Just say that again. Yes, certainly.
So although I was born in London, my childhood and adolescence were in Cambridge and I was the youngest of four children of an academic family.
Without doubt, the best decision I made was not to follow my three brothers and go to Clare College,
but to go across on the little train preaching to Oxford, where I went to Merton College and Dennis Parsons as a medical tutor.
Now, are you saying that because it was a good thing to get out of your home city or because of Dennis
Burleson's or because of what happened in Oxford as opposed to what might have happened in Cambridge?
I mean, I think the first point you make has to be true, but actually know just the positives about medicine in Oxford.
I'm talking 1963, and I think probably Dennis Parsons was an unusually gifted human being, a tutor in many other ways.
He wasn't a gifted human, but he had fantastic strengths in getting people to think beyond their comfort
zone and also to get people to have to think hard about joining up subjects.
So he taught the whole of physiology, including neurophysiology, the whole of biochemistry, pharmacology, bit of pathology.
And so that was obvious because it all connected, rather old fashioned to Oxford itself, was full of interesting people.
And hence Cramps was the professor of chemistry.
And there was a very strong group of people in biochemistry around Crib's.
There were still Flori in post or just retired in pathology and Legro Clark in anatomy.
So there were some impressive people. Right.
And do you think the structure or the sort of method of teaching in Oxford was different from Cambridge, from what you gathered?
Yes, I was remarkably ignorant about how it worked in Cambridge,
but I think it probably was a bit different in that I think that Dennis Parsons style of teaching,
which was to focus on three students a year over the first three years, he'd have nine students doing medicine.
I think in a Cambridge environment there would have been many more students and he'd found people out much more.
So I suspect there was some subtle difference there.
Oxford was famous for being a place where people sat on their backside and thought hard about why the experiment wouldn't work,
whereas in Cambridge they just got in. Did it go right that one of the aphorisms and you came over and I think your father was unwell in your school?
Yeah, yeah. Which obviously complicated things a bit. And then you did schools and Perth and back.
Yeah, presumably. Yeah. Did you find it. Well first of all, how did you find the entrance index with that entrance in Oxford involves sitting in I
think it was Christchurch Dining Hall which is not exactly a modest statement of things.
And I remember being baffled by what this was all about, really virtually all young males sitting in this room scribbling on pieces of paper.
It could have been 1863 rather than 1963, erm anyway.
But there was also this issue of having an interview with a panel chaired by the head of college at Merton who was not very distinguished philosopher.
And I remember him asking me what I read and I just read Middlemarch.
And the comment was, do you think George Eliot sees the world through rose tinted spectacles?
And I had not a clue what he was talking about.
It was not a very academic college, Merton, but it was a very nice environment in the sense that it was relatively small.
It was certainly well-heeled. And having a tutor who was interested in thinking about academic intellectual things made a huge difference to me.
Yes. How did you find the practical side of the schools?
Yes, that's again a very good question, Derek, because it's so different from now.
There was a lot of practical work. I remember doing a wonderful practical with a young lecturer in biochemistry called Robinson,
who was a lipid biochemist, went off to needs to be professor.
But, you know, he spent a whole week of his life taking two or three third year schools, undergraduates,
through a project that involved lipid extraction and doing counting of radioactive
incorporation of tritium and things that in those days were absolutely at the front end.
And you got the data and you had to think about it. And that certainly had a very positive effect on me.
I think there is a message a little bit about the importance of having exposure.
To real experimental science, relatively young, and the schools years ago, how did you enjoy that?
It was called animal physiology then and it was broad, which I liked for the reasons I've mentioned.
And there were some good teachers. There was a man called Cox and Victor Coxon, who, in retrospect,
although he wasn't at all an exciting lecturer, actually must have given us very good lectures,
because when I look back on the notes I'd taken, it seemed to me he got a very rounded and interesting view of what then was called body fluids.
There were people like Peter Matthews doing neurophysiology, and Matthews was pretty impressive intellectually.
And I got to know him a little bit better later on. And I just got increasingly impressed by the clarity of a really able brain.
There were quite good people in respiratory physiology,
but I'm afraid I'm not including Brian Lloyd in that because he got so lost in the mathematics that the biology rather disappeared.
There were certainly exciting things in endocrinology once Harris was fully in place.
So that was also good.
The end result of the process was Avivah and I remember being Vibert by a group of people and I thought actually they were very fair.
That's what I was impressed by. I thought these people took trouble and took time to read what one had written into us.
One about it. Yep, that's good enough. And did the marvellous 20 minutes.
Yes, I think it was probably 20 minutes. Yep. Yeah. And then Perth and back in pharmacology.
Yes. Okay. So that I was a bit unusual in that I had a year of research immediately after taking school.
Right. So Path and back happened. Dislocated by.
Yes. I was firstly coming back to doing as it were, didactic learning.
And secondly, I was in a different cohort of students. Yes.
