My husband, Ulrich Loening, who has died aged 94, was a lecturer first in the botany and then in the zoology departments (now the molecular plant sciences and biological sciences departments) of Edinburgh University. He engaged in fundamental research and made significant contributions to the developing science of molecular biology.
He had always had a great interest and concern for the natural world. After the establishment by Conrad Waddington, a professor of genetics, of the school of the man-made future at Edinburgh, Ulrich became actively involved in environmental and green issues.
In 1984 Ulrich was appointed director of the Centre for Human Ecology (CHE) at the university. Human ecology was a new and developing concept, which broadened environmental science to encompass the study of all aspects of human behaviour that affects the biosphere.
Ulrich was born in Berlin to Lilli (nee Cohn) and Erich Loening, a photochemist who developed early colour printing methods and later worked for Kodak. His parents had moved from Berlin to London in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution. In Ulrich’s teenage years the family lived in Jordans, Buckinghamshire, a centre of Quakerism.
Although he never became a member of the Society of Friends, he attended Quaker meetings and was influenced by their thinking. His interest in nature, in ecological issues and in organic agriculture stemmed from his early experiences in a rural environment, of gardening and keeping bees and chickens, and by Quaker concepts of self-sufficiency.
Ulrich went to Merchant Taylors’ school, north-west London, and then studied biochemistry at Wadham College, Oxford (where he also got his doctorate), graduating in 1954.
We met in Oxford in 1955, while performing music – Ulrich played the cello and I played the violin. We married in 1957 and moved to Edinburgh in 1959, where Ulrich first took up an Agricultural Research Council fellowship at the botanic gardens.
In 1992 Ulrich and some colleagues established the first master’s degree in human ecology. Although the CHE was closed in 1996, the MSc course continued to run via the Open University and later Strathclyde University.
In the early 1970s, together with four other families, we bought a derelict steading (farm buildings) and renovated what had been a coach house into a family home in Ormiston, East Lothian. A large garden made us self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit.
An adjacent piece of neglected woodland was acquired by the group, in which we planted more than 1,000 trees. Ulrich was a skilled woodworker and in 1958 made a cello. He built much of his own laboratory equipment.
Ulrich is survived by me, our three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
