David Landon obituary

The Guardian

20-03-2025

My father, David Landon, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer in the use of high-resolution electron microscopes to improve the understanding of neuromuscular diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and established a state-of-the-art electron microscopy facility that provided diagnostic services for several London hospitals that ran from the mid-1970s onwards.
Specialising in exploring the microscopic structure and function of nerves and muscles, his early published papers describing structures involved in nerve conduction called the nodes of Ranvier were the start of a fruitful research career that used electron microscopes in diagnostic services for neuromuscular conditions.
Born in London, David was the son of the novelist and screenwriter Christopher Landon and his Australian wife, Isabella (nee Campbell). When the second world war broke out, Isabella took three-year-old David to Australia to escape the blitz, and they returned in 1945.
Inspired by his biology teacher at Lancing college in Sussex, David developed a fascination with zoology, catching butterflies and watching birds as an escape from the tedium of boarding school and tensions at home in Norfolk following his parents' divorce.
During medical training at Guy's hospital medical school in London, he met Karen Poole, a fellow student, and they married in 1960.
After qualifying in 1959, David became a house physician and outpatients officer in the Guy's casualty department, senior house officer at Paddington hospital and then a lecturer in anatomy at Guy's before joining a new Medical Research Council research group in applied neurobiology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London.
He intended to stay only a few years, but remained there for the rest of his professional life, and over the years held posts at the hospital as senior lecturer in applied neurobiology (1964-77), consultant in morbid anatomy (1974-2001), professor of neurocytology (1991-2001) and as dean of the Institute of Neurology (1987-95), an adjacent facility that stands within the faculty for brain sciences of University College London.
His only diversions away from working at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery came in 1975 when he spent three months setting up an electron microscopy facility at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, and in 1983 when he went to Bombay (now Mumbai), India, to train up 40 technicians on electron microscope use in relation to leprosy research.
On his retirement in 2001 he was made a freeman of the Pewterers Company, in recognition of his work with the company's charitable trust.
David was a generous mentor and a kind, loving family man. He loved his garden and developed a talent for silversmithing during retirement.
He is survived by Karen, their three children, James, Christopher and me, five grandchildren, Heidi, Jack, Felix, Jason and Wilfred, and his brother, Nicholas.