Edward Perl

Edward R. Perl
Born	October 6, 1926 Chicago, Illinois
Died	July 15, 2014 Durham, North Carolina
Nationality	United States
Fields	Neuroscience
Institutions	University of Chicago Harvard University Johns Hopkins University State University of New York Upstate Medical University University of Utah University of North Carolina
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Known for	Pain research
Notable awards	Bristol-Meyers Squibb Award for Distinguished Research on Pain (1991) Gerard Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Neuroscience (1998)

Edward Roy Perl (October 6, 1926 – July 15, 2014) was an American neuroscientist whose research focused on neural mechanisms of and circuitry involved in somatic sensation, principally nociception. Work in his laboratory in the late 1960s established the existence of unique nociceptors. Perl was one of the founding members of the Society for Neuroscience and served as its first president. He was a Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Cell Biology & Physiology and a member of the UNC Neuroscience Center at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Perl was born in Chicago, Illinois to John and Blanche Perl, natives of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively. As a child, Perl was fascinated by electricity, which led to an interest in electronics, radio, and the sciences. In college at the University of Chicago, Perl focused on physics and engineering, but a conversation with his father, who was a physician and surgeon, convinced him to pursue a career in medicine as a means of studying human physiology.

While in college, Perl was accepted into the U.S. Navy’s Officer Training Program. He served as a medical trainee at the V-12 Navy College Training Program at the Great Lakes Naval Station (Chicago) in the summer of 1945 and began studies at the University of Illinois School of Medicine (Chicago) in the fall of 1945, at which time he was discharged into the naval reserves with the end of WWII. Perl earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1947 and his M.D. in 1949.

Perl’s first exposure to neuroscience came at the University of Illinois School of Medicine's Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute (Chicago), where he worked for a time as a part-time graduate student in Warren S. McCulloch’s laboratory and where he met, among other notables of the time, Elwood Henneman, whose experiments on spinal reflexes and supraspinal control of motor function were to influence Perl’s later research path. A project undertaken in the laboratory of cardiac physiologist William V. Whitehorn in the late 1940s led to Perl’s first scientific paper, published in Science in 1949; the principles behind the device Perl designed for this project became the foundation for impedance cardiography. This work earned Perl a Master’s Degree in 1951.

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