Richard Perham (1937 – 2015)

Richard Perham died on Saturday 14 February 2015, after a short illness, at the age of 77. Richard began as a PhD student in Fred Sanger’s group in the Biochemistry department in 1961, working with Ieuan Harris, and moved with Fred and Ieuan to the LMB when it was founded in 1962. He stayed on to the beginning of 1965, then after a postdoc with Fred Richards at Yale returned to the Biochemistry Department as Lecturer (1969), Reader (1976) and Professor of Structural Biochemistry (1989). He was Head of the Department of Biochemistry from 1984 to 1994, and Master of St John’s college from 2004 to 2007.

Richard was a highly distinguished biochemist with interests in molecular machines and self-assembly, in particular the structure and mechanism of multifunctional enzymes and complexes, and helical viruses. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1984 and received numerous awards. He retained fond memories of LMB and came to the Alumni meeting last year (2014). He was a friend and colleague to many of us who have been in Cambridge for a while, and will be sadly missed.

Hugh Pelham
Director, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology