Julia Bell (geneticist)

Biography

Julia Bell attended Girton College in Cambridge and took the Mathematical Tripos exam in 1901. Because women could not officially receive degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, she was awarded a master's degree at Trinity College, Dublin for her work investigating solar parallax at Cambridge Observatory.

In 1908, Julia Bell contributed to the early development of human genetics through work at Galton Laboratory. She was involved in documenting inherited diseases in human populations. She focused her research on identifying and discovering the patterns of hereditary conditions to support the early work of clinical genetics as scientific discipline in Britain. Her work reflected a major shift toward more systematic and medically designed approached in human genetics. She started work at University College London as assistant to Karl Pearson (1857–1936), professor of applied mathematics, director of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, London and one of the founders of modern statistics. Bell's predecessor as assistant to Karl Pearson was the mathematician Alice Lee who had resigned due to ill-health.

At the Galton Laboratory, Julia Bell worked at one of the primary centers for early human genetic research in Britain. The laboratory had a large influence on the development of biometric and hereditary studies which was building on the work of Francis Galton. She contributed to connecting clinical observations with early genetic frameworks.

Bell's position as Assistant to Karl Pearson was funded by Francis Galton's endowment to University College London to support eugenics research. Pearson described the role of his Assistant as "a post well suited to a woman living with her family in London and keen on scientific work" because the Assistant's salary of £100 a year was unattractive to men compared with the annual salary of £250 year paid for the position of Galton Laboratory Research Fellow. Bell's remuneration for her work as Pearson's assistant was equivalent to the pay of a non-academic part-time clerk at this time. Like other women scientists of the period, Bell's early professional life throughout the 1920s was defined by low pay and short-term research contracts. In 1921, Bell was awarded a Fellowship worth £300 p.a. by the Medical Research Council.

In 1914, Karl Pearson had asked Bell to augment the expertise of the Galton Laboratory staff by taking a degree in medicine. Bell's decision to train as a doctor was informed by her own interest in the more observational aspects of the study of heredity. She studied at the London School of Medicine for Women (Royal Free Hospital) which had been the first medical school in Britain to admit women, and the only school to do so until 1886. In the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Bell was the only staff member of the Galton Lab who was medically qualified. Bell qualified MRCS LRCP in 1920, was awarded membership of the Royal College of Physicians and made Galton research fellow under the Medical Research Council in 1926, and was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1938, being only the fourth woman to be so elected.

Between 1907 and 1925, Bell was employed intermittently in both the Biometric and Galton Laboratories, both of which sat within the Department of Applied Statistics at UCL under the directorshop of Karl Pearson. At the time of Pearson's retirement in 1933, Bell was one of five long-term members of staff who had been in place since 1922, along with Ethel Elderton, Dr. Percy Stocks, Egon Pearson, and Mary Noel Karn. In 1932, Bell had joined the genetics committee of the Medical Research Council and worked as a permanent member of the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council 1933-1944. Her subsequent work led to her receiving the Weldon memorial prize and medal for biometry awarded by Oxford University in 1941. Bell worked within the Galton Laboratory for 57 years, working there from 1908 until her retirement in 1965 at age 86.