In his 2005 novel, “Saturday,” the acclaimed writer Ian McEwan describes what his protagonist, Henry Perowne, sees when he visits a London seafood market to buy ingredients for a fish stew: crates of crabs and lobsters, still moving, and marble slabs arrayed with “bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms.”

While there, he ponders reports of recent scientific research demonstrating that fish can feel pain. It is a good thing that sea creatures “have no voice,” Perowne thinks . “Otherwise there’d be howling from those crates.”

Perowne’s thoughts may have been fictional, but the reports were real. They were written by Victoria Braithwaite , then a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, who died on Sept. 30 at her home in Boalsburg, Pa. She was 52.

Her death, from pancreatic cancer, was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Penn State University, where she had been a professor of fisheries and biology since 2007.