Sturrock, Robert F (b.1937)

These papers relate almost exclusively to Sturrock's work in St. Lucia, 1966-1973. They comprise records of field studies, notes, observations, and data analyses and documents relating to the planning and operation of the control programmes such as work schedules and lists of equipment and supplies. Also included are drafts of published papers.

The collection also includes a small group of research notes and data probably of Sturrock's wife, also a scientist working in a similar field.

1962-1976

16 boxes

Thes papers were given by Sturrock to the Wellcome Tropical Institute in 1988. They were transferred to the library at Wellcome Collection in 1990.

Robert F. Sturrock was born on 2 October 1937. He obtained a degree in Zoology (Parasitology) from Imperial College, London (ARCS, BSc) in 1958 and a PhD (London).

From 1961 to 1966, he was employed at the East African Institute for Medical Research, Mwanza, Tanzania, first as a Scientific Officer and, from 1964, as a Senior Scientific Officer. He worked on the distribution of hookworm infections and their contribution to anaemia in man; and on the assessment of the risk of new irrigation schemes spreading schistosomiasis in East Africa.

From 1966 to 1973, Sturrock was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation as the Principle Biologist on the St Lucia Schistosomiasis Control Project. This project was instigated in 1965 when the St Lucia Government and the Rockefeller Foundation entered into an agreement with regard to "matters affecting the health of the people, and, more specifically, schistosomiasis". The Foundation provided funds for buildings, an investigative scientific team and other expenditure. The St. Lucian government provided land for the laboratories and local support staff and was also in reciept of external funding, including from the Medical Research Council.

As an island with isolated valleys, each with a high prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni, St Lucia was seen as a good location for the comparative study of different control methods. The laboratories were formally opened in 1966. Sturrock joined the same year. His role was to study the field population behaviour of the snails and to design, implement and evaluate a control programme based on molluscicides. There were three main phases to his work on the project:

- preliminary field observations for the study area in Cul de Sac Valley (1966-1969)

- development of an experimental molluscicide control programme (c.1969)

- implementation of the control programme and a 3-year surveillance treatment programme (1970-1973).

Sturrock left the project in 1973 after which it continued to develop the mollusciciding strategy for use in a control programme. The project was eventually wound up in 1981.

After St. Lucia, Sturrock was employed as a Tropical Clinical and Medical Lecturer in the Department of Helminthology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and was promoted to a Senior Lectureship in 1975. From 1974 to 1981, he was seconded as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow to the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratories (WTRL) in Nairobi as the parasitologist to a group of immunologists studying immune mechanisms to the schistosomiasis in primates (baboons) and man. He was then appointed as Asisstant Director of the WTRL in 1975 and Director in 1980.

From 1981, Sturrock was based at the LSHTM in the Department of Medical Helminthology but retained a link with Kenya with the Ministry of Health, Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, the Kenya Medical Research Institute and as a Research Associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya. He worked on community drug treatment schemes against schistosomiasis, evidence for the development of radiation attenuated live vaccines and genetically-engineered vaccines against schistosomiasis in baboons.

This collection has been catalogued and is available to library members. Some items have access restrictions which are explained in the item-level catalogue records.