Richard Charles (Donn) Casey (1931-2009) was born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of Richard Gardener Casey, Lord Casey of Berwick, 16th Governor-General of Australia, and Maie Casey (nee Ryan), author, artist and pioneer aviator. Casey grew up in Geelong, Washington, Cairo and Calcutta [Kolkata]. He studied agricultural science at Melbourne University and graduated BAgrSc in 1956. Casey’s working life was centred on the issue of population control. After short stints at the Population Council, Rockefeller Foundation, in New York and in India, he settled in Cambridge, England, in 1962.



He established the Reproduction Research Information Service Ltd. (RRIS) in Cambridge to produce ‘Bibliography of Reproduction’, a monthly list of research papers with an accompanying database. He also served in administrative roles with the Society for the Study of Fertility and the Simon Population Trust. From 1974 onwards, he worked on developing the Filshie Clip as an alternative method of female sterilization to the Falope ring. The Filshie Clip was marketed by Femcare, a Nottingham-based firm. In 1983, Casey resigned from the Simon Population Trust and worked for a year in a laboratory on micromanipulation of sheep eggs under Dr Bob Moor, Agriculture and Food Research Council, in Cambridge. Following the sale of the Casey family farm in Australia the 1980s, Casey worked as a freelance inventor, focusing on making laboratory devices.



In the late 1980s he set up Casey Medical Devices Ltd. to develop the Cambridge Clip, a less expensive prototype of the Filshie Clip, with a plastic rather than metal clip. He died in Cambridge in 2009.