Quick Facts
Biography
Dr Ethel Bidwell (1919-2003) was a British research scientist who investigated blood coagulation.
In 1950, Bidwell, an enzyme chemist, joined the Oxford University team headed by Gwyn Macfarlane. Two years later, she began to study plasma concentration and selective extraction of factor VIII.
By 1953 she had devised a technique to extract and concentrate bovine factor VIII that was 8000 times stronger than human plasma.
In 1959 she was working on the preparation of human coagulation factors at the Medical Research Council Blood Coagulation Research Unit at Churchill Hospital, Headington, Oxford.
Tilli Tansey wrote of inviting Bidwell to a witness seminar convened by the History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group:
She was extremely reluctant to attend, telling me over the phone when I invited her that she had nothing to contribute. But I knew, from reading the journals of the time and from a casual conversation with a haematologist friend that she was the person who, in the 1950s, had discovered factor VIII, the first reliable treatment for haemophilia, and I wanted to hear her story.