Dr David Shotton (1962)

Dr D. M. Shotton, PhD (1962), aged 80.

David Shotton came to Queens’ in 1962 from King Edward VII’s School, King’s Lynn. His father, Frank E Shotton, had matriculated at Queens’ in 1936. David studied Natural Sciences and gained a first-class degree in Biochemistry. He also participated in college sports, sang in choirs and was a staunch member of both the Chapel and the Christian Union. He went on to study for a PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where, at the time, the most cutting-edge research on molecular and cell biology in the world was being pursed. In 1970 David published, in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, the structure of elastase, an important enzyme impacting many areas of human biology. This was at a time when very few protein structures were resolved. He then secured a Medical Research Council Beit Fellowship at Bristol University to continue his research, followed by an MRC Travelling Fellowship to work first at The University of California, Berkeley, and then at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. There he undertook ground-breaking work on spectrin, a cytoskeletal protein that lines the intracellular side of the plasma membrane of cells. Perhaps the most important discovery he made during his time at Harvard was his future wife, Shirley. They celebrated their wedding in the USA and in Cambridge in a special service in Queens’ Chapel. He continued to work on protein structure and the proteins of cell membranes when he was appointed as a Lecturer in Cell Biology at Imperial College, London, in 1976, moving on to the University of Oxford in 1981. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College. His lab in Oxford was an Aladdin’s cave of microscopy. There he pioneered work in exciting areas of light and electron microscopy. He wrote a book on confocal microscopy, in which he demonstrated the great gift of making a highly complex topic accessible to younger scientists. In 1977 he was an EMBO Fellow at the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. He was later also a CIBA-Geigy Visiting Fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Department of Cytometry, University of Leiden. For several summers, he taught an advanced course at The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A friend recalls walking back from the lab there late one evening and hearing David singing and playing guitar in a small garden with a group of fellow lecturers and students after a long day of teaching. In 2004 he became Reader in Image Bioinformatics and Director of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group at Oxford. Latterly, he actively pioneered progress towards much wider access to scientific data, playing a key role in Open Citations, a not-for-profit organisation for open scholarship, which now provides access to over two billion citations. He became well-known as a thoughtful guide and a continuous source of inspiration for young researchers with wise advice and ‘volcanic’ intuitions. He had a knack for explaining complex science in a way students (and even children) could understand. He won a Teaching Award at Oxford and was a much-loved teacher. His friend, Professor David Sattelle, has said, “He leaves a legacy of outstanding research achievements and the techniques that he developed will continue to be used by future generations of scientists. His passion for fair and free access to the benefits of scientific discoveries was profound and that work also continues. David was an inspirational, valued and much-loved scientific colleague. His talent, his energy and his support will be very greatly missed by all fortunate enough to have known him and worked alongside him”. He was a man of great good humour with a very positive attitude to life, coupled with a settled and strong Christian faith. He was an active man who enjoyed hiking and sailing, but he also found time to appreciate music, poetry and art. He was very fond of animals and the family owned a succession of dogs with which he formed strong bonds. He particularly loved gardening and designing gardens. His career took him to many countries, but he and Shirley enjoyed travel on holiday as well. He imbued his children, and latterly his grandchildren, with a love of the natural world, a love of music and a love of scholarship. His son, Jamie Shotton, followed him to Queens’, matriculating in 1999, to read Computer Science before completing a PhD. Jamie, who sang in the Chapel Choir, married the 2005-08 Organ Scholar, Bertilla Ng, in Queens’ Chapel and they have three children. David’s daughter Justine is a veterinary surgeon. Another son, Joshua, predeceased him. He and Shirley finally retired to the village of Yelling in Cambridgeshire, where he created a beautiful garden, five years before his death from cancer.