Roderic Alfred Gregory
Roderic Alfred Gregory CBE FRS was a British physiologist.
Early life and career
He was born in 1913 in Plaistow, Essex, the only child of Alfred Gregory and Alice Jane Gregory. His father was a fitter and turner who, in 1913, was employed by Brunner and Mond. At the age of 11 he started at the local grammar school, George Green's School.He then trained as a physiologist in the Department of Physiology at University College, London in the early 1930s and then studied gastrointestinal physiology for a PhD at Northwestern University, Illinois. He turned his attention to gastrin while he was Holt Professor of Physiology, and Head of Department, at the University of Liverpool. He "made fundamental contributions to the study of gut hormones through his isolation of the gastric acid stimulating hormone gastrin, the characterisation of its spectrum of actions, the identification of structure-activity relationships and discovery that gastrin was produced in excess in the tumours of patients with Zollinger–Ellison syndrome". Much of the work on gastrin at Liverpool was with his long-term collaborator Hilda Tracy in the same department.