The second point I hadn't really thought hard about, but it was it was quite interesting in some ways a good thing.
But in another way, it's quite challenging. The year of research was exceptionally interesting.
I did that in biochemistry with Parsons.
And as I said, Krebs was the professor then and a very interesting sort of aura that came around with Crib's not a good lecturer,
rather shy, but bossy, a funny combination.
But on a Saturday morning, I was busy doing an experiment because I enjoyed doing experiments.
And I think the only other person in the tool building chemistry was Krenz at eight thirty on a Saturday morning.
And he walked past the lab, looked in, resumed walking past the lab, came back 30 seconds later, said, Your boy, don't you talk to me?
And it turned out that he had had some time in Cambridge after he left Germany.
And Krebs was passionate about both helping young people, particularly not well-heeled people, get into science and passionate.
I think about women. And there was somebody in Cambridge then who fit in both boxes called Miss Solsbury, who'd ended up as my father's secretary.
And the message that Crêpes gave me was, give me Solsbury, my love.
I was nice, but interesting. She hadn't ended up as a scientist. And I said, yes, yes, yes.
Anyway, I mean, I had a lot of respect for crêpes,
but I realised that there were younger academics there who had found somebody as formidable as crêpes, quite hard work.
Denis Parsons got on well with him. So he would and said this interesting comment that he thought when you had a new head of the department,
it was good to have a certain amount of incompatibility because that raised the activity forever, because he was always relentlessly quantitative.
That was the thing I thought about me always asked with what you were doing A, B or C?
I was, yes. Was the subject. The subject was. Yeah, that's quite interesting.
And look back on it was that guy in Denmark called Scow had just discovered the sodium
potassium ATP's and the Nobel Prise was awarded to him forty eight years later.
I think so it was a big discovery, but it was something that biochemists were interested as it fed into physiology, because, of course,
the idea of active pumping of sodium had come straight out of Cambridge and Hodgkins Lab with Caden's, and it was where physiology met biochemistry.
So my project was on the sodium potassium.
Here and the reactions of it, but in the context of the intestinal epithelium, which is what Dennis Parsons worked on,
and there were one or two things that came out of that project that were interesting, like a little bit of fractionation early.
So fractionation and characterisation of these reactions by M and the realisation that you
could get at some of the cytoskeleton elements in these membrane preparations that way.
So we had to paper in the Journal of Cell Biology from that one year research.
And I think when I've met people who are into the cytoskeleton, they're absolutely astonished that I'm not 120.
Because as you. A senior scientist. Yeah.
And that was Perfuse gut was. Yes, it was indeed. Yeah. Yeah.
So then you go back to the person back and we still writing up your thesis.
You know, I wrote my thesis over the summer before starting that, um,
the Pathum Back was interesting because it was clearly a very put together, thoughtful course.
But the day is ex machina. There was Flori who actually retired the summer that I started that course.
So Henry Harris had just been appointed and I think gifted as he was teaching wasn't at the top end of his priorities.
So that that there was a sense in which this wonderful course wasn't actually quite in its prime.
Right. And then that was followed around.
Back to you. Yes, yes. Yes. And, um, it was a very good guy who worked on blood clotting and platelets who I was impressed by.
He was in the done school. And then the pharmacology, which ran side path and back, was taught by Bill Papen, who was an impressive teacher.
Yeah. Then there must have been the possibility of doing clinical in Oxford.
So what made you go? Did you see it?
So I must choose my words, given the nature of this, the Oxford Medical School, it's about the voters up and down the road.
The word that is persons always used maliciously.
And he had done his clinical training in Oxford was that at the clinical school was still very young, Richard.
And it it had great strengths, but some weaknesses for various reasons.
I went to University College Hospital in London where actually, although I found some interesting things going on,
I met a phenomenon which I bumped into subsequently, which is its reputation rested on one or two major figures.
And those major figures, like Max Rosenheim were busy running the Royal College of Physicians or whatever.
So actually you were left with their registrars who weren't terribly special, actually.
What year was that? So I went to do my clinical in 67.
Yes. Yep, yep. And then you had two, three years clinically. I really enjoy it.
Yes, I did. And I did a spell in Uganda working in the MRC nutrition unit there as part of that.
So that was a special part. And again, in retrospect, how do you think your three years at UCLA compared with potential?
Yes, yeah. The thing that really surprised me was to realise that once a week for my three years in Oxford, I had to sit down and write an essay.
And there was only one person who ever suggested I did any written work during the three years of clinical work.
And that was the paediatrician Leonard Strang, who didn't again have some imprint on me.
And I think he was an interesting, clever guy.
So I saw the contrast as the apprenticed clinical learning with the more cerebral academic learning is really very disjointed.
There wasn't a joint Buckners between them. I did indeed enjoy the clinical years and I enjoyed patients.
I didn't particularly enjoy the hierarchy which medical schools had in those times that I wasn't terribly good at sort of wanting to follow.
