Introduction
Dr Barnet Woolf FRSE (1902–1983) was a 20th century British biochemist, geneticist and statistician. He gives his name to the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.
Life
He was born in Hackney in the East End of London on 24 November 1902 one of seven children to Meyer and Rose Woolf, Jewish parents originally from Lithuania. He was educated at the Grocers Company School at Hackney Downs.
A brilliant scholar he won a place at Cambridge University and worked in the biochemistry lab under Frederick Gowland Hopkins. In 1920 he was one of the joint founders of the university's communist party, alongside Ivor Montagu and Maurice Dobb. The party was joined by Allen Hutt, Philip Spratt, Charlotte Franken, J. B. S. Haldane and John Bernal.
He graduated MA in 1924 but continued as a post-graduate, gaining his first doctorate (PhD) in 1930. In 1934 he obtained a post as a researcher at the clinical laboratory in London Hospital. He moved to Birmingham University as a Research Fellow in Zoology in 1940. In the Second World War he was employed as a statistician in the Medical Research branch of the War Office.
In 1945 he moved to Edinburgh with his new wife.. He began as a Lecturer in Medical statistics at Edinburgh University in 1946. In 1969 he became a Reader in Genetics.
In 1947 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Francis Albert Eley Crew, James Gray Kyd, Lancelot Hogben and John Du Plessis Langrishe.
He retired in 1973 and died in Fife on 20 March 1983.
Family
In 1945 he married the paediatrician, Dr Cecil Mary Drillien (1917-2006). They had three children.