Professor Donald Michie 1923.11.11 - 2007.7.7

Professor Donald Michie, 83, and his ex-wife, geneticist Dame Anne McLaren, 80, were killed when their car left the M11 motorway as they travelled from Cambridge to London on Saturday 7th July 2007.

Donald Michie came to Edinburgh in 1958, to join the Department of Surgical Science. He went on to found both the Experimental Programming Unit and the Department of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh in the 1960s, and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Machine Intelligence in 1967. He left Edinburgh in 1984 to found the Turing Institute in Glasgow.

Anne McLaren also worked in Edinburgh, as member of the Institute of Animal Genetics from 1959 to 1974, when she left to become the Director of the MRC Mammalian Development Unit in London. In 1992, she became a principal research associate at the Welcome Trust/Cancer Research UK.

Many of us were fortunate to hear Donald's illuminating talk, given on 28th June, at the recent Edinburgh Computer History Reunion, and were looking forward to future visits. They will both be sadly missed.