Obituary - Keith Vickerman, zoologist

Died: June 28, 2016

PROFESSOR Keith Vickerman, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 83, was one of our most distinguished biological scientists. Born in Huddersfield, he was interested in wildlife, especially the smallest organisms, from an early age, his most treasured boyhood possession being a brass microscope given to him by his father.

He studied zoology at University College London (UCL), specialising in parasitology and it was at UCL that he first saw, under the microscope, swimming trypanosomes, the single-celled organisms (protozoa) responsible for sleeping sickness; beautiful but deadly.

His first class degree exempted him from national service and he progressed to a PhD on insect parasites at Exeter, followed by a period at Edinburgh University learning how to use the electron microscope, then still a new tool that opened our eyes to the subcellular world.

He was next appointed to a lectureship back at UCL where his ground-breaking trypanosome research began. This involved time at the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Unit in Uganda where he collected infected blood samples from sleeping sickness patients and from cattle and game animals, which he brought back to London to study.

He was particularly intrigued by the apparent inability of trypanosome hosts to develop immunity to the parasites. He studied the parasite’s structural and molecular changes as it moved from tsetse fly vector to mammalian blood, eventually making his key discovery- that the parasite evades the host’s immune response by changing its surface coat.

He wrote: "The parasite has a coat of protein which it can repeatedly shed, to replace it with a coat of a different kind, so that the patient has to produce antibodies against the new coat. This process can go on until the patient dies."

This was not only an important discovery in its own right, since it turned out that similar changes are the basis for the ability of many kinds of parasite to evade host immune responses, giving Professor Vickerman's work considerable generality.

In 1968, Professor David Newth tempted Professor Vickerman to join the rapidly growing zoology department at the University of Glasgow, where he established a protozoology research unit and improved the electron microscopy facilities, soon with the help of Laurence Tetley. Professor Vickerman was well aware of the strong protozoa research tradition at Glasgow, especially the early work of Muriel Robertson, the first woman zoologist to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), who had also worked on trypanosomes in Uganda.

On Newth’s retirement, Professor Vickerman was appointed to the Regius Chair of Zoology in 1984, a position established by King George III in 1807 and he remained in that post until his retirement in 1998.

In the meantime, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1970), elected FRS in 1984 (for some years, he was Glasgow University’s only such Fellow), later serving on the Royal Society’s Council. He was a founder and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1998) and also served on the Vatican’s advisory panel on tropical diseases, meeting Pope John Paul in 1981.

As is often the case with scientists, retirement did not stop his research: he began a new project on soil protozoa, and joined an investigation into a novel disease that was becoming a serious threat to the Norway lobster (scampi), one of Scotland’s most important exports. He relished the opportunity to return to bench science after too many years on committees, meticulously keeping parasite cultures going month after month.

Professor Vickerman’s biological interests extended well beyond parasitic protozoa. As Regius Professor, he was Honorary Keeper of the University’s Hunterian Zoology Museum: after extensive improvements, he was delighted to welcome David Attenborough to open the re-furbished museum in 1986. He led the university’s Natural Environment Research Council funded Taxonomy Initiative which brought together geneticists, botanists, geologists and zoologists. He was an enthusiastic and caring teacher of undergraduates, contributing courses on special interests such as animal domestication as well as protozoology.

His textbook, The Protozoa’, co-authored with his long-term friend Frank Cox (1967) was long a key resource for students. Professor Vickerman was also a keen gardener, maintaining a plot at Kelvinside Allotments for many years. He and his wife Moira were instrumental in saving the plots from developers, including an address to the Scottish Parliament (2001) where Professor Vickerman spoke on the importance of biodiversity in cities.

This interest in plants extended to Glasgow Botanic Gardens, situated near his home; he was founder president of the Friends of the Gardens until his death. His paper on the arrival of the New Zealand flatworm in the west of Scotland (1979) was one of the earliest to note this new threat to earthworms and therefore to soil fertility.

He met his wife Moira, then a law student, at a freshers dance at Exeter; Moira says that her husband was a fabulous dancer ; they went on to marry in 1961. They adopted their daughter Louise in 1973 and encouraged her musical interests; she has become principal harpist of the Utah Symphony orchestra.

When Professor Vickerman retired, colleagues commissioned the composer Sally Beamish to write a harp solo which Louise performed, accompanied by a film of swimming trypanosomes. Professor Vickerman's retirement was badly affected by a fall from his attic in 2002: after a spell in the Southern General Hospital with spinal injuries and a period in a wheelchair, he was relieved to be able to walk Louise up the aisle at her wedding in 2003. He is survived by Moira and Louise.

ROGER DOWNIE