The SHC around was following the registrar around. Um, but there were some impressive people.
Charles Dent was probably the one who had the biggest imprint on me.
I did a house job with, uh, John Leonard Jones and with John Dickinson and, you know, interesting people.
John as Brian. Yes. Yes, yes. Absolutely.
But somehow or other, the end result was, as I reflected on it, I'd actually enjoyed the three years preclinical.
You. Yeah. Then after has jobs. Yes. To you went to New Guinea.
I did indeed. You're very well briefed, which was interesting because I knew I was going to come back and do a deal in Oxford.
I got married and to a young doctor and we both were, you know, relatively adventuresome and.
We just got married and got one or two rather useless generous presents like silver teapots,
and we took back to wherever it was and bought a ticket to to new it.
How early then had you decided to do the deed? Yes, probably after finishing house jobs, I was still in contact with Dennis Parsons.
As I say, we wrote up some papers and that led to sort of things continuing.
Is that a decision you ever regret? Not the. But staying at the house?
Yeah, I'm very aware. It was probably the big decision in terms of my working life.
Um, and I sort of accepted that life has big decisions.
And sometimes you can say if I had gone down this thing, I would have been different.
I certainly didn't regret going down the route I took. And it's had, you know, a very fulfilling life.
It is worth sharing. But but but certainly, you're right, it was an unusual decision.
So was it two years? And then again, it was just after that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure that was a sort of wonderful broadening. It was.
And there were some quite interesting academic sort of laterals to that.
The guru's story was just beginning to happen. And although that wasn't in the area of New Guinea we worked in, I was alert to it.
And I was aware that the Australian Medical Research Council were beginning to get interested in putting money into to that sort of activity.
There was a very impressive Australian doctors, one or two only in the in the hospital we worked in.
I was also very taken by the notion of working to one's clinical limits,
which was very different from the then prevailing thing in a hospital in the UK.
If you were at this level, you did that, but you didn't do any more there.
It was nobody else to do it. You did everything you could and that was actually quite it in sort of invigorating.
I think the other academic aspect that intrigued me was the geographical variation in pathology.
I was astonished to find one of the senior doctors saying to me,
if you diagnose somebody with a minor cardiac infarction, you'll be wrong unless they're a Seventh Day Adventist.
And I looked with bafflement at this Australian 60 year old doctor saying this to me.
And actually, he was absolutely right. Asthma didn't occur except the Seventh Day Adventists.
And of course, this all turned out to be related in a funny way to what later became the hygiene hypothesis.
The Seventh Day Adventists were obsessive about cleanliness, was lack of exposure to certain things.
So just seeing these things on the ground was quite interesting.
So then you came back to the pig with Dennis? I did.
Three years on what subject? Yes. So that was funded by an MRC Junior Clinical Fellowship.
I was very lucky with the availability of these sorts of things then I think.
And it was trying to work out how the transport systems that acourt the apical membrane of an epithelium like small intestine and those in the back,
the lateral facing the blood side, are coordinated because it was very obvious that physiologically these things had to be talking to each other.
So that was really the underlying sort of issue.
And we met quite a lot of interest from looking in some detail at the way sugars with different molecular,
um, modifications interacted with the transport systems ethically and Bazza laterally.
And I was examined on that thesis by Richard Caden's from Cambridge,
who had moved from being very, very knowledgeable about the nerve cell membrane to epithelium.
And in a funny way, that was an interesting bovver because his knowledge of epithelium was not deep, but it was based on first principles.
But some of those first principles were terrific.
But I suddenly realised he hadn't really understood something that had recently come out of research in in Germany from the front,
the group that showed that quite a lot of transport across so-called leaky epithelium was between cells rather than through the cells.
So there was an interesting mismatch between a young Cocchi tells me that this senior experienced scientist where I realised I had an insight,
which he didn't, who was the referee? The other examiner and the referee was somebody I've always admired, Charles Michel,
who was capillary physiologist, very distinguished one, and a thoughtful person.
Again, somebody who'd done medicine before he went in to be an academic in.
And in some ways, Charles probably isn't aware of this, he was a little bit of a role model for me.
He would have been five or 10 years older than me. So you're still in biochemistry?
Absolutely. And is the crib are still pervading? No.
The very interesting aura that happened while I was doing clinical Crabb's retard and they appointed Ron Porter and Porter was, if anything, uh,
equally or more impressive than Crabb's because he was a very approachable human being and his
expertise in immunology and the chemistry of the immune responses was obviously very special.
Why he got his Nobel prise for the structure of antibodies.
But he was very keen to be uppity every day in the top floor of the biochemistry tower and would speak to everybody,
would make a point of talking to people, knew a bit about them.
And the week after he got a Nobel prise, he found himself in Japan.
And suddenly my sister-in-law, who's Japanese, got a phone call from Paul to out of the blue saying, I want you to know your brother Richard is fine.
And she was completely baffled because she's Japanese.
