Peter Stanley Harper
BMJ 2021; 372 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n671 (Published 11 March 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;372:n671- Julian Sampson
Peter Stanley Harper grew up in Barnstaple and developed a keen and lasting love of nature from time spent in the surrounding countryside, but followed his father, Richard, a GP, into medicine. His academic leanings were no doubt influenced by both his father, who wrote two books on the relation between evolution and disease, and by his mother, Margery (born Elkington), who was a French scholar with a first class degree from Oxford and a doctorate from the Sorbonne, but who sacrificed her own career for her husband’s.
During preclinical studies at Oxford, Peter attended additional lectures at the Department of Zoology and became determined to find a way to combine his genetic and clinical interests professionally. At the time there was no established clinical career route to enable this, and after completing undergraduate clinical attachments at St Thomas’ he initially took jobs in paediatrics and internal medicine. In 1967 he moved to Liverpool, soon finding a natural home with Cyril Clarke’s team (later Sir Cyril, president of the Royal College of Physicians). Like Peter, Clarke had a major interest in genetics, developed through his research on the swallow tailed butterfly, and he had recently established the Nuffield Unit of Medical Genetics at the University. Peter then spent two years at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, USA, with Victor McKusick, completing his doctoral studies on …
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