Professor Lawrence Whalley FRCPE

Born: 12/03/1946
Died: 11/04/2024
Speciality: Psychiatry
Designatory Letters: MD FRCPE FRCPsych

Emeritus professor of Psychiatry at Aberdeen University and internationally acclaimed researcher into age-related cognitive decline, who drew attention in his books and papers to the risk factors in life style and  the environment.

Lawrence was born in Lancashire, one of five children to Tony, a mechanical engineer, and his wife Florence. His was a close family whose support was unwavering during the years of their mother’s declining health and early death when Lawrence was twelve. A capacity for hard work and intellectual curiosity began early, notably at St Joseph’s College in Blackpool where he was encouraged by the teaching brothers. He trained in Medicine at the University of Newcastle and, while still a medical student, he married Patricia, who was training to be a teacher.

He qualified in 1969 and after his pre-registration posts, Lawrence moved to Oxford, spending a year doing locums, including in general practice and psychiatry. He passed the 1st part of the MRCP UK at this time, bur decided to train in psychiatry and in 1971 commenced a 3-year rotating post at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, obtaining his MRCPsych in 1974 and his MD in 1976. He followed this with a senior registrar rotation in Edinburgh, before obtaining a Senior Clinical Scientist appointment to the MRC Brain Metabolism Unit at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital along with honorary consultant and senior lecturer appointments. In 1986 he transferred to Edinburgh University as full-time senior lecturer with honorary consultant status. His final move was in 1992 to Aberdeen University as Crombie Ross Professor of Mental Health. He was elected FRCPE at this point.

Lawrence’s patients will remember him as a thoughtful and very caring psychiatrist, but his reputation rests on his extraordinarily wide-ranging research output. In Edinburgh, the focus of this was on the brain chemistry of the devastating symptoms experienced by many patients during the early stages of major mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In parallel with the laboratory-based endocrine research of George Fink, Lawrence led the clinical group who measured levels of hormones in patients receiving treatment for acute psychotic illness, gaining novel insights described in a series of seminal publications on hormone changes accompanying mania. His research interests then moved to the neuroscience of age-related intellectual decline and Alzheimer’s disease. He began work on the epidemiology of dementia with the observation that early-onset dementia was not randomly distributed; cases seemed to cluster in the community, suggesting the possibility of environmental risk factors. Together with Ian Deary and John Starr, he began prospective studies of cognitive decline and vascular risk factors in 1300 healthy old people in Edinburgh.

In 1992 he was appointed Crombie Ross Professor of Mental Health in the University of Aberdeen, and honorary consultant psychiatrist. This gave him a unique epidemiological opportunity when he gained access to the childhood cognitive scores of eleven-year-olds acquired in 1932 and 1947 by the Scottish Council for Research in Education. These formed the Aberdeen Birth Cohorts. With his team he was able to trace most of these now elderly individuals, obtain their consent to be re-examined using modern methods and be followed up biennially, thereby affording a life-course approach to understanding their cognitive and brain health. A five-year Wellcome Professorial Senior Fellowship allowed him time out from his other academic responsibilities and his clinical work to pursue this further and to publish The Ageing Brain for a lay readership in 2004. His contribution at international conferences was widely sought, particularly in the United States. He also continued to collaborate with Ian Deary and John Starr, who subsequently set up the parallel Edinburgh-based Lothian Birth Cohorts.

Lawrence retired to Edinburgh in 2008. He had a wide-ranging general knowledge and was a lively conversationalist, rarely without an opinion which he would happily defend. He enjoyed travel, walking, gardening, and cooking, and was a talented artist. He was central to the lives of his three daughters, Charlotte, Mandy and Elizabeth, six grandchildren, and three stepchildren, making his family parties memorable for his many friends. His two marriages to Patricia and Helen had ended in divorce, but he remained on good terms with, and supportive of both of them and their families

Lawrence remained physically and mentally active to the end. Remarkably, a third of his more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications were written after retirement, making him one of the most highly cited academics in his university.