Michael Stewart Pease
OBE[ (2 October 1890 – 27 July 1966) was a
British classical geneticist at
Cambridge University.
Pease was the son of
Edward Reynolds Pease, writer and a founding member of the
Fabian Society, of the Pease family of
Quakers. He married Helen Bowen Wedgwood, daughter of the Labour politician
Josiah Wedgwood IV (later 1st Baron Wedgwood), of the
Wedgwood pottery family on 24 February 1920 at Chelsea Register Office. Their children include the physicist
Bas Pease and Jocelyn Richenda Gammell Pease (1925–2003), who married the Nobel-prize winning biologist
Andrew Huxley.
His research in chicken genetics included the development of an
auto-sexing breed of chickens where the gender was clearly distinguished by the chicken's plumage.[3] He also served as a Labour councillor on the Cambridge County Council for
Girton. He was appointed to be an Ordinary Officers of the Civil Division of the
Order of the British Empire in 1966 for political and public services in Cambridgeshire.
He was interned at
Ruhleben Prisoner of War Camp during the
First World War and his father, a Major at the time, asked whether he could be exchanged for a German prisoner wishing to return to Berlin. While interned Pease tried to get gardens put into the camp and on April 27, 1916 gave a lecture on dancing in Elizabethan times.