Lionel Penrose
| Lionel Penrose | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Lionel Sharples Penrose 11 June 1898 |
| Died | 12 May 1972 (aged 73) |
| Institutions |
University of Cambridge University College London |
| Alma mater | St. John's College, Cambridge |
| Known for |
Penrose triangle Penrose method Penrose stairs Penrose's Law Penrose square root law Penrose–Banzhaf index |
| Notable awards |
Fellow of the Royal Society Lasker Award |
Lionel Sharples Penrose, FRS (11 June 1898 – 12 May 1972) was a British psychiatrist, medical geneticist, mathematician and chess theorist, who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of mental retardation.
Penrose was educated at the Downs School, Colwall and the Quaker Leighton Park School, Reading. On leaving school in 1916, he served, as a conscientious objector, with the Friends' Ambulance Unit/British Red Cross in France until the end of the First World War. He went on to study at St. John's College, Cambridge; he was a Cambridge Apostle.
Penrose's "Colchester Survey" of 1938 was the earliest serious attempt to study the genetics of mental retardation. He found that the relatives of patients with severe mental retardation were usually unaffected but some of them were affected with similar severity to the original patient, whereas the relatives of patients with mild mental retardation tended mostly to have mild or borderline disability. Penrose went on to identify and study many of the genetic and chromosomal causes of mental retardation (then called mental deficiency). This body of work culminated in the book, The Biology of Mental Defect (Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., London, U.K., 1949).
Penrose was a central figure in British medical genetics following World War II. From 1945 to 1965 he occupied the Galton Chair at the Galton Laboratory at University College London. He received a number of awards and honors including the 1960 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. The Lasker citation read:
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