Protein deficiency in early life. Experiments from 1960s Hong Kong

When I was writing the post of 8 March on the classic experiments in malnutrition and the intergenerational effects that ensued, I could not help thinking I was vaguely aware of earlier experiments that also explored the effects of a shortage of protein in the diet on a rat’s ability to navigate. I then realised who was doing it and where but I had no idea of the background or the outcome. It was actually in the next room of the animal house we occupied at the University of Hong Kong (it was air conditioned!) and just getting started on it by the time we left was the new, and first, Professor of Psychology. He was known then as John Dawson. I only spoke to him a couple of times but I had him down as a good guy since he spoke in terms of evolutionary psychology. But what was he doing and why?

I knew for that he was using the colony of rats in the Department of Zoology, an inbred strain founded from animals flown in from the University of Sheffield about eighteen months earlier*. I also knew that the zoology workshop (brilliant with perspex constructions) had built the test maze.

John Binnie-Dawson in 1969
from a family tree on ancestry.com

From the university newsletters that arrived over the years (long discontinued) I realised that the John Dawson we knew was being referred to as Professor J.L.M. Binnie-Dawson. Therefore, in tracking what he did I had to use the two names since I discovered he published under both.

It is clear that he had observed the feminising effect of kwashiorkor, the result of extreme protein deficiency after weaning, on children in West Africa. Dawson had worked in Sierra Leone. From his publications it is also clear that he was interested in differences between the sexes in spatial ability and so the two fields were brought together in studying effect of protein deficiency and sex hormones in rats.

I have not read the papers, having been content to see if my memory was correct but it seems that he pulled the whole story together in a paper in Psychologia in 1984 of which this is the published summary:

The author presents empirical evidence, mainly from his own research conducted from 1963 to 1975, to support the biosocial hypothesis, which argues that the normal sex difference between males and females in spatial ability has a 2-way sex hormone basis. This higher level of male spatial ability is also held to be biologically adaptive for the human group: In subsistence hunting societies, the male must generally be able to hunt food and locate water to ensure the survival of the group. This hypothesis also postulates that the actual level of male spatial ability in a particular biological subsistence environment will be influenced by the spatial requirements of that environment. Three specific studies are reviewed: (1) a study to determine whether Arunta individuals living in the semi-desert environment of Central Australia have developed high spatial ability and a permissive social system, as contrasted with the strict group orientation of West African Temne rice agriculturalists, who do not need spatial ability to grow and accumulate rice; (2) a study of the effects of the Kwashiorkor-induced endocrine dysfunction and feminization of males on the development of feminine spatial ability; and (3) a study using rats to test this suggested endocrine basis of spatial ability under controlled laboratory conditions. It is concluded that these biosocial studies have provided extensive evidence for the biosocial hypothesis.

Other research interest included handedness, as well as a number of other areas in cross-cultural psychology, much of relevance to the people of Hong Kong.

While in Hong Kong, he was instrumental in proposing and then hosting in 1972 the inaugural meeting of what became the International Association fo Cross-Cultural Psychology. He was its first Secretary-General and later its President.

John Lewis Mervyn Binnie was born in 1930 in Sydney. According to genealogy websites the name Dawson was that of his paternal step-grandfather, Edwin Dawson, who adopted him after his father died and shortly before his mother died. This is the name he published under until 1980 when he changed his name to Binnie-Dawson.

Before he arrived in Hong Kong, he published from Edinburgh in the early 1960s where he was Research Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology; it seems it was while based there that he worked in Sierra Leone. He also served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Reserve. Later in the 1960s, he was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sydney. It was from there that he was appointed to the new chair in Hong Kong.

John Binnie-Dawson retired in the mid-1980s to Kingswear in Devon. He died in Torbay Hospital on 29 December 1987, aged 57.

John Binnie-Dawson was one of a small group who during the 1960s lifted the University of Hong Kong from being a largely teaching institution to one recognised internationally in research and scholarship.

…And he was another to demonstrate how important it is to be given a good start in life.

*The rats provided a good source of income for the department under a wheeze devised by John Phillips (1933-1987) (FRS 1981). Excess were preserved in large numbers and charged—in advance—to the ‘A’ level Examinations Board (then run by the University) against their possible use in practical examinations. The charge per rat was not small.

Binnie-Dawson, J. L. [1984]. Bio-Social and Endocrine Bases of Spatial Ability. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient 27: 129-151.