Gabriel Horn interviewed by Patrick Bateson 16th January and 3rd April 2007, filmed by Alan Macfarlane 0:09:07 Father was a tailor, a lovely man; mother managed in difficult circumstances, but also a lovely person; during the war living in poor housing, father ill and mother having to help him in the shop; had three elder brothers, oldest brother about nine years older; mother born in the East End of London and we used to go from Birmingham to see my grandmother there; hated seeing the extreme poverty there; father's parents would have died in Poland before my birth; mother's parents came from Austro-Hungarian Empire; father born 1878 and mother in 1892; I was born in 1927; felt that in terms of the life my family lived we were rather well off compared with mother's family in the East End 5:09:10 My father despised both liberal and orthodox Jews; we did not live in a Jewish community in Birmingham but had their business near the centre of town and later moved to Handsworth; whilst my brothers went to the Hebrew School when the family lived in the centre, there was no such school for me to go to when we moved; they were also too far from the Synagogue to go but rarely; mother did keep a kosher kitchen which was a bit of a problem for me when later I was evacuated; by the time I went to university I had given up entirely 7:13:14 My primary school, Westminster Road Junior School, was next to my home; nothing very remarkable happened there; I was bullied but never remember any anti-semitism though my older brothers did experience it; my parents did not want me to be exposed to the New Testament so did not go to the morning congregation at school or to religion lessons; I was the only one not to go but it was accepted without comment; I failed entrance examination to the grammar school, perhaps due to disruption of being evacuated for a few months and then returning to find the school closed; went to a school of sorts for one hour a week in the basement of a church; actually did get through the exam but did not get a place; my older brother had been to a Commercial school and one did the exam for that at thirteen; I took it and got into a Technical school and in my first year was near the bottom of the class in most things; in the second year I remember the gym master reading 'The Lady of Shallot' to us; in the culture I came from people didn't read poetry and certainly not role models like him; something sparked an interest and I went from being bottom in maths and physics to top; even almost remember the day when I suddenly realized how algebra worked; later, when I was about to leave school the maths master asked me what I intended to do; I had chosen a Technical school rather than Commercial as I wanted to be a civil engineer; I had seen in Arthur Mee's 'Children's Encyclopaedia' the bridge over the Victoria Falls and I decided then I wanted to build bridges in Africa; after I left school at fifteen I applied to Stewart and Lloyds in Birmingham for a job but didn't get it; my father got a job for me as a draftsman in a big engineering company and I stayed for a week as I thought it an awful job 15:02:19 At that time my older brother, Henry, had been called up; he had worked for my father who was by then getting quite ill and needed help; he asked me to help him and become a tailor; I agreed on the condition that I could get off one day a week to study for the National Certificate of Mechanical Engineering; during that two year course I was also going to youth clubs; at one we were playing table tennis in a school hall where the elderly woman in charge was reading Huxley and Wells 'A Science of Life' to a small group; I listened and that was almost the decisive moment; I knew nothing of biology but decided to do medicine so that I could help people, also there was no one to tell me what I should do if I wanted to study biology; another problem was that to get into university you needed to matriculate and then the Higher Schools Certificate; decided this was what I wanted to do and asked my parents; could see that they were rather pleased although my father tried to persuade me to be a tailor as a safe job; he was, however, prepared to support me; I went to a woman who was a biology teacher at the King Edward's Grammar School for Girls in Handsworth; she offered to arrange teachers for me in February when the exams were in June; in fact it was a two year course and the cost of five shillings an hour would be a lot for my parents; realized it was fruitless and went back to the Technical college to do the mechanical engineering exams; in the following September I went to night school intending to accelerate the two year course into one year; the following January my father died and the family needed a breadwinner; still had the shop and went on selling clothes; I was good at making women's skirts but not jackets; put up a notice advertising 'alterations', a skill which served me well later in micro-surgery; made a living but still went on at night school, managed to matriculate in the following June and then embarked on the equivalent of 'A' levels - chemistry, physics and biology; I was seventeen and this was a two-year course which I was trying to do in one year; was an extraordinarily exciting learning year; due to be called up for armed forces at eighteen and asked for a deferment until I had finished my exams; only gave a short deferment and refused to extend it to the following July; I wrote to my MP and he wrote to the Minister of Defence, Mr Arthur Henderson, who refused to interfere in the process of the call up 'but it was unlikely it would be implemented in time before Mr Horn's examinations'; many years later I met Mr Henderson in the House of Lords where I sat next to him at lunch and told him the story; he professed to remember me saying 'we thought it was a neat solution'; passed my exams; before I did matriculation, didn't know who to talk to about medicine but wrote to the Sub-Dean and the Birmingham School of Medicine, Professor Charles Smout; he agreed to see me but was quite violent saying I had no qualifications and should give up the absurd idea; wrote me a letter in the same vein; some years later after I had got my Higher Certificate I asked to see him again; he upbraided me once more and told me to leave but he did ask what I was carrying in my briefcase; it was my certificate and he told me to come back and offered me a place to read medicine 25:51:15 Politics was not discussed in my family; mother said she was Liberal but I never knew what that meant; as an undergraduate