Second Part

0:09:07 Fred Sanger's retirement tea party;  about 1982 I got a letter from the Vice Chancellor inviting me to be the John Humphrey Plummer Professorship, previously held by Alan Hodgkin; natural inclination was to wonder why one should give up an excellent job in a famous lab to take on teaching and administration; told Max about the offer and he suggested I should not accept; then I discovered that a close colleague, Ron Laskey, who was an early graduate student and with whom I had worked on and off all my life, had also been offered a professorship in Zoology; Ron suggested we thought further and when we looked we found that our positions at the MRC had been whittled away so that we didn't have staff positions any more; thought that if we moved into Zoology and get a reasonable research grant this would help a great deal; we decided we would move and asked for time to get some funding from the Cancer Campaign; in the course of time we did and that turned out all to be due to Gabriel Horn; a clever manoeuvre to get both of us to move; gave us a floor in his Department, we got the money and moved in; it was a key event because it meant that we started with a medium sized research group; we did our teaching which was nice, it was a lovely Department under Gabriel; the work went rather well and the Cancer Campaign who sponsored us at that time asked if we would be interested in expanding a bit; we thought that would be nice but what Ron and I wanted was a small institute; they said they couldn't produce that much money but could make a contribution; by good fortune, the Wellcome Trust came into money at that time and we had an approach from them; we asked if we could put the two together and they agreed; I most particularly emphasised the pivotal role that Gabriel Horn played in this; we had enough money to build a small institute and many of the barons would have been hostile, but Gabriel thought it a good idea and actually helped it along; he spoke to the Secretary General who would ask the General Board if this was a good idea, who agreed; finally asked the heads of departments; this was how it survived; we got the money for the first addition to this institute; Gabriel was the chairman of our advisory board which was immensely valuable; without him I don't think it would ever have come into existence; it was very good of him as it wasn't obviously helping his department but he could see its value from the University's point of view; the initial operation, which cost £4,000,000, went well and in time we had the opportunity to expand; for this building we got £23,000,000; we have now over two hundred people here and bring in quite a lot of money for the University; although it had been against the advise of Max Perutz he nevertheless remained a very good friend

7:34:10 Feel I know Gabriel very well and have immense admiration for him; he is not only nice but an amazingly interesting person; he really transformed the Zoology Department; when he took it over it was pretty low but by the time he had finished he had fourteen FRS in his Department; he was a highly successful Master of Sidney Sussex; he's a kind of genius at managing things and people; he had also set up a way of getting scientists to advise the Government; I participated in one of these; it was a clever manoeuvre to get the Government to be interested in science; Prill, Gabriel's wife

9:43:20 I was very privileged and enormously lucky to end up at Magdalene; I had been sounded out by other colleges but in retrospect I am glad that I wasn't chosen; Magdalene was wonderful to belong to, very small with a highly experienced Bursar who knew everybody; did not attempt to shake up the College; was advised that if you wanted to do something you would suggest it to someone else, then it would pass to others, and gradually a consensus would emerge which then you would ask the governing body to consider it; I was probably seen as a pretty ineffective Master, nevertheless the College did well and it was a happy place; I was very grateful to them for allowing me to keep on my own lab work so when the time came to stop I still had a lab to go to and be active again in my own field; Magdalene also has a President who is a senior Fellow, and is in many respects more powerful than the Master; he is the head of the Fellowship; the role of College teaching must be done but took the view that every Fellow had a significant research contribution; it worried me seeing younger Fellows having to do terrible jobs like Tutor for Admissions; in my time we survived without damaging the careers of younger Fellows; it is a problem how you get these tiresome jobs done; encouraged the use of secretaries who could take on part of the burden; teaching is very important but for a university like Cambridge which is trying to compete with the rest of the world, we have to have people who are pre-eminent in their field; a good example is that some of my colleagues spent their time marking first year exam papers, not a good use of time in my view

15:13:17 The Institute has always been one third cancer and two thirds developmental biology; this was historically how we got our money and it still works that way; no one is going to solve cancer overnight because it is multiple different disorders and can only be analysed individually; we are fortunate in having some very good groups in this institute who are working in aspects of cancer; delighted to say that in the last two years we have had two of our home-bred  staff members elected to the Royal Society, one on the cancer side the other on the Wellcome side; Stephen Jackson this year's Royal Society appointee, has made real inroads into DNA repair; all the time our genes are being damaged and this is a major cause of cancer; he has been meticulously analysing step by step what goes wrong with a view to trying to see if eventually one can alleviate the process of DNA damage by various chemicals which have favourable effects; he started a company called Kudos which saw the commercial side of this; it was then sold for a large sum recently; when I was chairman here I strongly encouraged the commercial side; these people are not well paid and without this commercial side we would have lost them all; another very successful younger person, Daniel St Johnson, who works on the development biology side analysing how it is that the components of an egg arise because they form the basis of how the whole development occurs; an egg is a template for the rest of life and a key question is how does this amazing cell come to be possessed with these components to enable it to start the next life; those are two good examples of younger people who have thrived in this environment, making successful careers for themselves; Stephen Jackson and Tony Kouzarides both started companies; we are charity funded and you can't do commercial work in a charitable organization; they had their companies in the Science Park or elsewhere and guided the activity; both have now sold them; Tony sponsored a company called Abcam which was very successful in making antibodies, a good Cambridge company; that emerged out of someone in his group and he could see the commercial side of it; it has to be kept separate from us as a charity, but that works fine; for sure it is not easy to balance these two things but it must surely be the way forward for university academics to have a significant commercial interest if possible; Government must want this and it gives employment; the University has not interfered in either of these two cases

23:48:15 Hope that I have mentioned all those who have been instrumental in what has been an amazingly fortuitous career; I have talked about Gabriel Horn, but would like to mention Ron Laskey who has been crucial in getting this institute going; he is a Professor in the University but works at another institute at the hospital; these two have been particularly supportive; also my great gratitude to Magdalene and Churchill College who are so good to me; I feel a bit parasitic, but feel privileged to have had a career in a place like Cambridge; and of course, to Max Perutz for bringing me here