John Coote had two great passions. One was neurophysiology, the other was climbing, but his penchant for taking on dangerous challenges in the mountains almost brought a premature end to what would turn out to be a glittering career in research and teaching.
Coote was 33 when he and two other climbers set out to scale Pico Bolívar, the highest mountain in Venezuela. On their way down from the summit a rockfall snapped their descending rope and the three climbers fell.
Coote’s Venezuelan companions were killed, and he ended up lying on a rocky ledge for ten hours next to the body of one of the other climbers. He was rescued by a search party and taken to hospital, where he was found to have a fractured skull.
This was not Coote’s first big injury. He had broken his pelvis after falling while rock climbing in England. He took fewer risks after getting married and having children, but continued to visit the Alps and the Himalayas.
In 1988 he was able to combine his passions when a team from the Birmingham Medical Research Expeditionary Society carried out a study of Peruvian Indians living in the high Andes who are prone to chronic mountain sickness. When Coote and his colleagues arrived at the hospital that would be their base, in Cerro de Pasco, they found that the building was covered in bullet holes because of attacks by Shining Path guerrillas.
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That night Coote and his team heard the sounds of fighting for the first time, but continued with the mission. “We can always filter out the machinegun fire on the EEG [electroencephalogram — a device used to test electrical activity in the brain],” he joked.
His focus in research was on the brain’s control of blood pressure in muscles. He and colleagues conducted path-breaking experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s showing how muscles talk to the brain through nerve passages. They demonstrated that if a muscle is stimulated, the receptors inside the tissue feed back into the nerve and send signals back to the brain.
In his later research, collaborating with Professor André Ng at the University of Leicester, Coote focused on the way the brain and heart interact through the nervous system. His work showed — contrary to previous assumptions — that the vagus nerve plays a key role in protecting the heart against rhythmic disturbances.
John Haven Coote was born in Enfield, north London, in 1936. His father, Albert Coote, was an electrical engineer who became a Pentecostal minister. His mother, Gladys, was from a mining family in south Wales and worked in domestic service. Coote first went to school in Enfield, but was evacuated with his mother and two sisters during the Blitz, first to Somerset then to south Wales, where he enjoyed his first taste of walking in the hills.
On returning to London he went to Enfield Grammar School then began reading medicine and physiology at University College London. Even though National Service would have been phased out before he had finished his studies, Coote declared himself a conscientious objector in the mid- Fifties. As a result he was sentenced to three years of farm work, which proved to be an eye-opener for a young man who had lived a fairly sheltered existence as the son of a clergyman.
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Returning to his studies, he took a BSc in physiology and completed his PhD in 1964. It was at this time that he started to take an interest in the brain’s control of circulation.
Coote joined the department of physiology at the University of Birmingham in 1967, working under Professor Sidney Hilton. He became the Bowman professor of physiology in 1983 and was also appointed visiting professor at the University of Leicester. Despite his earlier pacifism, he carried out advisory work for the Royal Air Force, some of which concerned the problem of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) in jet pilots.
He was an honorary member of the Physiological Society and served as chairman of the editorial board of its monthly journal. He was awarded the Carl Ludwig Distinguished Lectureship of the American Physiological Society in 2003 and the Paton Prize of the Physiological Society in 2005.
Modest and straight-talking — he abhorred jargon — Coote was an inspiration to hundreds of students. His department thrived. He loved nothing better than a brain-storming session over coffee and a piece of Fry’s Turkish Delight. In 2013 Coote’s colleagues honoured him with an all-day symposium in Birmingham that highlighted his academic contribution.
He met his future wife, Susan Hylton, an anaesthetist, on a blind date set up by one of her friends in 1974. It was love at first sight. They were engaged within two months and married later that year. She survives him with their three children: Edward, who became a dentist; Rachel, who is an aerospace engineer; and Naomi, who works in banking. Their father enjoyed DIY and supported charities that helped to send the children of Sherpas to school in Nepal.
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During his inaugural lecture as the new professor at Birmingham in 1983, Coote faced the difficulty of addressing a diverse audience. His solution was to intersperse complex neurophysiology with “thinking time”, when slides of soaring mountain peaks, ice ridges and azure skies would appear on the screen behind him. “Now,” he advised those in the lecture theatre, “just rest your eyes on that and let it sink in.”
John Coote, cardiovascular physiologist, was born on January 5, 1936. He died of a ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm on November 27, 2017, aged 81