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