Secret life of hair, skin and muscle revealed

massey-university

Tue Jun 09 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

Secret life of hair, skin and muscle revealed

Tuesday, 9 June 2009, 2:31 pm
Press Release: Massey University

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The complex biology and structure of hair, skin and muscle has been the lifelong research focus of world-leading scientist Distinguished Professor David Parry, who will give a lecture at the Auckland Museum tomorrow tonight (Wednesday).

Professor Parry, a Massey University molecular biophysicist and winner of last year's Rutherford Medal, plans to share some of the mysteries of the human body’s organisms and functions he has unlocked, as well as some of the fascinating people and events that have shaped his scientific and personal life.

The Royal Society of New Zealand's Rutherford Lecture, titled Reminiscences of a Lifetime in Fibrous Proteins, will cover his discovery of the workings of fibrous proteins in hair, tendon, skin, cornea and muscle. These proteins are important in giving the body its shape, and its ability to move and see.

Professor Parry says understanding the structure and function of fibrous proteins in body tissue tells us why the body keeps its shape, despite being made mostly of water, and how the skin acts as a barrier between our internal and external environments.

Fibrous proteins, built from a combination of about 20 amino acids, also provide the thermoregulatory and defence mechanisms in animal hair, allow muscles to contract, and light to be refracted from the cornea onto the retina.

His early work, explaining how muscles are turned on and off, has been applied in such areas as meat processing and in plastic surgery. He found a way to make meat more tender and to minimise scarring after surgery.

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He studied mathematics and physics at London University’s King’s College in the mid-1960s where he did his PhD on the structure of proteins and synthetic polypeptides. He joined Massey in 1973 lecturing in physics.

Before that he was involved in groundbreaking research on muscle components at Harvard University, and from there he went to Oxford University where he collaborated in assembling the first-ever sequence of protein collagen, as well discovering the mechanism that switches muscles on and off.

A former Head of the University's Institute of Fundamental Sciences (where he continues to work part-time) and a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Parry has had international roles as vice-president and president of the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics, and vice-president of the International Council for Science. He has published more than 200 research papers.

Reminiscences of a Lifetime in Fibrous Proteins: Auckland Museum, June 10, 7pm:bookings 09-306-7048

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