Edward Roy Perl (October 6, 1926 – July 15, 2014) was an American neuroscientist whose research focused on neural mechanisms of and circuitry involved in somatic sensation, principally nociception.

In college at the University of Chicago, Perl focused on physics and engineering, but a conversation with his father, who was a physician and surgeon, convinced him to pursue a career in medicine as a means of studying human physiology.

Perl began a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Philip Bard in the Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1950; there he met neuroanatomist Jerzy Rose and neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle, who would become a lifelong mentor in surgical and electrophysiological recording techniques.

His time in Europe enabled him to meet with and observe French neurophysiologists Paul Bessou, Albert Fessard, Denise Albe-Fessard, Pierre Buser, Jean-Marie Besson, and Hungarian neuroanatomists János (John) Szentágothai and Miklós Réthelyi.

[6] The work by Burgess and Perl represents the first thorough documentation of a large sample of nociceptors, primary afferent neurons that detect stimuli capable of causing tissue injury and transmit information about these insults centrally.

[11] While still at the University of Utah, Perl and Burgess Christensen, then a post-doctoral fellow, determined that the marginal zone (lamina I) of the dorsal horn of the spinal cord contained neurons that were responsive to different kinds of noxious and innocuous stimuli from the periphery.

[16][17][18][19][20] In a methodological tour de force, Perl worked with Yasuo Sugiura and Chong Lee in the mid-1980s to physiologically characterize and label (with Phaseolus vulgaris leucoagglutinin) unmyelinated C-fibers.

[21] Experiments performed by Christopher Honda, Siegfried Mense, and Perl in the early 1980s demonstrated that neurons located in specific areas of the cat thalamus were responsive to noxious stimulation of the skin of the hindlimb.

[22] As a whole, studies in the Perl laboratory in the 1970s and 1980s helped clarify a specific pattern of somatosensory (principally nociceptive) input to the spinal cord and brain and established the foundation for a circuitry devoted to the processing of noxious stimuli from the periphery.

This work in part resulted in the systematic categorization by Timothy Grudt and Perl of functionally characterized spinal neurons based on their morphological features and location within the dorsal horn.

[24][25][26] Perl's experiments with Adam Hantman focused on a unique, homogeneous population of Green fluorescent protein (GFP)-expressing neurons in the spinal substantia gelatinosa of a transgenic mouse.