Marion Macleod

Marion Macleod (née Fairman) was born in Newcastle upon Tyne to Roland and Rhoda Fairman (née Finch), a coach painter and cleaner respectively. At the start of the second world war, she was evacuated to Berwick-upon-Tweed and then Shap in Cumberland. She returned to Newcastle and at age 16 left school and started working as a laboratory technician in a bacteriology lab in Newcastle University. She finished her school in evening classes and won a scholarship to attend university.^[1]

After graduation from Durham University with a double first degree in botany and bacteriology in 1952, she began a job as a post assistant lecturer at Glasgow University and completed her PhD in 1955.^[1]

In 1956 Macleod studied bacterial cytology at Harvard Medical School as a Harkness Fellow, and then from 1957 to 1958 she studied virology at the California Institute of Technology.^[1][2] While in the US, she met Norman Macleod, another Harkness Fellow, and in 1959 they married. They had three children. Following a break in her career to raise children, she returned as a part-time lecturer at Napier College, Edinburgh.

In the 1983 general election she stood as the Social Democratic Party (SDP) candidate in Edinburgh Central, where she came third.^[1] Macleod completed a second PhD on medical sociology in 1986 from Edinburgh University, and then worked as a lecturer at Queen Margaret College in medical sociology.^[1][2]