I was sad to learn of the death of Professor William ‘Bill’ Russell three weeks ago. He was co-inventor with the late Rex Burch of the Three Rs - Reduction, Refinement, Replacement - the guiding principles of animal research today. I hardly knew him, but I do remember him bursting into song while giving talks to large and distinguished audiences. He was clearly a polymath and a fascinating man.
The three Rs are a lasting legacy, with many welfare awards and even a building in the names of Russell and Burch, and of course there is now a National Centre for the Three Rs.
There’s a delightful obituary of this delightful man in The Guardian today by Caroline Richmond. She sums up the ‘musical polymath and promoter of laboratory animal welfare’ thus:
a funny and erudite polymath who wrote science fiction novels, introduced the concept of replacement, refinement and reduction - the 3Rs - into animal research, and had successful careers as a psychoanalyst, zoologist, agronomist and sociologist. His wide ranging knowledge and capacity to set almost anything he was going to say to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune made him immensely popular and earned him a place on BBC Radio’s Round Britain Quiz for several years.
I realised reading his obituary just how much I didn’t know about Bill Russell.