I spoke with a lovely, slightly stuttering Lancashire accent, but it sort of was an exemplar of of how to be a good head of department.
I think a lot of time for Porter as a human being. Then we were getting a college attachment around.
OK, so I got interviewed for one or two college things, including by George Pickering at Pembroke College.
And actually, I'm very lucky that I didn't get any of it because it enabled me to do something which,
uh, was completely by chance to apply for a job in Dundee, which was my next move.
I'd also applied for jobs in New Zealand at Dunedin.
And if the letter's offering me a chance to go and see them had come in the reverse order, I might well have spent the next 35 years in New Zealand.
But I went to Dundee Place. I'd look at the map to find out where it was, but I was incredibly lucky in the timing of going there.
Chemistry was really taking off there. But the department I had applied to his physiology,
which had been a very much a backwater until they appointed somebody called Oli Petersen the previous year and early was more or less exactly my age.
He became foreign secretary of the Royal Society, a very distinguished scientist.
But he was fun to work with and very supportive of scientific research.
Danish trained or absolutely Danish trained medical background had done a
postdoc in Cambridge with E.K. Matthews in the pharmacology department there.
So it was European scientists, very strong links with Germany.
And I think he opened my eyes to the way modern science was going to have to happen in the UK and physiology linked up with Kerryn and exactly.
Yeah, Philip Coggan, I think was appointed the same year as me.
And, you know, I was very aware of very good younger people in biochemistry,
that it was a guy called Garland who'd worked with Randall in Cambridge, who was the new head of biochemistry.
So between them, Petersen and he had a big influence on a small university.
It's a bit like the turning circle of the Titanic versus the turning circle of a tug.
If you're a small medical school and Dundee is small and not particularly high profile, you bring in some able bosses and some bright youngsters.
Things really take off rapidly, and the sort of sense of excitement about research there was really very strong.
So was it then as persons with the idea of actually it was a phone call out of the blue from somebody called Charles Philips,
who I've not mentioned was a neurophysiologist towards the end of his career, had taken up the chair of anatomy in Oxford.
I don't think he really enjoyed doing that job, but he was good chatting around and finding out what was going on.
And he phoned me up and said, I see you're coming to a stop meeting in Kings London.
Why don't you call in to have a cup of tea on your way back? And I found the cup of tea, had two other people.
There was an interview for a job. Great.
And it was really just chance it was anatomy rather than the job.
It cropped up because George Fink, who is a very distinguished endocrinologist, I think it's a certainly a physiologist.
I've been appointed to run an MRSA unit in Edinburgh,
so I didn't feel uneasy about going into a department called Human Anatomy because I knew with a tradition of GW Harris,
people like George Fink having been there and was actually an experimental biology department and was think what made the prisoners link.
Yes. So I think I only discovered later had really been Upraise knows, for a relatively short period of time,
taking over from George Gordon, who was a wonderful senior mentor for me later on.
And George, of course, had been appraised for 30 odd years.
But to become a reader and therefore there'd been a vacancy for them, would have somebody to be at the front line of being a medical tutor.
And Fink had been very successful at doing that, I think. Yes.
And I mean, you've had a terrific reputation as a college tutor.
Tell me about that. And first of all, how you sort of grew into it.
And secondly, what were your principles, if you had any? Oh, go ahead.
Yes, I was aware of how lucky I was to be teaching as compared to, for example, colleagues in other universities.
And I think that's one advantage of having been in other medical schools,
the luxury of choosing your own students and therefore having to live with the positives
and the negatives of the humans who you'd actually picked from a very strong group anyway.
And the other thing was what I'd learnt from Dennis Parsons.
What's the point of learning all these lists of this and the other if you can't make connexions between different things?
And I did feel strongly about that, I would much rather that the students got the sort of big picture,
even if they had quite a lot of work to do in filling in some of it rather than the other way round.
I remember meeting in other universities when I was an examiner,
people who could tell you everything about a calcium channel, but they couldn't tell you which way calcium flowed through.
That seemed rather sad. Yeah.
Now you discovered a Channel two and.
Yes, yes, I had something happen to be in Oxford, which I hadn't expected, which was people wanted to come and work and do sabbaticals in Oxford.
And that wasn't because Richard Boyd was suddenly a different human being,
because I quite liked the idea of someone that was near London but wasn't London that had good things.
And I had a succession of really nice, clever, distinguished, hardworking scientists through my lab.
And that had a big influence on a whole group of people working with me, the graduates and the postdocs.
So I think it was without doubt a fantastic advantage, which I hadn't predicted when I did come to Oxford.
One of them was somebody who was interested in amino acid transport in red blood cells.
And I thought there might be some quite nice ways of modelling what was going on in the intestine where,
as I say, of these quite interesting, more complicated things by looking in red blood cells.
And indeed there was a way of which a new system was found in the red blood cell turned out
to be absolutely applicable to a problem about amino acids leaving the intestinal epithelium.
