Lucey, Eric Reeve, and Alan Robertson. Waddington's initial solution to staff accommodation problems in Edinburgh was the acquisition of the nearby Mortonhall and an experiment in collegiate living, from which Eric Reeve's wife, the artist Edith Simon drew inspiration for her novel The Past Masters (titled House of Strangers in the USA). In 1965, the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Foundation funded the building of a modern tower block, adjacent to the main Institute of Animal Genetics Crew Building on the university's King's Buildings campus to accommodate the research being undertaken by Waddington and his colleagues. By the 1970s, Clayton, DES Truman, John Campbell, Geoffrey Selman, Joe Jacob, John Bishop, Ken Jones and their research groups occupied the tower, all pursuing different aspects of an explicitly epigenetic research programme. When Ruth Clayton's group outgrew the accommodation available in the tower, she refurbished and occupied the first floor of the Crew Building. She retired in 1993 with Emeritus Reader status.
Epigenetics and the eye
Epigenetics in its very broadest sense (and that originally intended by Waddington) is the study of the processes by which the information encoded in genes (the genotype) becomes manifest (is expressed) in the observable characteristics (the phenotype) of an individual during development. The eye in general and in particular the abundant proteins of the eye lens, which are termed crystallins provided Clayton and her colleague DES Truman with an ideal system in which to investigate the link between gene expression and cell differentiation during embryonic development. The complexity of crystallin protein composition and expression were explored by early adoption of a wide range of innovative immunological, biochemical, molecular, and cellular techniques then being developed in Edinburgh and elsewhere. On the basis of these and other studies she developed and advocated the view that the differences in gene expression that underlie cell differentiation are quantitative in nature and combinatorial in effect. This nuanced view contrasted markedly with the prevailing ideas at that time of a strict demarcation between “house-keeping" and “luxury" gene products, strictly tissue-specific expression of luxury gene products and a single unitary function for individual proteins. Crystallin gene expression was further explored in a detailed series of studies using long-term cell culture models in which progenitor chick lens cells continuously differentiated into lens fibre cells in controlled laboratory conditions. The intrinsic programme of crystallin gene expression during this process was found to be non-coordinate within and between crystallin protein classes, tightly controlled and resembled the developmental programme seen in the animal itself, but it could be modified by age, genotype, cellular growth rate, and soluble factors. All of this indicated that the epigenetic programme was intrinsic to the cells, but it could be modified by external and internal variables.