I met Anne Soper and in our last year we went out together; we talked a great deal about politics; there were a number of factors but it was not family background that interested me in politics; in those years of enlightenment for me when I had decided to read medicine, my mind was opened by Huxley and Wells 'A Science of Life' and I began to read, particularly philosophy; remember reading C.E.M Joad's 'Guide to Philosophy' and that brought a huge change intellectually; it was an extraordinary experience to question all certainties; with my background at a school which gave a training for skilled artisans where all the answers were known; from Joad I went on to Bertrand Russell, I came across Einstein's theory of relativity, A.J. Ayers 'Language, Truth and Logic'; these opened up my mind while at the same time I was seeing the social conditions of people; in my course at the university there was a course in social medicine and saw the poverty around one; Anne Soper was the daughter of Donald Soper, a very left-wing Christian politician; by then I was an agnostic but was more and more conscious of the needs of the underprivileged and the injustices of the distribution of resources in the country; the waste of talent in many young people while for others who went to the right school it was given; it should be drawn out by the school but for the majority it wasn't; think those that were the factors that drove me to the left of politics 30:31:10 At Birmingham I started to develop an interest in the brain; I was beginning to be aware of perception and sensation and the philosophical issues around that and consciousness even then; I remember one day in 1946 reading an article on the surgery of the brain in a magazine called 'Discovery' and it was that moment that I knew I wanted to work on the brain; that and the philosophical background was driving me towards the central nervous system at an early stage; I enjoyed my time at Birmingham; I plunged into undergraduate life and got involved in the debating society and became chairman of the society at the end of my first year; that made me also chairman of the political society; that first year was a great year for exploring beyond the bounds of anatomy and physiology as was to some extent the second year; the third year was fabulous; a remarkable man in the medical school called Solly Zuckermann, the Professor of Anatomy, although anatomy was not actually taught us by him; he was in London a good deal of the time advising the Government, but he would come on Fridays and stay until Monday; somehow the whole atmosphere changed in the Medical School on Friday afternoon; everyone was alert and they remained so until Monday afternoon; I knew that I could work in the Department of Anatomy with a very small group where quite a lot of work was being done on the brain; I took a scholarship exam which would allow an extra year without an exam but a dissertation; I was so keen to have a research project and it was one of the most exciting years of my life; this was the reason why when I came to Cambridge I wanted a project in the third year; it was also the year I met Anne and married her; she was reading zoology and helped me with my zoological knowledge; we connived to marry without telling anybody and did so the day after our first paper; we kept our marriage secret from Donald and his wife for many years but I am pretty certain they would have opposed the marriage; I had no background, no money, and they had aspirations; very middle-class which I was not 36:43:12 I loved Solly and he was very much a father figure to me; when I got the scholarship to do a B.Sc. in a year I also got an opportunity representing Britain in the debating society in an all-India tour in 1951; a fantastic opportunity and I wanted to go on this six-week visit but it was at the start of the B.Sc. course; I went to the department and saw Peter Crow, a distinguished endocrinologist, who was Solly's right hand man; he said I should see Solly who advised me not to go; during that year I did a lot of research and then I was to go on to clinical work; I really wanted to continue research in the Department of Anatomy but I was also supposed to be attending ward rounds; I was absenting myself from ward rounds and the Professor of Surgery, Stammers, apparently contacted Zuckerman and complained; Zuckerman put out an instruction that 'Horn should not be encouraged to stay in the laboratory, but you don't have to discourage him either'; later on I really didn't want to come to Cambridge but to stay in his department; I went to see him and he hadn't got a job for me; by then I had decided to stay in medicine and had published some papers in endocrinology; Zuckerman said he would write to his friend Dixon Boyd at Cambridge which he did in my presence; it was a glowing letter and a job at Cambridge did come up and Dixon Boyd asked me if I was going to apply; that is how I got into Cambridge 40:34:09 Having spent five or six years studying medicine, a new rule had been introduced requiring one to spend a year at a hospital in order to become registered which I did; I still went on doing research though my poor wife and children suffered; was also thinking what future research to do; applied for the job in the Department of Anatomy in Cambridge and hoped to go into fulltime research; however I still clung to medicine; to eke out a living I used to supervise quite a lot for King's which was the beginning of my association with the college; I also found I could also earn nearly as much by doing the surgery for the local GP in Histon on one or two evenings a week and occasional weekends; also did occasional weeks as a locum in the Fens while I was a demonstrator; kept this association going until finally I realized that there were plenty of people to do good and then focussed more and more on my research 43:48:09 The huge influence from my philosophical interests led me to wonder how one could study consciousness from an experimental point of view; became aware of the selective nature of consciousness and attention and the things you do attend to are apprehended in a self-conscious way; seemed to me that if you could understand how the different signals are treated in the nervous system, the tended and unattended signals, you could find the routes whereby the attended signals are passed and treated in the brain and then see how that differs from the unattended signals; that seemed to me a potential attack on the problem of consciousness from the experimental point of view; there were already some