Born on 19 May 1922 in Kingston upon Thames, the fifth of six children, Jo Ogston studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1939 to 1945. Several placements before and after qualification led her to start her career in laboratory physiology. Married to a pharmacologist, Miles Weatherall (see previous obituary), in 1944, she first worked in physiology, including jointly publishing with Miles on the effect of dithiols on time to death in poisoned rats. She felt that her career fell into place by good fortune. The work she did on fetal physiology at the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in Oxford between 1957 and 1959 laid a foundation for later epidemiological work on the identification and prevention of fetal anomalies.

Before moving more formally into epidemiology and medical statistics, Jo conducted health …