Passages: An Immigrant Family in New Zealand

Edward Jones was a fourth generation New Zealander and a graduate of the School of Medicine at the University of Otago, (Mb.ChB. 1962). After a year as a house surgeon at Tauranga Hospital he turned to a career in biological research and took up an appointment in the Anatomy Department at the University of Otago. In 1965 he was awarded a prestigious Nuffield Dominions Demonstratorship to Oxford University to pursue a D. Phil. in (neuro)Anatomy. Returning to Otago University in 1969 he re-joined the faculty in the Anatomy department where he remained for three years continuing research begun at Oxford, and gaining an M.D. which is a post graduate degree in New Zealand. In 1972 he moved to the United States to a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis. He moved to the University of California, Irvine in 1984 and then to the University of California, Davis in 1998. Edward Jones, known as Ted to family, friends and colleagues, was a man of many parts. He was a widely published and internationally distinguished scientist, a neurobiologist who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a classical scholar and lover of literature and history for whom books and scholarship were an abiding passion, and a keen amateur winemaker and olive oil producer during the last part of his life in California. His interest in the history of his own family grew out of a desire to understand the genetics involved familial gastric cancer when he encountered a Maori family in Tauranga seriously afflicted by the disease, and later when he learned of the rather high incidence of depression leading to suicide and also inherited hemochromatosis in his own family. Edward Jones died in 2011.