Robert P. Perry 1931–2013

Robert P. Perry On July 15, Robert Palese Perry—‘‘Bob’’ to those who knew him—passed away at the age of 82. Bob was a pioneer in studying gene transcription in mammalian cells, a wonderful mentor to his preand postdoctoral students, and a compassionate family man. He leaves behind his wife Zoila, a well-known sculptor with whom he enjoyed a happy marriage for 57 years, his two daughters Adele and Monique, his son Rocco, and seven grandchildren. Of Italian origin—his grandparents moved from Trivigno, a small town in Southern Italy, to the United States in the late 19 century—Bob grew up in Chicago. He earned his bachelor degree as a major in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1951 and his PhD in biophysics from the University of Chicago in 1956. Thereafter, he did postdoctoral work at theOakRidgeNational Laboratory in Tennessee, at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, and at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. In 1960, Bob was hired as an independent investigator by the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research (now part of the Fox Chase Cancer Center). He remained faithful to this institution until he retired in 2004. From 1971 to 1974 he served as Associate Director of the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research. In 1977 Bob was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Section of Cellular and Developmental Biology, for his exceptional research contributions in this field. In 1994 he was nominated to be the first occupant of the Stanley P. Reimann Endowed Chair in Oncology Research, and in 1995 he received the Stanley P. Reimann Honor Award. Stanley P. Reimann was the founder of the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research, and these were the highest award given by the Institute. During the BC (Before Cloning) era there were probably fewer than a dozen laboratories worldwide doing cuttingedge research on gene transcription in mammalian cells. Among them were the laboratories of Bob Perry, James E. Darnell Jr. at Rockefeller University, Sheldon Penman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert G. Roeder, then at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. For today’s graduate students and postdocs, it is virtually impossible to imagine how important discoveries could be made with the Stone Age tools then at hand. Even in bacteria and bacteriophages, the common research models at the time, very little was known about the synthesis and decay of RNA molecules. When Klaus Scherrer, then a postdoc in Jim Darnell’s laboratory, proudly told Jim Watson in the early 60s that he was about to initiate studies on RNA metabolism in mammalian cells, Watson replied ‘‘To work with animal cells, you’ve got to be a hero or a fool!’’ Soon thereafter, however, the laboratories of Bob Perry and Jim Darnell generated a big wave of excitement about mammalian RNA synthesis. Thus, in 1962, Bob reported in a single author PNAS paper that ribosomal RNA was made in the nucleolus. This important discovery was based on his finding that low doses of the drug actinomycin D specifically inhibited incorporation of [H] labeled cytidine into nucleolar and ribosomal RNA, as revealed by autoradiography and