Roderic Alfred Gregory

Who was Roderic Alfred Gregory?

Roderic Alfred Gregory CBE FRS was a British biologist.

He was born in 1913 in Plaistow, London, 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 Monde. 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 North-Western 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".

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965 and awarded a CBE in 1971. He won the Royal Medal in 1978.