neurophysiological correlates of this in the work of Hans Berger in 1928 when he studied the human electroencephalogram found a rhythm at the back of the skull called an alpha rhythm and they disappear if the subject is attending to a stimulus and reappear if the subject is not attending; so something going on in the brain which is quantifiable; Lord Adrian and Brian Matthews were able to repeat Berger's work and take it forward in the 1930's; Adrian was a sensory physiologist and was interested in how signals were passed from the skin to nerve fibres and up to the brain; he discovered the nerve impulses that we use; he wondered whether the signals that are not attended to are blocked in being transmitted from the eye or skin to the brain; I thought it a great thing to study and my intention was to come to Cambridge and set up an electrophysiological laboratory and study attention in animals; there was no one in Cambridge who was studying the neurophysiology of the central nervous system, nor very little in Britain; thought I must be trained somewhere so asked Professor Boyd if I could take leave the next year and go to work with Herbert Jasper at the Montreal Institute of Neurology; Dixon Boyd agreed but couldn't pay me and Herbert Jasper had said I could come if I raised the money; I applied to the Wellcome Trust and got a grant; Herbert knew Adrian and asked him if he would see me; saw him in his laboratory one morning and he was simply wonderful; he was then Master of Trinity, a powerful man; he was in his basement lab all blacked out so he could take photographs and he was filing something; we spoke for next two hours on attention 50:29:16 Had a similar experience with another august person, A.J. Ayer; I had written an essay on the neurological basis of thought during my year in Zuckerman's laboratory; Zuckerman had read it and sent it to Ayer; Ayer asked to see me; Zuckerman had thoroughly read and commented writing Hebb, a famous neuropsychologist, all over my manuscript; Hebb had published a paper in 1949 on how memory might work and unbeknown to me I had written in my essay almost exactly the same; saw Ayer in his apartment at Mayfair where he harangued me on how wrong I was and that physiology had nothing to say about sensory perception; I occasionally drew his attention to what Bertrand Russell had said which only inflamed him all the more; Adrian was most encouraging; he did understand the blocking mechanism of the mind; said 'the doctor asleep at night does not often hear the call of his child but he will wake to the ringing of the telephone'; selectively blocking signals but allowing some SOS messages through 54:34:21 Began to teach for King's in 1956 though can't remember well; 1957-58 I was away; in 1958 King's asked me to take on all the supervisions which I did but I was still only a demonstrator and as such colleges are usually reluctant to take on; they did offer me very generous dining rights which I exercised; Provost Sheppard was extraordinarily nice to me; I remember the very first evening coming into college much too early and there was only one person there, hidden behind a newspaper; he asked me who I was and I returned the question which amused him greatly; coming from Birmingham to Cambridge although a doctor I only had an M.B. and so was called 'Mr'; at one dinner was placed next to Sheppard and noticed my card said 'Dr Horn' and I commented to him that I was only 'Mr' to which he replied that I was the only proper doctor in the college; met John Griffith dining in hall after I came back from Canada and fortunately applied for and got a very substantial sum of money from the US National Institute of Health which enabled me to set up a first class neurophysiological laboratory with the help and encouragement of Professor Boyd who was a classical anatomist and thought I had come from a different planet; very sweet to me and gave me space; there I was recording from nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and was telling John Griffith about this and he said he would like to see what I was doing; he was fascinated though a mathematician and theoretical chemist and had never really thought about the nervous system; after that he came frequently, often carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, a shy upright person, unsure of himself; we would watch the oscilloscope screen together; you can tell when you are recording from a single nerve cell because the cell generates an electrical current which you can measure the voltage associated with it; the voltage generates a wave that you can see on the oscilloscope; any one neurone has a particular wave form; sometimes we could see one wave form accompanied by another little wave form which had to mean it was two neurones; John had been reading some work by Eccles, a great neurophysiologist; he said that if I could tell him how neurones worked in the brain he would tell me how the brain worked; those were the days when it was thought that there was only one kind of neurone and that was in the spinal cord and that you could extrapolate from that to every single neurone in the brain; he saw these two neurones on the screen and wondered how they interacted with each other Second Part 0:09:07 Collaborated with John Griffith and published at least one paper together; taking forward how the two neurones interacted electrically because if you could understand that you would begin to understand how networks and nerve cells interact; no mathematics available to study it so he had to design the mathematical tools for studying it; there were no computers then; these were electrical pulses and you couldn't analyse the time elapsing between each pulse so had to film it and then the film was analyzed by a woman who was also measuring film of pulsars at that time; took months for the measuring the intervals; became a fellow in 1962 and we spent much time in my room here, in his room, and my laboratory, and formed a great friendship; and going beyond our own work together he was a very original scientist and I think would have got a Nobel Prize 3:11:19 Working on attention where there was always two stimuli I had found some nerve cells in the visual part of the brain that responded not only to visual but also tactile stimulation; there were very few of them and the responses were quite weak but visual physiologists did not like this; there was a group in Germany let by Baumgärtner who had found similar things for auditory input, neurones in the visual cortex responding; Dave Hubel and Vernon Mountcastle really didn't