Collection K/PP137 - McCLARE, Dr Colin William Fraser (1937-1977)

McClare was born in 1937 and educated at Felsted School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences, specialising in chemistry. He undertook research at Cambridge on the chemistry of free radicals in biology as a Medical Research Council student, 1958-1961, and on energy transfer in nucleic acids as a Beit Fellow, 1961-1963, and was awarded a PhD in 1962. He was Lecturer in Biophysics at King's College, London, 1963-1977. From his growing interest in bioenergetics and the problems of muscle contraction he concluded that classical thermodynamics was inadequate for the description of biological processes, and that the application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to biological machines required the introduction of time scales. His ideas were not generally accepted and although he wrote extensively on the subject his papers were not accepted for publication until four controversial papers appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Biology and Nature , 1971-1972. These generated a vigorous correspondence with scientists all over the world. McClare's unorthodox views failed to gain the approval of established scientific opinion. He took his own life at the age of thirty-nine, 1977.