Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, 3rd Lord Rothschild, (1910-1990), was a biologist, a cricketer, a wartime officer for the UK Security Service, a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N M Rothschild & Sons, and an advisor to the UK governments. His choice of design for his card of 1956 shows an electron micrograph image of a sea-urchin egg. At Trinity College Cambridge, Victor worked in the Zoology Department before gaining a PhD in 1935. In 1950, for his work on fertilization, he gained a DSc. The design of his 1956 card, depicting the application of the latest technology appealed to Lord Rothschild’s scientific nature, and was in keeping with the spirit of the 1950s, when technology developed during the War was being applied to peacetime purposes.
This card bears the caption: "Ths is an electron micrograph, magnification 30,000 of the surface of a sea-urchin ehh three minutes after fertilization. The dark triangulkar head of the fertilizing spermatozoon can be seen, together with the circular middle-piece, just inside the surface of the egg. Christmas 1956."