like that and they were very influential figures in the US at the time; coming from it from attention and finding nerve cells in the visual part of the brain responding to a tactile stimulus whether the animal was attending or not; there was a basic level of interaction going on which was independent; Peter Venables and I did an experiment in humans with similar results; not only did you get switching between modalities, like audio and visual, but they actually interfere with each other at quite a low level of the cerebral cortex; in 1963 Charles Shute and Peter Lewis in the Department of Anatomy where I was working had shown that there were pathways that had never been discovered that were actually not visual but they went into the visual pathways from other parts of the brain; I thought this was the key; there was a lot of evidence that this extraordinary high level of brain function, attention switching, for example, and what one would call clinically, consciousness, is controlled deep down in the very primitive parts of the brain called the brain stem; I wanted to spend some time putting electrodes into the brain stem and seeing whether there were lots of nerve cells there that responded to more than one sensory modality as that is what I would predict; I had written a chapter on some neurocorrelates of perception and gave it to Horace Barlow to read; he liked it and when he could not go immediately to take up a Chair at Berkeley he suggested I go for a term teaching on the physiology of vision; when I arrived I was told I would have to work with Dick Hill as there was not enough equipment for me to work by myself on brain stem research; working on anaesthetised rabbits we put an electrode on the brain stem and came across nerve cells that responded beautifully to visual stimulus; I remember one day dropping a pin on the floor while we were monitoring the activity of the nerve cells and getting an immediate response; further research found lots of nerve cells that responded to sound and touch as well as to visual input; however, when we came to look at where the electrode had been it was not in the core of the brain stem but in the roof; the roof of the brain stem is the most ancient visual centre in vertebrates called the optic tectum; we looked through the literature and found nothing published and so the world didn't believe us; remember coming back to Cambridge and telling Dixon Boyd who asked for proof which I gave him; then a lot of people started working on this; I then also found that neurones in that part of the brain responded differently to infrequent and frequent stimuli; for the former there was always a response but it declined with frequency, showing habituation; this had been observed in behaviour and I had heard about from Bill Thorpe at the Thorpe-Zangwill club; in animals, they give a response to a novel stimulus but if not rewarded with food, for example, they don't respond; I suddenly realized that we were dealing with a nerve neural counterpart to behavioural habituation so I saw my life retrospectively opening up in two directions; saw I must follow this elementary form of learning as here was a clue to understanding what the neural basis of learning might be; the other was sensory interaction 14:19:03 In 1967-68 Dick Hill wrote to me and said he would like to come and spend a summer in Cambridge; I had read about the vestibular stimuli in the visual cortex and I'd already been to Makerere to work with Hugh Fraser-Rowell where I'd worked on locust brains; came across the work of a Dutch man, Wiersma, whom I met, who was recording from the optic nerve of crayfish and found that the nerve fibre was looking at the field of vision above the horizon; every time a visual stimulus was below the horizon there was no response; found that if he tilted the animal the nerve cell went on responding in the same area and didn't tilt; suggested to Dick that we see if something like this existed in the visual cortex of a mammal; we found this was so and we sent off a letter to 'Nature' which was published; it caused intense controversy; the following year I was joined by Gerry Steckler and we spent a year working on it once again and we published the full paper in 1972; could never understand the vitriol that was heaped on me in meetings in the visual forum and it took many years for other people to confirm; it was a difficult experiment to perform and also took courage to do it in the States; there was a group there which published a paper in 1981 saying in a sense that I was wrong in underestimating the number of these as there were more, but it still went dead and is a lacuna in the scientific system that this still isn't quite respectable 19:07:00 [PB: I will tell you why. It is because people trained in a certain kind of science do an experiment where you vary one thing and keep everything else constant, and if you get an effect that is the cause. People still think in this very linear way and if someone like you comes along and says it is not the cause but one of the causes, people hate this systems approach to biology. I have encountered many physiologists who hate this] 19:42:13 I remember I had some interaction with Colin Blakemore about this and he said 'The trouble is we physiologists don't know how to handle parallel systems and therefore it's not popular'; I don't know if that's it or the explanation for it; I read a review by someone in Stirling University about this kind of influence and she had never heard of this earlier work; I wrote to her and she said she was pleased to know about it but was facing terrible trouble getting her work published; I felt then that the quicker I get out of the field of visual physiology the happier I should be in another field 20:40:17 You and I had already started in 1965 before I went to Makerere; when I came back we began to think of ways of dealing with that problem; on the habituation front, I went on to study it in the insect brain and work out its characteristics and a year after Dick Hill and I published in 'Nature' showing these lovely habituating curves of neurones and showing that these nerve cells had so many of the properties of behaviour; this paper was 1964 and in 1966 a paper appeared from Tauk and Brunaire in France showing that you could get this kind of response decrement and showing many of the properties of behavioural habituation across a single junction between nerve cells and the next neurone; the trouble was they didn't know it was any one cell to the next nerve cell and it could have been many nerve cells