Photos of Colin Blakemore show him smirking and feeling pleased with himself. At the weekend it was announced that he has received a knighthood in Elizabeth Windsor’s birthday honours list.
Blakemore first achieved infamy nearly 30 years ago for sewing down the eyelids of kittens to study the development of vision in the brain. He’s also planted electrodes in the visual cortexes of kittens and kept them in continual darkness for the first three months of their lives, inside closed cylindrical chambers.
Blakemore was the bogeyman of the animal rights movement for many years, not just for the “research” he performed (in truth there were others doing as bad if not worse experiments) but because he chose to make himself a public figure by defending the torture of sentient beings in the name of science. He continually whined about how he and his family were targets for so-called extremists and how his children had received death threats, yet he wouldn’t stop saying how laudable vivisection was. In other words he brought misfortune upon himself.
Insult was added to injury when he was apparently overlooked for a knighthood 10 years ago while chief executive of the Medical Research Council precisely because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He threatened to resign over that, but being a person of very little substance he never delivered on his threat.
Now he’s crowing about his honour, saying how it feels like “the cream on top of the cake”. He also thinks it symbolises a sea change in recent attitudes to animal experimentation. In fact opposition to animal testing has remained pretty constant over the past decade despite an all-out propaganda war by the vivisection industry.
Blakemore’s desperate craving for recognition shows a deeply flawed character. No doubt he was affected by public revulsion towards the experiments he carried out. Now he thinks gaining a knighthood will absolve him of his crimes and restore his credibility. But he will never escape notoriety for what he has done to defenceless creatures.
In any case aren’t scientists supposed to pursue their work for its own sake, not for reward or celebrity? Did the likes of Darwin, Maxwell, Diriac and Faraday care about fame and fortune? They were true scientists, not a sham like Blakemore, torturing animals in the name of science. He isn’t worthy of being mentioned in the same breath.
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