Robert Knox

The platypus in Edinburgh: Robert Jameson, Robert Knox and the place of the Ornithorhynchus in nature, 1821–24

The duck-billed platypus, or Ornithorhynchus, was the subject of an intense debate among natural historians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its paradoxical mixture of mammalian, avian and reptilian characteristics made it something of a taxonomic conundrum. In the early 1820s Robert Jameson (1774-1854), the professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh and t...

Dudley Knox Library

Robert Insall

Robert Insall was born in London in 1965, into a family of architects, musicians and historians. To their great surprise, he was obviously scientifically inclined from an early age. He did a B.A. at Cambridge University, then stuck around in Cambridge for a Ph.D., where he got interested in Dictyostelium, followed by a postdoc in Johns Hopkins, where he got interested in chemotaxis and cell mov...

Robert Koch

Robert Dottin

We are investigating the signal transduction mechanisms by which extracellular hydrophilic hormones activate genes. We use Dictyostelium discoideum as a model eukaryote because it is relatively easy to perform reverse genetics on this organism and it is also capable of development. We had earlier shown that extracellular cAMP behaves as a hydrophilic