McLaren was the daughter of Sir Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway and a Liberal MP, and Christabel Mary Melville MacNaghten. She was born in London and lived there until the war, when her family moved to their estate at Bodnant, North Wales. As a child she appeared in the film version of H.G. Wells' novel Things to Come released in 1936. She read zoology at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, later gaining an MA. Researching mite infestation of Drosophila under J.B.S. Haldane, she continued her post-graduate studies at University College London from 1949, first under Peter Medawar on the genetics of rabbits and then on neurotropic murine viruses under Kingsley Sanders. She obtained her D.Phil. in 1952 and married fellow student Dr Donald Michie on 6 October 1952.
As a couple, McLaren and Donald Michie worked together at University College, London from 1952 to 1955, and afterwards at the Royal Veterinary College, on the variation in the number of lumbar vertebrae in mice as a function of maternal environment. McLaren would later take up research on fertility in mice, including superovulation and superpregnancy. In 1958, she published a landmark Nature paper with John D. Biggers reporting the first successful development and birth of mice in vitro, a paper which has been called "one of the most significant papers in the history of reproductive biology and medicine". During this period, she also had three children:
However, the marriage ended in divorce in 1959, and McLaren moved to the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh to continue her research. The couple remained on good terms; Michie also moved to Edinburgh. The experience of raising children as a single career parent made McLaren a strong advocate for government assistance towards childcare.
Later career
McLaren spent the next 15 years at the Institute of Animal Genetics, studying a variety of topics related to fertility, development and epigenetics, including the development of mouse embryonic transfer, immunocontraception, and the skeletal characteristics of chimerae. In 1974, she left Edinburgh to become the Director of the MRC Mammalian Development Unit in London. In 1992, she retired from the Mammalian Development Unit and moved to Cambridge, joining the Wellcome/CRC Institute, later the Gurdon Institute. She was made a Fellow-Commoner of Christ's College, Cambridge in 1991. McLaren's work often took her outside the University. She was a member of the committee established to inquire into the technologies of in vitro fertilisation and embryology, which later produced the Warnock Report. She was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 1991–2000. In 2004 McLaren was one of the co-founders of the Frozen Ark project, along with husband and wifeBryan and Ann Clarke. The project's aim is "Saving the DNA and viable cells of the world's endangered species".
McLaren and her ex-husband Donald Michie were killed in a road accident on 7 July 2007, when their car left the M11 motorway as they travelled from Cambridge to London. There is a fund in the name of Anne McLaren for encouragement of scientific study.
Trivia
In her later life, she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which made travel to the USA difficult for a while.
Legacy
The Anne McLaren Papers are housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.
