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For staff

 

Celebrations of the man who is the "living embodiment of pharmacology in the UK".

"He is enormously warm towards the students. He is a kind man and will take as long as it takes to explain things and make things come alive, especially in practical demonstrations."

Professor Mike Edwardson

As the Department of Pharmacology celebrates the life and work of Dr Brian Callingham, Paul Holland interviews the researcher and his colleagues discovering a man of many talents… and how a moorhen ‘accidentally’ made it into the Biomedical Journal.

Railway enthusiast, photographer, College safety officer, dedicated member of the Stretham Old Engine Trust and purveyor of advice and fine stories - it comes as a shock that Dr Brian Callingham has had time in his life to fit in decades of ground-breaking pharmacological research and teaching.

His infectious approach and his ability to spin a good yarn are being celebrated as a thanks for years of service to the Department of Pharmacology.

There are so many stories about Dr Callingham that I am warned to set aside a day when I speak to him. I’ve already spent a very pleasant hour speaking to former colleagues who describe him as a brilliant mentor to students and someone who helped build the Department up from a single room operation to the significant, world-leading centre it is now.

“Have you heard any of Brian’s stories yet? There are so many and they are all so well remembered it seems hard to know which are apocryphal,” says Head of Department Professor Mike Edwardson.

The impact of his words is clearly demonstrated in the Department I see as I sip my tea from a mug with a Dr Callingham quote emblazoned on the side which reads: “If you only had to do it once it wouldn’t be called research.”

His memorable quotes are a great aspect of his personality says Professor Edwardson, adding: “His strength is his ability to engage with students and others. He is enormously warm towards the students. He is a kind man and will take as long as it takes to explain things and make things come alive, especially in practical demonstrations.”

For this he has become the person above all others students remember adds Deputy Head of Department, Dr Robert Henderson. “His lecture style, his stories and his practicals mean students remember him and ask after him years later,” says Dr Henderson adding: “I think that he is a living embodiment of pharmacology in the UK. Everybody knows him and he has been around for pretty much all the pharmacological development in the second half of the 20th century.”

 

But back to Dr Callingham’s stories. Professor Edwardson remembers one famous incident involving a moorhen which I check with the man himself when I meet him in the Department.

“The moorhen story? Yes that really happened. Many years ago when  I was cycling to work, the car in front of me hit the poor thing. I stopped and I took it to the department where we patched it up as best we could, but it expired," says Dr Callingham.

Not wanting to let its life go to waste Dr Callingham, who describes himself as a “pharmacologist who looks at physiology through the use of drugs”, decided to examine it to do more research on monoamine oxidases (MAOs).

This area is perhaps where his most notable research was carried out as MAOs were used as important drug targets, for treating depression and Parkinson’s disease. Understanding how MAOs worked in the body revealed possible side-effects of those drugs, including the famous “cheese effect” which saw patients who’d eaten cheese after taking their medicine suddenly experiencing a sky-high rise in blood pressure.

So the tragic death of the moorhen allowed Dr Callingham to look at MAOs in the animal and his research was later published in the Biochemical Pharmacology Journal.

Research has not been the only thing he has done since joining the University. Dr Callingham and his wife, Margaret, have become social linchpins of the Collegiate and city community. This has grown through his departmental work and fellowship in Queens’ College, and through her work as a pharmacist in Boots in Petty Cury.

His role in College life included taking on supervisions, becoming the Fellow Librarian and Director of Studies in Medicine and Veterinary Science. He also became the College portrait photographer, and he is currently the College’s Safety Officer.

Dr Callingham said when he came to Cambridge in 1964, it was to help bring the pharmacology department ‘back from the dead’. He recalls: “When I joined it was a three men and a dog department.”

Professor Edwardson paid tribute to his colleague’s contribution to the department: “He was brought in at a time when the department operated from a single room. Now we are a significant department and Brian’s contribution to that success over the years has been a major one," says Professor Edwardson.

Dr Callingham’s dedication to students is perfectly demonstrated by his reaction to a recent spell in hospital.

“I was in Addenbrooke’s Hospital for three weeks and was teaching clinical students from my bed. My consultant said it was wonderful of me to do it, but he said it was their turn to look after me and so they put up a sign at the bottom of the bed which said No More Clinical Students,” he recalls.

Dr Mike Young, a colleague who has worked with Dr Callingham since the 1960s and like him is “retired” yet still spends an inordinate amount of time at the department, says: “He is warm-hearted and straightforward. There is no side to him and that’s a huge strength of his.”

The celebration of Dr Callingham’s career will be held at the Department on Thursday (November 27) at 4pm in the Pharmacology tea room.
 

Picture credit: Bertl Gaye