Fellow

Peter Braude is Head of the Department of Women's Health, King’s College London. After qualifying as a doctor in South Africa, Peter Braude interupted his clinical studies to spend 5 years in the department of Anatomy in Cambridge. His work focussed on gene expression in mammalian preimplantation embryos, later leading to the first understanding of major gene activation in the human preimplantation embryo, an important and still frequently cited paper. He then returned to clinical medicine, to Obstetrics and Gynaecology and held the first project grant awarded by the MRC for research on human embryos in vitro at a time when this type of activity was still controversial and novel. Together with Martin Johnson in Cambridge, he was awarded an MRC programme grant to investigate human preimplantation development. Because of the controversial nature of some of this research he undertook a two-year diploma in the philosophy and ethics of medicine, and subsequently has written extensively on the ethics of in vitro fertilisation, and research on human embryos in vitro. He now directs what is probably the most active preimplantation genetic diagnosis programme in the UK, and is an acknowledged international authority in this area. Recently with colleagues from KCL, he has succeeded in developing the first human embryonic stem cell line in the UK within two years of receiving the first licence to do so. He continues to innovate, teach, and practice clinically.