Samuel Victor Perry was a pioneer in muscle research and was responsible for the education of a worldwide body of scientists in his discipline. Probably the best current marker for the diagnosis and prognosis of heart attack and other heart conditions arises from his research about 30 years ago on the muscle protein called troponin I.
Known as Sam to his work colleagues and Victor to his family, he was a member of a diminishing band of scientists who completed much of their education as mature students after wartime service. Biological science at Cambridge in the 20 years from 1945 was a golden age in which Perry was an exemplary participant. This followed an adventurous war and coincided with several English international rugby caps.
In 1959 he became head of biochemistry at the University of Birmingham and, benefiting from increased investment in universities over the next decade, built a leading biochemistry department in outstanding new premises. His university role increased with the merging of his department with those of medicinal biochemistry and physiological chemistry into a new School of Biochemistry, of which he was the chairman until retirement in 1985.
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Samuel Victor Perry was born in 1918 and brought up in Southport, Merseyside. When he was 13 his father died from a heart condition arising out of illness sustained from fighting in the trenches of the First World War. His mother, at considerable financial sacrifice, supported him through his biochemistry degree at the University of Liverpool. A fateful and happy coincidence of those years was that he met and shared a laboratory bench with Rodney Porter, a lifelong friend and the winner in 1972 of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1939 Perry and Porter both graduated with first-class honours degrees. Each began studies as graduate students but was told that the looming war meant the chances of completing their doctorates were slim.
Perry’s war years are graphically described in an autobiographical essay “Fate has Smiled Kindly”, published in 1997 in Comprehensive Biochemistry Volume 40. Setting out from Liverpool in July 1941 he arrived in Egypt as a 2nd lieutenant. He was captured by the Germans in 1942 but escaped while being held in Bologna in northern Italy in 1943 only to be recaptured soon afterwards and told that he would be transported to Germany. On the way he escaped again in Mantua, hoping to get to Switzerland. He was again recaptured, crossing a bridge, coincidentally by the same guard who had caught him earlier. After being held successively in three prison camps in Germany Perry was moved to one in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1944 he attempted a third escape while being transferred to Brunswick owing to the advancing Russians. He managed to jump off the train after cutting a hole in the wagon as it moved through Bohemia. This escape also was short-lived. Perry was found guilty of damaging the property of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. During the one day he was away for his trial in Hildesheim, the Brunswick camp was bombed during an air-raid and several of his fellow prisoners were killed.
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After the war Perry went to Cambridge to pursue his doctoral degree. There he shared a laboratory with Porter and their respective supervisors Kenneth Bailey and Fred Sanger, both distinguished scientists elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in the 1950s. Sanger went on to be the recipient of two Nobel prizes.
In 1946 and 1947 Perry represented Cambridge in the rugby varsity match. In 1947 he won his first two international caps playing for England. In the following year he represented England in all five internationals, including the match against a hugely successful Australian side whose line was never crossed until their final match. However, revenge came in that game when Perry played for the Barbarians alongside their current president, Micky Steele-Bodger. They won 9-6, crossing the Australian line three times. Perry was proud of being the only FRS who was also a Barbarian and could claim to have played rugby at international level.
In 1948 he was married to Maureen Shaw and was soon to become a lecturer in the Biochemistry Department of the University of Cambridge. In 1959 he moved to Birmingham. Principally, his contributions came from studying the highly complex but extremely organised array of proteins found in skeletal and cardiac muscle. Seminal breakthroughs were occurring in the field especially in Britain, the US and Japan. These included the “sliding filament hypothesis” in 1954 that described a model for muscle contraction, and later a model for the regulation of contraction mediated through protein molecules by calcium ions. Putting substance on these protein-based models was Perry’s life work. It involved years of careful isolation and characterisation of many proteins and trying to understand their mechanism of action. The Royal Society has written that the whole muscle community has reason to be grateful to Perry for the huge number of highly trained and well-educated graduates, postgraduates and post-doctorals — all expert in protein biochemistry — who arose through his academic leadership. More than 15 of his research students went on to receive professorships.
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Perry made an important commitment throughout his career while at Birmingham to relate his basic research and that of others to human health conditions that he felt would ultimately benefit from this work. At the forefront of these were the various forms of muscular dystrophy, and he wrote movingly in his autobiographical essay of his first meeting with a large body of parents with their young son sufferers of the Duchenne form of the disease. For 30 years he served on the medical research committee of the Muscular Dystrophy Group of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (now the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign).
As is common in basic medical research, its benefits to help to cure the illness were depressingly remote over most of that time. It must have come as a rewarding experience during his retirement to learn of the enormous advances that followed the discovery in 1986 of the gene whose defect is responsible for the Duchenne form.
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His research in the late 1970s established the distinct properties in cardiac and skeletal muscle tissue of two proteins troponin I and troponin T. These differences are now the basis for the main biochemical assay, which Perry and his co-worker Peter Cummings anticipated, going alongside electrocardiograms for detection of myocardial infarct (heart attack) and for general diagnosis and prognosis of heart conditions.
In a tribute to Perry, Allan S. Jaffe, a leading physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, New York, renowned for its healthcare in cardiology, said: “Our present state of knowledge was primed and in many ways based on the landmark work of individuals such as Professor Perry.”
Perry was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and among his several distinctions were the award in 1977 of the CIBA medal of the Biochemical Society (of which he was the chairman from 1980 to 1983) and delivering in 1984 the Croonian Lecture of the Royal Society.
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Perry loved physical exercise and, after his rugby days, he was forever landscaping the gardens and building ponds, stone paths and walls at his retreat, Felin Werndew, a renovated water-mill at Dinas Cross in Pembrokeshire. In retirement he continued for many years in the Birmingham university physiology department, working with his valued research associate Valerie Patchell, and indeed published a further 50 papers.
Perry is survived by his wife, Maureen, and two daughters and a son.
Professor Samuel Victor Perry, FRS, muscle research biochemist, was born on July 16, 1918. He died on December 17, 2009, aged 91