page_title: Samuel Victor Perry
section_title: Biochemistry career
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Victor Perry / Biochemistry career
caption_attribution_description: English: Felin Werndew Once a mill using the water from the stream running down Cwm Fforest, and standing on the turnpike road on which this disused bridge was very likely situated. The modern road runs at a higher level alongside, making this site is almost invisible to passers-by.
context_page_description: Samuel Victor Perry FRS was an English biochemist who was a pioneer in the field of muscle biochemistry. In his earlier years he was a rugby union lock who played club rugby for Cambridge University R.U.F.C. and international rugby for England.
  After schooling in Southport Perry took a biochemistry degree at the University of Liverpool. His academic career was then interrupted by war service in the Royal Artillery, though he spent much of the Second World War in Italian and German prisoner-of-war camps after being captured during the Western Desert Campaign. After his liberation and demobilisation, he undertook doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. This was followed by a period of post-doctoral study in the United States, before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer. In 1959 he moved to the University of Birmingham as head of its new biochemistry department.
  Perry's later career saw him serve on several of the British research councils, and working with the charities the British Heart Foundation and the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.
context_section_description: Back in Britain, Perry took a post at the University of Cambridge to complete his PhD. At Cambridge he studied under Kenneth Bailey, and shared a laboratory with his old friend Porter and Fred Sanger. In Cambridge, Perry developed a reputation as a major figure in muscle research and won the Trinity College prize fellowship for his pioneering doctoral thesis. He took up a lecturing post in Cambridge and in 1948, while still at the university, he married Maureen Shaw, an artist and actress he met in Southport.
  He took a post at the University of Birmingham in 1959, and later served on the research committees of the Science Research Council the Medical Research Council, Agricultural Research Council and the British Heart Foundation. He was also spent twenty years associated with the British research charity the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign.
  In 1959, just before his move to Birmingham, he purchased Felin-Werrdew a ruined 18th century watermill in Dinas Cross, Pembrokeshire in Wales. This became a massive project, and required major conversions and landscaping. During the 1960s he persuaded his students to help improve his home and its gardens as part of their "PhD research".  After his retirement, he and wife Maureen moved permanently to the Watermill in Wales.
  In March 1974, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and contributed more than 300 scientific papers throughout his career. In 1984 he gave the Croonian Lecture on  Calcium and the regulation of contractile activity.
caption: Felin Werndew, Perry's retirement cottage in Pembrokshire
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