Walter Heape facts for kids

Walter Heape (born April 29, 1855, in London – died September 10, 1929, in Tunbridge Wells) was a British scientist who studied animals and how they develop from embryos. He is most famous for being the first person to successfully move an embryo from one mammal to another. This was a huge step forward in science!

Walter Heape's Early Life and Studies

Walter Heape came from a wealthy family. He was taught at home by a private tutor until he was 17. After that, he spent a year studying at Owens College. For several years, he worked in different businesses, including rice and sugar milling, and cotton spinning. However, his health wasn't great, so he decided to change paths and become a scientist.

Heape started by studying how living things work (physiology) at Owens College. Then, he learned about plants (botany) in Oxford. Later, he went to Cambridge University. There, he continued to study physiology, botany, and the shapes and forms of animals (animal morphology). He received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Cambridge in 1885.

From 1879 to 1882, Heape focused on studying how mammal embryos develop. He worked closely with another scientist, Francis Maitland Balfour, until Balfour sadly passed away. After that, Heape became an instructor and demonstrator, teaching about animal forms until 1885.

Working with Marine Life

In 1885, Walter Heape became an Assistant Secretary for the Marine Biological Association. This group studies ocean life. He was then put in charge of building a special marine laboratory in Plymouth. His job was also to explore and study the sea creatures living near Plymouth. He did this until 1887, when he left due to some disagreements.

After leaving Plymouth, Heape traveled to many places like Egypt, India, and Burma. He returned to England in 1889. He received grants to continue his research and even went back to India briefly to collect embryos from monkeys, but he had to return home because of illness.

The Amazing Embryo Transfer Experiment

On April 27, 1890, Walter Heape did something truly groundbreaking. He took two fertilized eggs (ova) from an Angora rabbit and carefully placed them into another type of rabbit, a Belgian Hare. The Belgian Hare rabbit had been fertilized by a male Belgian Hare just a few hours before.

About a month later, on May 29, 1890, the Belgian Hare rabbit gave birth! She had four baby rabbits that looked like Belgian Hares and two baby rabbits that looked like Angora rabbits. The Angora babies were pure white, just like their Angora parents. This experiment proved that embryos could be successfully moved from one animal to another, and the new animal could carry the pregnancy to term. This was a huge scientific achievement! Heape had help with the surgery from Dr. Samuel Buckley.

Later Work and Inventions

Walter Heape continued his scientific work at Cambridge from 1891 to 1906. In 1897, he published another paper about his embryo transfer experiments. In 1906, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), which is a very high honor for scientists in the UK.

Later, in 1918, Heape and another person named Horace B. Grylls invented something called the Heape and Grylls Rapid Cinema Machine. This machine was amazing because it could take pictures incredibly fast, from 500 to 5000 pictures every second! It was useful for studying things that happened very quickly, like explosions or how armor reacted when hit.

Walter Heape got married in 1891 and had three children.

Selected publications