Gerald Kerkut was a natural sciences undergraduate, and then zoology PhD student, at Cambridge. His subsequent work on slug ganglia took him to Southampton as lecturer. There, he helped establish the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry (1959), was appointed the second Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry at Southampton (1966) and later served as Dean of Science, Chairman of the School of Biochemical and Physiological Sciences and Head of the Department of Neurophysiology. During three decades of research on invertebrate models he made several major advances in neurophysiology, including the development of an electrode for intracellular chloride measurement. Later, he worked on dorsal horn field potentials using isolated mammalian CNS preparations. Editor of more than fifty volumes, his publications ranged from a complete revision of a standard text on invertebrates to his own: ‘The Implications of Evolution’. He was founder (1960) and editor of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, editor of Progress in Neurobiology and, at one stage, had his own publishing company – Scientechnica. In his last years, his website attracted up to 60,000 hits/week with articles on politics, student concerns, money and education – as well as science.

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