In the 1950s when David Hull arrived in Oxford to take up his medical research fellowship, he could hardly have predicted the professional sobriquet that would follow: “brown fat Hull”.
Working at the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research, under Geoffrey Dawes, the eminent neonatal physiologist, Hull studied the minutiae of how newborn babies adapt to life after the uterus. He and a fellow researcher, Michael Dawkins, discovered “brown fat”, a tissue which resides between a newborn’s shoulder blades and around the kidneys and is vital for thermoregulation, but which prematurely born babies do not have. Suddenly the simple fact of keeping them warm took on new meaning: it was vital to their survival.
Hull subsequently wrote two pivotal papers on the subject in the Journal