We gave this transport system a name Y plus L for reasons that history could explain.
But fascinatingly, within a year there was a mutation of the gene encoding this transport system
that explained the rare but rather devastating metabolic disease in children.
And that sequence of going from a red blood cell to the intestinal epithelium to a bit of physiology to a molecule
encoded to a genetic defect of that in children I found very exciting because although one knows that happens in theory,
to say that lab was unusual. And the idea, of course, is the treatment was possible.
Yes, there's there's quite a lot of work still ongoing with that.
And funnily enough, a treatment which involves lowering the level of circulating lysine and arginine has been developed around this.
There's some attempt to try and do genetic manipulation of this.
I think more realistically, there's also quite a lot of effort now to do prenatal diagnosis.
If it's in the family and now in the college, would you recommend a particular textbook or how did you interact with textbooks in the first two years?
Yes. Okay. So I'm glad you raised the question the way you did, Derek,
because later on I was thrown by the arrival of the Internet and kids using the Internet for everything all the time in a mindless sort of way.
And I became quite twitchy about helping students actually evaluate whether things were or weren't intellectually robust.
Textbooks, yes, I think early on I did get involved in thinking quite hard about textbooks
and the way I would do it was sort of say there are three or four textbooks,
all of which have strengths and weaknesses. I want you to spend the first term deciding really which one suits your style best.
And then I want you to buy a copy and they go, but actually they all got money from the college to help them do this sort of thing.
And then I expected them to take those books away over the vacations, not to learn them in a mindless way,
but to do things like read the introduction or read the chapter on comparative aspects or read the chapter on what happens in old age.
I think that sometimes students need help to realise it isn't just Chapter 17 on Starling's two of the heart that they need to know,
they need to see it again. Back in a more general context. And how much did you find you had to tailor interactions to the individual student?
How much did you expect them to tailor them sort of pro forma you had?
Yeah, yeah, very much the former.
I wasn't terribly interested in the pro forma because I think the danger about that is that it just is cannon fodder for exams.
I wasn't keen on them taking the exams certainly in the first two years too seriously.
I was keen for them to pass the exams. I was always rather sad that Oxford was driven really,
I think by the GMC to get increasingly involved about whether a student was number fifty six in the batting order or sixty seven.
That didn't seem to be terribly useful. The other aspect of the exams was really what you mentioned earlier.
The the final honours school, which still exists,
I think does give the most able and most motivated young scope to do some wonderful, wonderful work, including projects.
But it doesn't include much in the way of experimental lab science.
And you hand them out references or do they find the references themselves?
Yeah, I wouldn't hand them out more than one or two references.
I'd want them to use that as a way of finding out the literature for themselves.
But I think the they would come back from lectures sometimes with incredibly long reading lists, which I think were a bit scary for them.
And I noticed that it was on the whole the most or least experienced lecturers who gave out the longest reading list.
So I thought there was an element of sort of help needed for the lecturers about that.
So yeah, I think I was probably not not in any sense a tyrant as a tutor.
And there were probably students who'd been, you know, would have done better quotes if I'd been a bit more tyrannical.
But I'm not sorry that I had a reputation of being accessible rather than just somebody trying to make them jump through
hoops or Merton by this stage and become famous for having a group of tutors who crack the whip under the influence of a,
you know, a rather strong head of house. And I was aware of that.
But I wasn't sorry that I wasn't you know, at some stage, Fisher and Persons would have been doing more work on the guard or perhaps, you know.
Yeah, that led to the recommendations about colour. So I wasn't involved in that, Denis, but I was with Denis,
but I certainly was aware of it and fascinated by really because I knew the two individuals very well.
Fisher, as you mentioned, his RB Fisher called David Fisher,
had been involved in the war in operational things to do with bombing and statistical analysis of that.
So he was very strong quantitatively.
Dennis was, I think, with his medical background, more of a biologist, but again, strongly influenced by the quantitative thinking.
So between them, they produced data which they thought about very hard.
And the data that led to the oral rehydration story was to do with how did the luminal constituents affect water absorption in preparation.
They prepared and it was very striking that glucose had some sort of magical effect, that stimulating water absorption.
They found that galactose metabolised much less had a much smaller effect, and they found that arns were required for the glucose effect to happen.
The issue really was the mechanism of this, and they had various hypotheses.
But it was all very, if you like, blue skies, academic science,
they weren't doing it to try and aid hydration status of dehydrated people and it was really groups in the States.
I think Phillips was involved in this, who later on picked up on it.
There was an editorial in The Lancet in the late 1970s which said that Fisher and Parsons
discovery was perhaps one of the major biomedical discoveries of the 20th century.
That was hyperbole. I know Chris wrote that article,
but it certainly made me realise how very important practical things could come out of clear thinking, academic studies.
And that drove me quite a lot in how I viewed education as well as my own research.
I wasn't frightened of being called not translational because it seemed to me the translation was, you know, not what I was doing.
