Professor cyril wyndham, 1916 - 1987

Cyril Wyndham was infectively addicted to research. He showed his students and colleagues the challenge, the excitement, and the fun of experimentation. He goaded people with problems unsolved, and delighted in a study well done and a paper elegantly written. Long before most of his contemporaries, in South Africa at least, he realised that the best investment in research is investment in researchers. He knew that good science and cost-effective research were most likely to be generated by men and women with fire in their bellies. He knew, using the words of Sir Peter Medawar, that research is not a branch of the retail trade.

Cyril Wyndham graduated from the Medical School of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1940; he was the top student of his class. He intended embarking on a career in cardiology, but the intervention of the Second World War, and the encouragement of Sir Basil Schonland, saw him go to Oxford, where the legendary Sir Wilfred le Gros Clark set him in the direction of human applied physiology. On his return to South Africa, he set up what was to become the famous Human Sciences Laboratory of the Chamber of Mines Research Organisation. Through his work on solving the physiological problems faced by the miners, Wyndham became the leading international expert on human thermal physiology. By 1975, he had published over 250 papers on applied physiology, and launched the careers of numerous young scientists; ten of his proteges later were to hold chairs at universities in South Africa and overseas.

He retired from the Chamber of Mines at the age of 60, and took up, as a second career, what had previously been a hobby - he joined the Medical Research Council as an epidemiologist. His work at the MRC fulfilled the same role, in the context of South African Health Services, as the Lalonde Report did for Canada, and the Surgeon-General's Report did for the United States. He identified that, in South Africa, there really were only two causes of premature deaths: destructive lifestyle and poverty.

Cyril Wyndham received many honours and accolades, including the MRC's Gold Medal and a DSc Honoris Causa from his university, Wits. Nothing rewarded him more, however, than the success of his proteges and colleagues. The affection and esteem they held him in will not quickly fade. A congratulatory remark, telexed by the great British thermal physiologist David Kerslake, on the occasion of the award of his DSc, could stand as his epitaph: "Congratulations Cyril. In the days when people did experiments, you did most of them".