The BIAL Foundation expresses profound sorrow on the passing of Prof Peter Fenwick, a unique figure in parapsychology worldwide, broadly awarded for his work on the process of death, including consciousness and near-death experiences.
Prof Peter Fenwick's connection with the BIAL Foundation began in 1995. The neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist was a member of the BIAL Foundation's Scientific Board for 27 years, a speaker at several editions of the ‘Behind and Beyond the Brain’ Symposium, a grant holder for 4 scientific research projects, and an Ambassador for the Foundation since 2022.
“The grants given by the BIAL Foundation for parapsychology have been enormously valuable as this area is ignored and underfunded by most grant-giving bodies. The BIAL Foundation has enabled me to advance my work with hospices and study the details of the dying process”, he said in 2022 when he became a BIAL Foundation Ambassador.
Peter Fenwick was born in Kenya in 1935. He went to secondary school in England and then read Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. He did his clinical medical training at St. Thomas’s Hospital and qualified as a doctor in June 1961. He was awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship to study electrophysiology and neurology at Queen Square. He then moved to the Maudsley Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry, where he completed his psychiatric training and later ran the Epilepsy and Sleep Units.
He became interested in electroencephalography and published several papers in this area. He was appointed to the Clinical Neurophysiology Unit of Broadmoor Special Hospital for violent offenders. He was involved in the case of Sullivan, which defined the law on automatism and later clarified it with regard to sleepwalking.
Peter Fenwick started meditating at the time the Maharishi brought meditation to the West and published many of the foundation papers in this area. His interest in parapsychology flowed from his work on consciousness and near-death experiences, which led him to the examination of the dying process. He received many awards for his work in these areas. For several years he was President of the Horizon Research Foundation, a UK organisation that supports research into near-death experiences.
