Abstract

As a tribute to S. V. Perry who to our sorrow left us lastDecember 2009, I would like to recount some memories ofmy Birmingham connection in the sixties of last century. Itwill be a personal account only touching lightly on sciencehere and there. Science, however, and in particular musclescience, was our close companion through most of the timeI spent in Birmingham in and out of Perry’s laboratory.When I came across from Switzerland with wife and threechildren, I met a solid crew of young investigators in thelab including David Hartshorne, Jake Kendrick-Jones andIan Trayer. I was a MD who felt that medicine, though anoble profession, was rather an empirical enterprise, whichdid not satisfy my thirst for knowledge. During my years inBirmingham Perry supported me doing a PhD that shouldprovide me with a more solid basis for doing research inthe future. Biochemistry was what I aspired to which was,however, not a curriculum in its own right at the Universityof Basel at the time when I finished medicine. Perry was anadmirable biochemist who got the finishing touch duringthe years with Kenneth Bailey in Cambridge (Perry 1997).In Perry’s lab I avidly soaked up all the biochemicaltechnologies new to me. Asking for explanation of everylittle detail, I occasionally must have gotten on the nervesof my colleagues who looked down a bit on the foreignMD. The boys in the lab called Perry ‘‘Prof’’ while amongthemselves they talked about ‘‘Sam’’ (Samuel). My relationto ‘‘Prof’’ was a bit of an exception, he told me to addresshim by ‘‘Victor’’ as he was privately called in his familyand by friends. So I did, but always with a certain uncer-tainty, until years later when our relation grew into a deepfriendship. With retrospect this development may havebeen facilitated by me gaining more self-confidence.However, from my perspective Victor Perry has alwaysremained one of the scientific giants I was privileged toknow well (Fig. 1).In the lab we were messing around with preparationsfrom rabbit muscle chasing for protein factors that inhib-ited the actomyosin MgATPase and conferred Ca

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