Colin Leakey

Colin Louis Avern Leakey (born 13 December 1933, Cambridge, England) is a leading plant scientist in the United Kingdom, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and of the Institute of Biology, and a world authority on beans.

Colin Leakey is the son of Louis Leakey (1903–1972), the pioneering paleoanthropologist, and Frida (Avern) Leakey (1902-1993), of Newnham College, Cambridge. His paternal grandparents were Church of England missionaries in British East Africa; his father grew up amidst the Kikuyu people and spent almost all his life in what became Kenya. His parents met in 1927 and married the following year. Their first child was a daughter, Priscilla Muthoni; Colin was their only other child. Frida and Louis divorced when Colin was an infant. He grew up with his mother and sister in Cambridge, and did not see his father again until he was 19.

By his father's second marriage to Mary Leakey, Colin is half-brother to Richard, a conservationist, Philip, a politician, and Jonathan, a businessman. Many of the Leakey family have made contributions to archaeology and anthropology.

His mother never remarried.

After Gresham's School, Holt, Leakey served his national service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, including a year on the staff of Lord Mountbatten who was then Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Leakey then studied physiology, biochemistry, botany and the history and philosophy of science for a first degree at Cambridge University in Natural Sciences. He later trained in tropical agriculture and tropical plant pathology at Exeter University and the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, receiving a postgraduate Diploma in Tropical Agriculture, specializing in tropical plant pathology. At Exeter, he was awarded the Currie Memorial Prize.

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