I was there trying to decide how the thing worked. But you mentioned the Dukas connected to work on the different sugar as the vaguely yes.
No, you're absolutely right. So, I mean, I fitted in with that.
And there was a very interesting story about one sugar with a little group on the cob and one
position that very interestingly was able to get into the cells but not able to get out.
That had rather a sort of a deep consequence in that relationship.
Yeah. Then in college, there's you as the medical tutor, but there's all the rest of the college going on.
And how much do you think the ethos of the undergraduates and of the various effects of that?
I think the chance which you mentioned earlier, crops up again and again in these sorts of issues.
I was exceptionally lucky and having colleagues I really liked and maybe I could do things with in interesting ways.
So I'm talking about, for example, Peter Cook, who was a cell biologist, and particularly Nick Proudfoot,
who was the biochemistry tutor, both very distinguished scientists with Nick Proudfoot.
He did the biochemistry teaching and I did the physiology teaching for each other, which meant I taught the biochemistry students a bit.
And, uh,
Nick pointed out when I myself retired that his students were always intrigued to find out things that weren't particularly on their syllabus,
but made them think when they were doing these things, they thought, why am I doing it?
But actually, later on when it came to their final exams or whatever, they saw the benefit of having some teaching.
That was a little bit coming in left field. Um, and had you been fairly influential in getting Proudfoot and cooked into Bresnitz?
The cook was there when I arrived and Peter was very, very assiduous in welcoming me, which I really appreciated.
Nick Proudfoot. Yes, I was involved in that appointment.
And as always, there are interesting tales to be told, but not quite yet about people who didn't get that job.
And Nick was a wonderful colleague.
And, you know, the fact he became so distinguished scientifically and was a full time tutor doing his tutorial work,
not looking for buyouts and all the current ways of trying to minimise the late always strikes me as a
good example of Oxford at its best is because Brezhnev is built up into a very strong medical college.
Yeah. And what how did you come together, as it were, a second meeting, or do you go out and do a well, well, well, well, Derek,
I'm going to embarrass you by saying it was already a strong medical college and I think your generation and certainly helped do that.
George Gordon, particularly. But I think the scale that you're mentioning was an opportunity when it happened.
Briseno sold some playing fields for a building development, which meant that there was the possibility of one or two subjects increasing in number.
I just been over to Queens College in Cambridge, which is our sister college, where, again, there were some very nice, warm, welcoming tutors there.
And I was struck by the difference in scale.
You know, when they sat down, there were maybe a dozen academics and nearly 100 students in biomedical subjects.
As Appraise knows, there would be two or three academics and maybe 15 students.
And so when the opportunity came for me to put in a bid to spend the medical side, I did definitely have keys model in the back of my mind.
I had a helpful head of house and a helpful bursar, and I managed to persuade my colleagues I please leave any area with the principle.
That was during the Windrush. Yes, yes. Goodhand David Wilson was somebody who I found.
Somebody said he was a very good chairman, he wasn't an executive director, if you know what I mean,
but the person at the time, Robert Cassa, was very good at doing the executive stuff.
And actually, I think it was quite an effective combination. Meanwhile, there have been the invention of research fellowship,
something called the Senior Research Fellowships and the Junior Gerti Research Fellowships.
And again, unsurprisingly, with the strength of Oxford Medicine,
those are very good people appointed to those like Russell Foster and later Peters A.G.
and a really distinguished biomedical senior people and a whole raft of junior people.
How do you found Herbert had and Herbert Heart?
I really only met towards the end of his time. He was charming.
He knew who I was. He would come and sit next to the young fellows. He would talk about things that were interesting him.
So the patenting of genes was something that as a lawyer he was interested in, even in the late 70s.
And it's very interesting to me that in 2013, the American Supreme Court had suddenly decided you can't patent.
And I think Herbert would have been, you know, delighted and intrigued by that because that was very much the line I to him.
And you've got the development of time, really.
You mentioned earlier about the Internet and. Yes.
How have you seen that going on? I mean, it must have advantages as well.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't get me wrong. I think I think the advantages are completely overwhelming.
And Southern, who followed Porter as the professor of biochemistry, once wrote a piece for a book I edited where he said,
and this is 15 years ago, there will be a time where no scientist doesn't start their research by looking at a computer screen.
And this was the notion of databases, which, of course, I was only involved in, in looking at sequencing and databases.
And, you know, he absolutely was correct, but it happened much quicker than even he might have predicted.
So it's changed quotes, everything quotes.
But I think like everything in human activity, it requires a lot of thought about how to do it intelligently and not, you know, mindlessly.
Uh, Southern is a good example of the sort of group of people that Porter represented of being, uh, very nearly unworldly.
He gave a lot of resource to Third World countries from the prises.
He he won and he came to work on his bike wearing sandals.
And whether I admired having people like that around,
because there are an awful lot of the suited sort and the medical school, as ever, is always changing.