interacting and they hadn't got any system that did it; I thought that I needed a system to do that; I knew there was one system where there was unequivocally the case that there was one nerve cell sending a signal to another nerve cell and that was the squid giant ganglion; thought that is the place if I can show this habituation then I know its occurring in the synapse and you have got to look within the synapse to understand it, you don't need to look much further; it happened and I remember giving a presentation of these results to a conference Robert Hinde and I organised in 1969 on short term change and neural activity; Eric Kandel was there and I showed these slides of this lovely waning of a response and it had to be on the pre-synaptic side not on the post-synaptic side and I said I thought that calcium was probably involved; Kandel showed later on that calcium was involved and it did happen at the synaptic junction but he never referred to that work, except when I met him after he got the Nobel Prize referring to my great paper on the squid stellate ganglion 24:26:23 I had been in the Department of Anatomy here in Cambridge for eighteen years and I really wasn't interested in running anything but just doing my research; I'd been pulled onto the research committee by Robert Hinde and began to see that the way the University was running was important for my research too so I began to look beyond it; I was then teaching six hours a week and had been for years here in King's; I had been appointed Reader; was not very impressed by the way Professor Harrison ran the Department; used to go on family holidays to Cornwall and Devon, driving through Bristol which I loved; when the Chair of Anatomy came up at Bristol I applied; I was extremely lucky in that Barry Cross had not been a traditional anatomist and had done an extremely good job in organising that department; he had allowed a young junior lecturer to revise the teaching of topographical anatomy so it was going extremely well when I arrived; the teaching looked good so I was able to concentrate on research; I always had a love of developmental biology and embryology; the field of molecular developmental biology was just beginning; I had a vacancy in the department and I managed to get a very bright young man, John Knowland who was working with Fred Sanger at the MRC Laboratories here in Cambridge; he came and began molecular developmental biology; sadly he only stayed about as long as I did in Bristol; felt that if I am going to populate a department of anatomy with scientists who had no medical training they ought to know a bit about anatomy; needed a clinical input and thought I could get John Knowland to get familiar with these things; too big a job and he opted out; I brought in quite a lot of neuroscientists to the department; I encouraged the development of biomechanics with research by Lance Lanyon; became quite strong in oral biology with Bernie Moxham; really a matter of appointing the right people to jobs and encouraging them; also, I as head of department did research; felt that no head of a science department should just be a manager; there was some discretionary money that I could use as head of department; one thing it brought me was the opportunity to bind the people in the department together so I used to spent some of that money on a party once or twice a term for all the staff, including technical and secretarial, and their partners, which was appreciated; two of the people I appointed, one Malcolm Brown who became Fellow of the Royal Society and remain in Bristol; Bernie Moxham went to become head of department at Cardiff; both those two departments got five stars in the Research Assessment Exercise, the only two to do so 33:52:22 Had a telephone conversation with Robert Hinde about applying for the chair in the Department of Zoology in Cambridge; thought it was absurd as I was not a zoologist and had no real interest in natural history and knowledge of biology was limited; gave all the reasons why I shouldn't apply; he countered with my work on squid, locust, all sorts of animals and even humans; I had great esteem for the department with which I had had links in the past; thought there were brilliant people there; in the end agreed that Robert could put my name forward and finally I was offered the Chair and it was far from clear that I should take it; I was well known in the department for my work with neuroscientists there; my research cut across boundaries and the one thing I saw as positive in going to zoology was the fights I continually had to mount in the medical faculty and the science faculty in Bristol about intellectual territory; to me they were senseless arguments as I didn't see the world that way and being forced to teach student that way was anathema; I then got the reputation in Bristol of wanting to take over the physiology department which was the last thing on my mind; the attraction of zoology in my discussions with you and Robert was the awareness that it didn't matter whether you worked on behaviour or cells it was all one; zoology cut across everything to do with animals which included humans; at that time the department was not in good shape so I knew it would be an uphill task while everything in Bristol was simply wonderful; remember going away with the family and we discussed it endlessly; in the end they left it to me to decide; on the basis of this challenge I suddenly thought what an opportunity to abandon all these constraints and step into the wide world of real biology Third Part 3rd April 2007 0:09:07 Didn't quite appreciate how much needed to be done in the department; the first thing that I did was to try to absorb the atmosphere of the department; at the time Donald Parry was head of department and was doing a marvellous job but he didn't have the authority that was required to help in critical ways; I got my research group going as I felt strongly that the head of department ought to lead not only by teaching and administrating, but ought to do research themselves; first priority was getting myself established and finding out what people wanted; I was not then head as I left Donald in charge; found that people did not want more neuroscience and there was a real fear that I was going to take the jobs that became vacant and fill them with my own kind, which is what you might do in a department of anatomy to strengthen one area; realized it would have been disastrous so tried to find out what were the strengths and weaknesses of the department; also my own experience of zoology was 