ScienceObituary

Robert Mahler

Facing the challenges of medicine and opera

The clinical scientist Robert Mahler, who has died aged 81, was a great-nephew of the composer Gustav Mahler. Born in Vienna, into a family assembled from the far reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was given a chemistry set and de Krief's The Microbe Hunters on his ninth birthday, and resolved to become a physician and biochemist, an ambition encouraged by his surgeon father.

His mother, a good singer, inspired his love of opera by taking him early to the Bartered Bride and working him up to Götterdämmerung. The family disintegrated with the Anschluss in 1938. Robert and his brother were brought to England by a kindertransport and placed with the MacCrae family in Edinburgh. Their parents ended up in India, though other relatives all perished. It was 12 years before Mahler saw his parents again, by which time he had completed his education at the Edinburgh academy, and taken first-class degrees in both biochemistry and medicine at Edinburgh University.

With remarkable purpose he embarked on a career in academic medicine. He moved to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London for further training, and did his national service as an RAF medical specialist, during which time he learned to fly and became a squadron leader. On demobilisation, he was awarded a Medical Research Council fellowship, which rotated him through units in Wales, London and Manchester. He was appointed as a lecturer in clinical pharmacology at Dundee University in 1956 but almost immediately took off for a year to Harvard as a research fellow in biochemistry. Shortly after his return to the UK, he received a cryptic telegram from Professor John Butterfield at Guy's hospital: "Matthew 11v3 - art thou he that shall come, or do we look for another?" He went.

It was at Harvard, and then at Guy's, that Mahler found his major scientific interests in carbohydrate metabolism and diabetes. He is best known for defining the fundamental biochemical defect in McCardle's disease, an inherited disorder of muscle.

He spent a year at Indiana University medical school before being appointed professor of metabolic medicine at the Welsh National School of Medicine in 1966, where he became professor of medicine and departmental head in 1970. He did not believe that professors should remain in post too long, and warned his colleagues in Cardiff early that 10 years was enough. True to his word, after a sabbatical year at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he resigned, and in 1979 took his last post, as consultant physician and diabetologist at Northwick Park hospital, Harrow.

Mahler's researches covered a wide span. He delighted in unravelling, with a few collaborators rather than a large team, the "natural experiments" he encountered in his clinical practice. His knowledge and scientific insight were properly valued by the Medical Research Council and the many medical charities on whose boards he sat. He never forgot that he was a physician, and his patients never forgot him.

In retirement he edited the journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London, a body to which he was devoted. When, at the age of 70, he gave up the editorship, he continued with his characteristic tact and discretion as editor emeritus, visiting the college daily for years until he became too frail.

Mahler never spoke of the difficulties of his youth, but philosophically remarked that he had been liberated to determine his own life. His idea of happiness was an evening at Glyndebourne with his wife Maureen, whom he married in 1951. They had two sons and four grandchildren, of whom Mahler was immensely proud.

· Robert Frederick Mahler, physician, clinical scientist and academic, born October 31 1924; died May 29 2006

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