And what would you say the important changes in your time and have they helped?
Yeah, yeah. Well, there are big changes in terms of structures, not least of which the scale of the medical school, 150 students a year.
But it's actually the psychology that's really changed.
And I think David Weatherall is probably the human who caused that more than any other individual.
I'm aware of this self-confidence in the medical school.
The notion that the Oxford Medical School is the best, of course,
it's the best was different from the world I was telling her about when I was making a decision whether to stay in Oxford or not.
I think the self-confidence is very justifiable.
When you think of the research activities and the scale of that. It is an amazingly strong, successful medical school.
However, I think sometimes there's less reflection than there might be about actually it's a small south Midland City.
If you want to find out the diseases of urban deprivation, it's not going to be so easy to show those to students,
particularly if there are more students in in Oxford than it would be in Leeds or Bradford or other places.
I'm aware, too, of how good the educational activities have been by young academic clinicians and particularly by the NHS clinicians.
Derek, as the as the people with the relatively few university positions have been trying to drive major research activities,
a lot of the teaching has been handed over de facto to to the NHS.
And I think the clinical and that's the clinical emerging. Absolutely. Yes.
So, I mean, you probably didn't in any way, in any strong way influence rather inform.
But how did you see preclinical as they came up to making their decision where to do clinical?
Yeah, yeah, yes. I teased some of them because they had so much angst about it and the angst was usually about.
Will I get into the Oxford Medical School or not? And one student up on campus said this is the most important decision of the whole of my life.
And I remember teasing him some years later because it did become rather absurd.
As I say, pendulum swing. The fashion was for people not to go to Oxford, changing the fashion for people desperate to stay in office.
But I always thought it was quite a good thing that people came to the clinical school from places other than Oxford,
a place called Cambridge, for example, though I know that that's currently back in subject of discussion.
Should it be one medical course over six years rather than have the potential for a break in the middle?
I benefited actually from going to London was a good time for me to be in another place.
But I think most students now are desperate to stay in the clinical course in Oxford.
Are any of them going to Cambridge? You know, interestingly enough, not and Cambridge has changed the way it does things,
I gather, so that I think that that isn't going to happen, which is sad.
And somebody told me that Cambridge has changed the word physiology to homeostasis.
Is that right? And is there an end to physiology as we know? There's going to be talk of it.
I was at a big international conference this summer where physiologists spent a lot of time wondering about what they should be called.
But the end result was an incredibly strong scientific programme of people doing everything possible.
There's less overt biochemistry, a huge amount of genetics, huge amount of neuroscience, huge amount of clever technology with physics and optics.
And it seems to me what people call themselves is increasingly not very interesting.
Now, your undergraduates in the last year, they do.
How much of a practical project? Six weeks. Yes, six weeks, which contrasts with the biochemists in their last year who are a years of research.
And, you know, that's a fourth year. That is a fourth year.
They are trying to draw the comparison just in order to say the break between the person who's
going to be a doctor and the person who's going to be a scientist has become more and more stark.
And I think that that has a cost because it means there's less chance for youngsters now to do what I did, which was slightly move across the border.
And it's obvious that you don't want that many people starting medicine not to end up looking after patients.
That's why they sign into it. But I think there are benefits in having a fraction who do slightly different sorts of courses,
whether it is going to public health at one end or go into fundamental research at the other end.
I think medicine, funnily enough, does benefit from being a broader college than just saying were cannon fodder for the NHS needs,
which became a little bit of a mantra for a few years ago.
So I'm I'm saying that I think six weeks research project is really not quite enough to engage seriously in science.
I mean, do they ever come back to the same project or write it up?
Yeah, some some definitely do. And some definitely come back over the long back.
And it depends a bit on the luck of the draw or how the science goes with that supervisors.
But I think it's one of the things that Oxford endowment pockets could be picked up,
you know, moderately focussed way, but fairly fruitfly to try and help that interface.
Yeah. Now, am I right that the course before you start your clinical is now three years running now?
Three years, three terms within four years. Yeah. And is that an advantage?
Yeah. So the path and back went some, some time ago and Derek and and it's been three years and includes the pathology and the
pharmacology during that three years it has had consequences that are quite interesting,
one of which is I think the first year has less time for thinking because it has more subject matter in it.
And that first year is important in terms of how students approach the whole of their first three years degree.
The other aspect is that it's forced subjects like pathology to try and distinguish themselves from clinical pathology,
which is making the clinical years.
I think I'm not terribly well placed to comment on that, but there does seem a disproportionate amount of immunology in the current cause.
Um, the other aspect that's relevant is about who will examine subjects.
Now there are fewer and fewer people who feel competent to even examine.
The whole pathology, if it includes virology as well as bacteriology,
that's a problem and increasing specialisation has happened all the time and the increasing number of academic teachers has increased,
presumably because of that. And do they get, as it were, lectures from all these different people?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do. But I think in an ideal world,
there would be a bit more effort to try and reduce the number of people giving the lectures and to have a bit
more coherence about the way the lecture series is structured and the interaction between different lectures.