'A' level and it was a new world for me; looked around for someone, not an ethologist as we were strong there; had been told of a man called Nick Davis who was at Oxford and managed to get him; having strengthened behavioural ecology; [PB: had a project on that at King's at the same time which was renamed sociobiology, which meant we could establish a strong group. Tim Clutton-Brock came back as a fellow, Robin Dunbar was here and Richard Wrangham. That may have helped to get Nick Davis here] 5:34:18 Moving a few years on when I was then head of department and on the council of the School of Biological Sciences; on the needs committee one had the fights for vacant offices; since the mid 1970's when the University has been under pressure from external forces to slim down; there was a big fight over one vacancy and I spotted that Tim Clutton-Brock was coming to the end of the sociobiology group at King's and I felt we ought to get hold of him; I pressed the needs committee who were mainly medics and they didn't understand what Tim Clutton-Brock was doing; in the end got the vacant post; the John Humphrey Plummer Professorship became vacant and also another Chair in Biological Sciences; both could go to any department; I thought these two professorships could be used to extract John Gurdon and Ron Lasky from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Richard Keynes, then Head of the Physiology Department, suddenly became very supportive; had heard that neither was very happy in the Laboratory and I went to have tea with them there and it was clear to me that they were interested; what they really wanted to do was to establish an outstanding department of developmental biology and I think they thought that they themselves weren't sufficient; there was another Chair coming vacant, the Quick Professorship; the person who got it in the end was Chris Wylie from University College; I don't want imply in any sense that you could short-circuit the University but what we had was some quite remarkable people who were willing to allow their names to go forward; Alan Hodgkin was on the panel of electors and he was very enthusiastic; Gurdon and Lasky got the Chairs; Chris Wylie and his wife, Janet Heasman, who is a remarkable developmental biologist, worked together; couldn't get one without the other; Chris got the Chair and Janet applied for a job in the department; difficult as there was a very strong internal candidate; in the end she did have the edge; so the four of them were in post 12:09:09 I was able to take over space in the department; Torkel Weis-Fogh had wished to promote cell biology and had brought in a group run by Bob Johnson, supported by the Cancer Research Campaign; managed to get space for Bob Johnson; Cancer Research and possibly Wellcome gave money for the refurbishment of laboratories for Gurdon and Lasky and the thing took off; later had the opportunity to appoint Mike Bate also a young, distinguished, developmental biologist; had this extraordinary cluster and that development brought the Department of Zoology up to the highest possible level; we also had in Charlie Ellington in comparative physiology who worked on locust flight; formed a marvellous group with Martin Wells; buoyant department but clear that many people were after Ron Lasky and John Gurdon was keen to keep him; they developed a plan to get more space by getting a building; that in itself was a big problem because the department would lose people attracted to new facilities; we got round the problem by ensuring that anyone who worked in the new institute would also be a member of a department and have teaching obligations to that department; their research contributions would be attributed to their department so that departments would actually gain; this is now the model for interdisciplinary facilities in the University; from that Wellcome-CRC came the Gurdon Institute and now the stem cell centre that has recently been established; all flowed from Gurdon and Lasky coming in the first place 18:00:17 Meanwhile there were inter-departmental things to consider; when I arrived we had 28 people reading Part II Zoology and I could see that as the department got stronger more people would want to come; there was a reluctance to expand because of the work load; when I finished there were over 80 Part II students; we in Cambridge were becoming stronger and stronger in neuroscience; 1969 I had got a group of people together in different departments in response to a then Science Research Council feelers to establish a neurobiology institute somewhere in the UK; planning meetings chaired by Oliver Zangwill but hostility from Alan Hodgkin etc.; SRC did not take it up but it did bring departments together and out of that came the Neuroscience Club which used to meet on Saturday morning; in 1987-8 the Medical Research Council said they did want to establish a neuroscience centre somewhere in the UK; this time we got the Brain Repair Unit; at that time we established the annual Cambridge Neuroscience Seminars; at that time spoke to Nick Mackintosh in King's who was then head of the Department of Experimental Psychology suggesting a joint Part II in neuroscience which was successfully started 22:01:23 Don't know how good a head of department I was; I was always accessible when there was serious trouble but not all the time; my schedule in full term was Monday, faculty boards and administration; from Tuesday afternoon onward I would work in my lab; Thursday afternoon would do a little administration; people did not disturb me in my lab; Fridays I would write papers at home and analyse data; pretty rigorous schedule; lectured usually in the Lent term, enjoyed teaching 25:15:12 The museum is one of the great collections in the UK but was not being well supported by the University; I did not have much in the way of resources for it and heads of departments explicitly wanted to close it and disperse its contents around the country; the Professor of Pathology was talking about dispersal but had never been to the museum; decided to have a meeting of the needs committee of the School of Biological Sciences in the museum; before the meeting took the heads of departments round the museum and they were simply amazed by what they saw; that changed the whole atmosphere and no longer any talk of closure; Ron Oxborough and I were worried about the position of museums in the University and managed to get the General Board to agree to appoint a committee to look round all the museums in the University which resulted in the key operating system