Oliver Wrong

Professor Oliver Murray Wrong (7 February 1925 – 24 February 2012) was an eminent academic nephrologist (kidney specialist) and one of the founders of the speciality in the United Kingdom.

From a background as a "salt and water" physician, he made detailed clinical observations and scientifically imaginative connections which were the basis of numerous advances in the molecular biology of the human kidney.

Wrong himself contributed to much of the molecular work after his own "retirement".

He dictated amendments to his final paper during his final illness in his own teaching hospital, University College Hospital (UCH), London.

Though academic in his leanings, he was a compassionate physician who established a warm rapport with patients (though not with his students), a link he regarded as the keystone of his research.

He belonged to a generation of idealistic young doctors responsible for the establishment of the UK's National Health Service in the post-War years.

Wrong was born in Magdalen College, Oxford, and was one of six children of Edward Murray Wrong and Rosalind Smith.

Murray Wrong was a history lecturer and later vice-president of Magdalen, and his own father was the historian George MacKinnon Wrong, head of the department of history at University of Toronto.

Rosalind, herself a historian, was the daughter of the Master of Balliol, A.L. Smith.

Murray died of heart disease at the age of 38 and Oliver wrote an account of his father's illness, including consultations with Sir William Osler, in a vignette "Osler and my father".

His father's early death and the Great Depression led to a split in the upbringing of the six children.

Oliver was sent to Toronto with two of his sisters and was raised by his grandfather, George MacKinnon Wrong.

Another sister was Rosalind Mitchison.

Oliver Wrong studied Medicine at Magdalen and completed his clinical studies at the Radcliffe

Hospital, Oxford.

His 'National Service' – military conscription - was spent with the Royal Army

Medical Corps in Singapore and Malaysia.

This was a geographical region to which he would return

several times in his research.

After internships in Toronto and at Massachusetts General

Hospital with Alexander Leaf, he was appointed University Tutor in Medicine at Manchester Royal

Infirmary.

Leaf was a formative influence and an important paper was jointly produced on the role of Anti-Diuretic Hormone and the kidney.

It was at Manchester with Dr. H.E.F. Davies, in 1959, that Wrong wrote a ground-breaking paper

on the mechanisms leading to the excretion of acid in human urine.

His clinical analysis of this

process and the impact of kidney disease made this paper a 'Citation Classic'.

Reviewing his time at Manchester, Wrong noted: 'I realise what an excellent education [my years at Manchester]

provided by giving me time to tackle my own problems under a benign yet critical supervision.

Because of earlier marriage and the rigidity of our postgraduate medical training programme, few of our present graduates feel able to afford such self indulgence'.

After an appointment at UCH,

Wrong became senior lecturer in medicine at the Hammersmith Hospital.

This was followed by appointment to the Chair of Medicine at Dundee University in 1969 and a return to UCH in 1972 to succeed Professor Charles Dent F.R.S. as a Professor of Medicine.

work into a short monograph published in 1981.

However, it was his renal work, based initially on the

urine acidification test which he developed with Davies, for which Wrong is best known.

At UCH over the following years, and following retirement in 1990, Wrong developed major insights

into the physiology and pathophysiology of the human kidney.

Wrong had a parallel interest in the

role of the large intestine in salt and water balance and developed much of his own experimental