Um, one always looks back and say, yes, there was a good series of lectures by so-and-so who felt they took on board teach the whole of that.
Now you sometimes run into the problem of one person coming in and giving a single lecture and not really knowing how that fits in.
I think these things, again, will be changed as the technology develops.
If actually the young have the possibility of hearing a moderately standard lecture in Oxford or to hear
a stellar lecture from Harvard on the Internet that they may change the way they view these things.
But that hasn't happened yet. Its it's beginning it's beginning to hear, um, which is anything I the last year that.
No, I mean I think I would want to emphasise how lucky I feel to have had this fulfilled life with between teaching research.
I was never forced to make that decision. Was I cheap or was I a goat.
And that's really the biggest message I want to hand. And on to the next generation.
Yeah, I'm just coming back. There are much more many more choices in schools now, if I'm right.
Yeah. So they end up concentrating on just a fraction. Yes, yes.
Yes, they do that. They dig deeper in a smaller area.
However,
there is an attempt and I was involved in setting up the revised course to have a paper where they have to show they can connect different areas,
a synoptic paper assignment that was very involved in doing that.
And I think it's definitely something I applaud the medical school taking on as an ambition.
I think, like all things, it needs fine tuning, but it's an attempt to try and have both the depth through the subjects studied focussed way,
but also the breadth in trying to force them to collect things. And I know it's an impossible question,
but how do you think in general the Oxford Preclinical School has evolved in competition in Glass at Cambridge?
Yeah, yeah. No, I think this competition, which goes on in rather quiet, understated British way, has to be a good thing.
But I also think that applies within each of those medical schools with colleges very alert of the fact
that some college who hasn't particularly been strong in an area suddenly has a change in strategy,
says it wants, for example, more women teaching or it wants a better state applicant ratio.
They're small enough to be able to do that a little bit.
Fine, tune it and then look at the results over time, realising that other people will be looking over their shoulder.
So there is some element of Darwinian sort of active pressure going on there.
I think the Cambridge one's really interesting because Cambridge is bigger and scientifically it's,
you know, incredibly strong, particularly obviously in the physical sciences.
But its strategy of having the tripod system is an interesting compare and contrast with Oxford.
Oxford goes for the style of saying if a school even knows they want to do biochemistry, come to Oxford and you can do it from day one in Cambridge.
You'd have to wait till year three till you really become a fully differentiated chemist.
But in terms of the medical schools, because of the GMC requirements, an awful lot of them are in common.
I and know that because I've examined quite a lot in Cambridge,
but there are some subtle differences and I think each one has strengths and weaknesses.
You mentioned you tend to do it. It's seven books or.
Right books. Yes, I wrote books and I edited some books and I edited one book, particularly with Dennis Noble,
which I really enjoyed doing because it was a fairly broad brush thing and I was rather astonished to find people like David Weatherall had read it.
And, you know, I I enjoyed being part of a community where there was some intellectual, uh,
discourse really between individuals who might not necessarily think they bumped into each other.
Now, you'd have been writing a lot of papers to. Yeah.
And you were also an editor of the journal. Yes. Editing is really par for the course.
But I did I did a big journal for some time. That was.
Good in terms of meeting colleagues and thinking a bit about broader subjects,
I think probably it was writing research papers, that was what really gave me fun.
The flip side of that was writing research grants and that sort of increasingly dominant for scientists now.
And, you know, if you have a 19 percent chance of getting your ground funded statistically, even if you like,
you think you're better than average, it means you're writing an awful lot of grants that are actually quite a wasted effort.
But, of course, they gradually refine the next set.
Of course, they do know and I'm all in favour of having grant funding that requires people to be at the top of their game to get funding.
But I'm saying I much more enjoyed writing papers than I did I in grants.
And did you sit on grant awarding bodies? Yes. Yes, I did.
And the MRC, I was on there a higher level awarding bodies,
and I chaired various groups that were involved in setting up research activities in certain areas in the UK for the MRC.
When I look back on those, Darick, I see those as less fulfilling.
For me personally, at the time, you thought you were quite important helping the MRC make decisions.
Actually 10 years later, you know, a little bit less than nothing.
But did you feel they were impinging too much on your mainline activities?
And there are people who are tough at saying no because their research was the only thing that really worked them in the middle of the night.
I think I saw myself as a bit broader than that, which is a way of saying I didn't have views, that my research trumped everything else.
And I quite like to try and see how things connected. Tissue engineering, for example, was something I didn't know anything about specifically.
But I chaired the entire Research Council group on whether the UK should go in terms of putting resource into tissue engineering.
And that made me think quite hard, obviously with expertise from engineers and so biologists about how that worked.
And I have kept a bit of an eye on that field and I don't think we got it entirely wrong.
Yeah, no. Great. Well, thank you very much, Richard.