for museums since 28:00:24 Remember there was a devolution of finances from the centre and departments were charged according to number of students, staff, space, and income they were receiving from research councils; if you did no research you did not get a deficit; Physiology had very little by way of income from research grants, with a lot of staff and minimum of teaching; Zoology had £500,000 deficit; departments manoeuvred their staff-student ratios or introduced new lecture courses to give the impression of heavy teaching loads; caused deep hostilities with struggles across departments; as head of department had struggles with Keith Peters who wanted to take over the School of Biological Sciences; later he expressed relief that I had blocked him as he was able to put all his energy into the Clinical School; despite all our public arguments we always remained friends which is academia at its best; this is one of the attributes of Cambridge colleges that instil a sense of respect and the opportunity to disagree while retaining friendship 35:01:22 When I had retired as Professor of Zoology I was approached by what is now DEFRA to look at origins of BSE; when I was on the council of Agriculture and Food Research Council I had been chairman of the committee that distributed financial resources into the whole of the effort on transmissible encephalopathies; it is not my field but I was only given two days to think about it as it needed to be reported to the House of Commons before the end of the Michaelmas session; agreed to do it and I appointed the committee members; Nick Phillips had already reported that the origins of BSE was a mutation in cattle, possibly in one animal; much debate whether that was right or plausible; more to the point he excluded scrapie as a source; clearly the Government wanted to have some update on what the current view was; a strange task as I knew nothing about it; I got John Webster from Bristol Clinical Veterinary School; when talking about the feeding of cattle described some changes in the sixties and calf feeding; I wondered whether there could be a sensitive period for eating infected material; we then began to look into the diet of calves and found that round about the critical epidemiological time there was a change in the way calves were fed and from then were fed meat and bone meal; cattle had been fed it before but it had never been given to calves; the epidemiological evidence also began to fall into place; it had been thought by the Phillips Commission that meat and bone meal were the trigger; it had been fed to cattle since the 1920's or even earlier; rough calculations on the numbers of cattle since suggested it would be a very rare mutation; why in the UK in the 1960's or 1970's and never in the rest of the world where the same technique was used; we thought it advisable not to exclude scrapie although it was taken by the press to declare that scrapie was the cause of BSE; given just six months to produce our report 42:18:20 Never felt it right for the head of a large department to take on the headship of a college; nearing retirement from the department realized that Mastership of Sidney Sussex would give me a further seven years; retired a year early as head of department; very different experience as in a department you have power to direct and to control space; in a college there is much less of a hierarchical structure where you have to both reflect the fellowship's desires and to guide it; I took with me the King's notion of a Research Centre as I thought it a good way of using research fellowships; I had mentioned this in my interview and had suggested the crumbling Soviet Union as a subject among others; after election was approached by a fellow which resulted in a project on post Soviet states in transition which was very successful; run by a fellow called Graham Smith who was a geographer; they had produced a landmark book but sadly Smith died just a week before publication; also presided over the 400th centenary celebrations; asked to start an appeal and managed to raise £6,500,000 and a system for donations; Sidney Sussex was the college of Oliver Cromwell so a tension between it and the Crown; no member of the Royal Family had ever visited the college; I had a good relationship with the Vice-Chancellor, David Williams, and he encouraged Prince Phillip to come to the college; he enjoyed his visit; wanted to invite the Queen for the 400th anniversary celebration; was invited to meet the Queen at Emanuel College and asked her, then followed this invitation with a letter and she came; also got a building put up; fund raising continued through system of annual giving Fourth Part 0:09:07 Science policy meetings started with a conversation with Alan Hughes shortly after the 1997 elections; he said that L.S.E. had arranged a programme of seminars for Ministers on matters to do with government; these did not actually happen but wondered whether we should put the experience of Cambridge in science and technology at the disposal of the Government; never crossed my mind that I should approach the chief scientific advisor but instead wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, Alec Broers; sent a copy to John Eatwell who had just come to Queens and was a member of the Upper House; failed to get a reply from Broers but when pressed said it was not possible; John Eatwell said it was possible; Cambridge is a devolved system where one can do this without the University; invited Dave King, Master of Downing and head of chemistry, Bob Hepple, Master of Clare and professor of English law to join us; at that time great interest in the press in cloning which prompted intense moral, religious and ethical debate; I drafted an abstract on cloning; John Eatwell contacted David Milliband who was head of the Prime Minister's policy group; later learnt that Milliband took it to Richard Wilson who was then Cabinet Secretary who took it to the Prime Minister; they all thought this a good idea; that was how the seminars started; we were able to do this independently of the University; all we had to supply were sandwiches as we got local people to speak; Martin Evans and Anne McLaren spoke among others; Richard Wilson came as did the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and a minister; later other Permanent Secretaries came as did Alec Broers; paid for food and non-alcoholic drink from our college entertainment allowances; have been roughly two seminars a year on topics to do with science and society; they have been very successful; the