Graham Roger Serjeant

Graham Roger Serjeant (born 1938) is a British medical researcher who studied sickle-cell disease in Jamaica, setting up screening programmes and long-term cohort studies. He was Director of the MRC Epidemiology Research Unit at the University of the West Indies and remains chairman of the Sickle Cell Trust (Jamaica). He is author or co-author of three books and over 140 publications on sickle-cell disease. His work has addressed the variability of sickle-cell disease with special emphasis on developing low-cost models of management suitable to countries with large numbers of patients and limited resources.

Graham Serjeant was born in Bristol on 26 October 1938 to Ewart and Violet Serjeant, the middle of three boys born five years apart.

At about 18 months of age, his family moved to Hove in Sussex and he attended the local primary school between the ages of five and 10, then entered the Quaker boarding school at Sibford Ferris in Oxfordshire. In those days, school ended at the 5th form and after passing 11 subjects at O-level, he moved to another Quaker boarding school, Bootham in York. Here he studied botany, zoology, physics and chemistry at A-level but set his sights on attending Cambridge. He was successful and proceeded to the entrance examinations at Cambridge where, following an interview with Sir Henry Thirkill, master of Clare College, he was offered a place to study the Natural Science Tripos in September 1957. He completed the Natural Science Tripos Part 1 in two years with a 2–1 degree and proceeded to sit for a Part 2 in anatomy under Professor John Dixon Boyd.

He visited East Africa in the summer of 1960, before commencing clinical studies at the London Hospital in Whitechapel in September 1960. He sought an opportunity to return to Uganda for some clinical training in paediatrics for four months under Professor Derrick Jelliffe. He was the only student at that time to request an elective period abroad whereas this has now become a routine part of medical education. This experience proved vital in later decisions to work on sickle-cell disease in Jamaica.

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