VOLUME 1 - ISSUE 3 - LORD PERRY OF WALTON, FRS

"research … the only really organised game for adults." 1

It was with great sadness that the Society learned of the sudden death of Lord Perry of Walton, on the 17 July 2003, at the age of 82. Walter Laing Macdonald Perry was a native of Dundee, educated at Morgan Academy Dundee, Ayr Academy, Dundee High School and at St Andrews [MB ChB, MD and DSc] winning the Rutherford Silver Medal for his MD thesis and the Sykes Gold Medal for his DSc thesis. After Casualty Officer and House Surgeon posts, he served as a Medical Officer in the Colonial Medical Service in Nigeria in 1944-46, then briefly as a Medical Officer in the RA, (1946-47), before embarking on a scientific career on the staff of the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Medical Research from 1947 to 1958, serving as Director of the Department of Biological Standards from 1952-58. He achieved MRCP (Ed) in 1963 and was elected FRCPE in 1967, FRCP in 1978, FRSE in 1960 and FRS in 1985.

In 1958 he came to Edinburgh as Professor of Pharmacology, holding the Chair from 1958-1968. During this time he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine [1965-67] and Vice Principal of the University [1967-68] before leaving to become the inaugural Vice Chancellor of the Open University in 1968, a post he held until 1981. During this period at the Open University he developed a second distinguished career as a University administrator and a promoter and facilitator of open and distance learning, in which fields he later carried out extensive work on behalf of the United Nations. A third career, in politics and public life, began with his ennoblement to a life peerage in 1979, taking the title of Walton in the County of Buckinghamshire, the initial base of the Open University. Latterly Walter sat as a Liberal Democrat, having twice been Social Democratic Party deputy leader in the Lords in the 1980s. He took an active role in the Lords' Select Committee on Science and Technology and held interests in and spoke on many areas of public policy, including fisheries policy.

Recognition of his distinguished careers came with appointments as OBE in 1957, Knight Bachelor in 1974 and Baron in 1979; 10 honorary Degrees, from UK, North American, Indian and Australian Universities and Fellowships of the Open University and University College London; the Wellcome Gold Medal, 1993 and Inaugural Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000. He was Chairman, President or member of numerous commercial, educational, public interest and scientific bodies. Lord Perry's publications included sole or part authorship of five books and 70 papers.

Shining through Walter Perry's career are strengths of commitment and sheer hard work, rigorous analysis of scientific, educational and organisational problems, experimentation and pursuit of clear objectives. Against scepticism, elitism and ill-informed criticism he drove through the establishment of the Open University. It is today respected inter-nationally, is by some orders of magnitude our largest university in terms of student enrolment and is a demonstrably successful outcome from an experiment conceived forty years ago. It represents a fine monument to Walter Perry. Walter once described himself as a "Doc of all Trades" and has written "I always carried out my researches on the basis that I was taking part in the only really organised game for adults". Throughout his life, Walter remained true to these two claims and I would suggest to the younger members of the BPS that they could not do better than follow his example.

As Director of Biological Standards at Mill Hill, Walter played a leading role in the government's attempts to provide adequate supplies of the Salk vaccine for poliomyelitis. But by his own admission he became disenchanted - or, more likely, bored - with what we would now call the media circus surrounding the government's clumsy attempts to limit the polio epidemic that visited the UK every summer. Fortunately, the Edinburgh medical school was on a high and took the opportunity to replace Gaddum, one of the world's leading pharmacologists, with a dynamic and innovative head of department.
Although Walter's skills and energy as an initiator and administrator of new projects have been adequately publicised his interest and indeed technical skills in the laboratory are often overlooked. His detailed knowledge of a wide range of research techniques and topics was crucial to rebuilding the department in Edinburgh and allowed him to promote the work of some and rejuvenate the work of others. Nothing seemed to intimidate him, be it the rather esoteric receptor theory which had brought Edinburgh to the fore, biophysics or gut bath pharmacology. However, perhaps his most inspired achievement was to build a new MRC research unit devoted to psychiatric research around the skills of Dr Tom Crawford who had been a major player in Gaddum's final research in Edinburgh. In his first position at Mill Hill, Walter carried out an unusual array of different experiments which included an attempt to determine the extra-erythrocytic location of the malaria parasite and assays to look at the possible mode of action of paludrine, a novel antimalarial. This work, on monkeys and tissue culture, set him in good stead when later he was required to test batches of the Salk vaccine for the presence of live virus.

However, Walter had also worked part-time in the laboratory set up by Sir Henry Dale, the Nobel Prize winner who had proved the chemical nature of synaptic transmission at the neuromuscular junction. He must have been an able pupil and published a number of papers showing that acetylcholine was also the transmitter at sympathetic and parasympathetic ganglia. As an honours student in Edinburgh, I saw him repeat these experiments as a demonstration. This was no mean feat, since the surgery involved compares in difficulty with complex eye surgery. Donald Straughan assayed the effluent for acetylcholine using a leech muscle preparation.