Scottish Government has become interested in having them there and I took one seminar group to Scotland to show how it was done; have also taken a group to China; it is beginning to fan out as a means of bringing scientists together with those who take government decisions for the later to understand the nature of science; about halfway through David King said he thought he had got the Prime Minister interested and would I get a group together to go to Number 10 and make a presentation; took four outstanding speakers on a variety of topics: Andy Hopper on computer science, Trevor Robbins on drugs of addiction, Sir Richard Friend on physics and Katy Core on epidemiology; before we have our seminars we will have got the speakers to meet and discuss their abstracts so the thing fits together; they communicate on a level that a non-technical person can understand; we do a dry run the day before; I went with the four to Number 10 and sat beside the Prime Minister for three hours; the four talked for half an hour each; the Prime Minister was enraptured and I was very impressed by his summary of the talks at the end; David King had warned me that if it failed then the Prime Minister would not have gone along the scientific route; clearly it didn't fail and the Prime Minister gave a speech supporting science; Gordon Brown is also strongly in favour; in part I feel it derives from this programme where we not only look at science but its ethical, social and moral implications; foresight programmes where the Government look at future developments in science and decide expenditure are based on our seminars; did one on migration last Friday where I argued there was science in migration for which we had the largest turnout of Permanent Secretaries ever, eight out of fifteen; getting very positive responses with requests for materials for their departments; the Minister responsible chaired the general discussion and promised to take forward to Government policy the outcomes of what had been said that day; on this topic needed to convince the speakers on migration in animals that they are uncovering general rules that are applicable to humans; does entail an enormous amount of work but will continue if there is pressure from the Government to do so 19:09:15 The Chief Scientific Advisor when this started was Bob May; he was very put out as he thought it undermined his position with the Government; some weeks later he apologised and said that in fact I had strengthened his position; he then always came to every seminar both as scientific advisor and later as President of the Royal Society; all Presidents since have come 21:39:16 Received a letter from Keith Peters saying that the Government had been looking at the output of a substantial review on brain science, addiction and drugs; the field was so important, the developments so nascent, that they wished for a committee to be established to look into the implications and to carry this foresight project forward; to make recommendations to the Government on development in brain sciences, addiction, medicines for mental health and all implications; Government had decided the lead department should be the Department of Health; gave the investigation to the Academy of Medical Sciences; Keith Peters asked me to chair a working group which I agreed to do so long as I could appoint whom I liked; that went well and we have been going now for a year and a quarter; hoping we will be able to report by the end of the year but may be difficult; looking at the development of brain sciences and how they are likely to impinge on the development of medicines for the treatment of addictions; however, the brief goes beyond that; the benefit of having read medicine meant that I saw the approach to this as one of public health; rather than see addiction as something that is essentially criminological, although there is a huge criminological component, as a public health problem you ask what are the causes and how could you prevent it; got a child psychiatrist and child psychologist on my committee and they have been reviewing the risk factors for the later addictive behaviour; I am sure it will have implications right the way through Government policy; I have already submitted an interim report and I gave a talk to a cross Government meeting last December; the Minister who chaired it wanted my report so that she could act on it; I said she could not as the report was not due for another year; big problem arose as there are clear implication from what we have done so far for the wellbeing of children and care of pregnant women; Minister sat up when I got round to public health and what the Government could do apart from becoming more efficient on the legal side by way of prevention; Dave King asked for an interim report which I agreed to, subject to modification; have noticed in the Chancellor's budget a massive increase in expenditure on the welfare of children although I do not know whether my document fed into that level although it may well have done so; regret that the press has failed to pick up the massive shift in support for children 28:31:23 Gambling does come into it as the brain areas involved in gambling are the same as those involved in addiction; Eric Taylor's report includes a reference to twin studies and fostering studies in which the behaviour of the genetic parents in respect of drug taking is a larger determinant in their offspring's drug taking than the foster parents 30:53:15 Coming back to Cambridge settled in a village as Prill wanted a place where she could keep her horse; found a barn and land and later got another horse which I learnt to ride; pleasures of college fellowship and the rewards of companionship are affected by living outside Cambridge; however, wonderful to live in a completely different world; our next door neighbours are farmers and this broadens one's horizons; have had some serious illnesses when I nearly died; was true to myself and never took to religion; very concerned about Prill and my children and their sense of loss; Prince Phillip was coming to Sidney Sussex to formally open a building for which I had raised the money; the Queen had unveiled the foundation stone in 1996; formal opening was to be in March 1999 in my retirement year and I was very keen to be present; Tim Cox was my physician and helped me to get there; not sure I was driven as illness focuses one on things like family and friends; as one gets better then the old drives reassert themselves and I got back to work as before; reflections on nearness of death when very ill