Henry Harris Video | Interviews

Sir Henry Harris, FRS (born 28 January 1925) is an Australian-born professor of medicine at Oxford University, now retired, who led pioneering work on cancer and human genetics in the 1960s. Harris was born in Australia into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. Educated in Sydney he first read modern languages in 1941, but was subsequently attracted to medicine through his literary interests. He studied medicine at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and began a career in medical research rather than clinical practice. In the early 1950s, Harris moved to England to study at the Sir William... MORE

Sir Henry Harris, FRS (born 28 January 1925) is an Australian-born professor of medicine at Oxford University, now retired, who led pioneering work on cancer and human genetics in the 1960s. Harris was born in Australia into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. Educated in Sydney he first read modern languages in 1941, but was subsequently attracted to medicine through his literary interests. He studied medicine at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and began a career in medical research rather than clinical practice. In the early 1950s, Harris moved to England to study at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford under Howard Florey. He completed his DPhil in 1954 and settled down to a career of academic research. In 1960 he was appointed as head of the new department of cell biology at the John Innes Institute, and in 1964 he succeeded Florey as Head of the Dunn School, and in 1979 he was appointed as Oxford's Regius Professor of Medicine succeeding Sir Richard Doll. Harris's research interests were primarily focused on cancer cells and of their differences from normal cells, and later on the possibilities of genetic modification of human cell lines with material of LESS