Walter also experimented with the teaching. Perhaps the most daring of his experiments was to ban half the class from formal lectures and to introduce a series of externally marked exams and, for the first time in Edinburgh, computer marked multiple-choice questions. Those students who were banned from the formal lectures did just as well as, if not better than, those taught traditionally. As the department began to flourish Walter became more and more involved in Faculty matters and took a substantial interest in a review of the curriculum. In particular he championed the preliminary degree of Bachelor of Medical Science after 3 years study whereby every medical student graduated with a BSc in Medical Sciences before going on to their clinical studies. Those who took an intercalated year graduated with honours. Walter argued strongly that the curriculum for the first three years should be science-based since the majority of Edinburgh graduates at that time went on to become consultants, often as academics in medical schools, and would be expected to contribute to research.

Finally, Walter was appointed a part-time Vice-Principal by Michael Swan. Walter drew the short straw and was made responsible for resource allocation. He upset his old faculty by funding replacement posts at the lowest rate possible. The Faculty of Medicine was then expected to find the extra money required to make the senior clinical appointments in the Edinburgh Hospitals. At this point, Walter had become a master of a new trade and left both pharmacology and Edinburgh to play a new game for rather bigger stakes as the first Vice-Chancellor of the Open University.

Walter joined the BPS in 1949 and served the Society well, first as Secretary 1957-1961, Foreign Secretary 1959-1960, member of the committee 1961-1963 and finally as an editor 1955-1960. In 1993 the Society awarded him the Wellcome Gold Medal. In the House of Lords he continued to serve pharmacology well as a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology. In addition he was a member and chairman of a number of subcommittees reporting on topics of considerable interest to the Society's members, including Cannabis: the Scientific and Medical Evidence, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and Science and Society. He thus continued to hit the headlines as a pharmacologist. On the day on which the report on cannabis was published, one of the committee's major recommendations, that "though cannabis should remain a controlled drug, the law should be changed to allow doctors to prescribe an appropriate preparation of cannabis if they saw fit" was rejected by the government in an unprecedented step, on the grounds that more safety and efficacy testing was necessary. Lord Perry's position was that clinical trials could take up to five years, too long for sufferers to wait.

Walter also took a keen interest in the welfare of seafarers and fishermen. His remarks in the House of Lords on overfishing in 1995 made a considerable impact on both sides of the Atlantic and 2003 saw the publication of a paper entitled "Answering Lord Perry's question: dissecting regulatory fishing". Although he was not a member of the House of Lords committee on animal experimentation, he attended every debate and committee meeting in the Lords that was relevant to animal research and took every opportunity to argue the case. At the time of his death Lord Perry was President of the Research Defence Society and had been since 1993. He was also a past Chairman (1979-1983) and had been a committed member for 40 years. He was a tireless defender of the work of Huntingdon Life Sciences and delighted in confronting anti-vivisectionists by asking them whether, if they or one of their family were seriously ill, they would be prepared to benefit from the results of research which could not possibly have been carried out without the use of animals. The RDS will miss his active participation and leadership.

Several newspapers have published obituaries focussing on the later half of Walter Perry's life and give fairly detailed accounts of his time as the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University and his achievements in the House of Lords. Such was Walter's personality that several of the authors are tempted to describe this by making a direct link between his qualities and the effort that was required to establish the Open University - tenacious, tactful and tough. Another portrayal, much nearer the mark, likens him to one of Frederick the Great's Generals: "a rough Scots profile, with eyes that are second-guessing the opposition, three or four moves ahead." Although close, this is not quite correct, since Walter, regardless of the opposition - whether it were Minister of the Crown, Dean of Medicine, stroppy senior lecturer, honours student or a very young daughter - had to win, no matter the game and no matter the prize. This he did with such enthusiasm, grace, boyish charm and modesty that it was impossible for the loser not to join in the celebrations. However, the loser was as often as not in for another surprise as, at the next airing of the issue, Walter changed his game plan and adopted his opponent's argument as his own.

Walter was working right up until he died in his sleep in his London club, still travelling weekly between London and Scotland. Whenever we met on the train I was amazed by his enthusiasm for all his committees and his anxiety to make an even greater contribution to his favourite causes. In June, in spite of his obvious failing health, he just could not wait for the summer recess to end and a new session to begin.
1 Perry WML (1993) Doc of all trades Proc R Coll Physicians Edinb 23, 73-89.

Professor John S Kelly, Division of Neuroscience, University of Edinburgh.