George Owen Mackie (born October 20, 1929) is a British–Canadian professor emeritus of

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary ...

at the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary insti ...

. Prior to this, he worked at the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

Department of Zoology, which he left in 1968. Much of his research focussed on invertebrate behavioural physiology. He was born in

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-we ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

, on October 20, 1929, youngest son of Frederick Percival Mackie. After obtaining a B.A. from the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

in 1953, he obtained an M.A. and a D. Phil from Oxford in 1957.Biography
/ref>CV
/ref> In 1982, he was made a fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

. In 1991, he was made a fellow of the

Royal Society of London The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...

Career

Mackie worked on jellyfish and other marine invertebrates, exploring the role of excitable epithelia as signalling pathways and analysing the neuromuscular basis of behaviour. He and Robert Meech discovered axons in Aglantha that conduct two sorts of action potential: sodium-based in fast swimming, calcium-based in slow. With Sally Leys he found that hexactinellid sponges conduct electrical impulses throughout their bodies, regulating the activity of the flagella that produce the feeding current.

References

Living people Alumni of the University of Oxford Academic staff of the University of Victoria Canadian zoologists Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Fellows of the Royal Society 1929 births Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society {{Canada-scientist-stub