Sir William Dunn School of Pathology Oral Histories

Georgina Ferry interviews Neil Barclay. Neil Barclay is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Pathology in the Dunn School. He arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate in 1969 to study Biochemistry, and undertook a DPhil in the same department supervised by Alan Williams. After a post-doctoral position in Sweden, he returned to Oxford to work on monoclonal antibodies with Williams, who had just been appointed head of the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit within the Dunn School. Barclay pioneered the sequencing of proteins on the surface of cells of the immune system that had been isolated through the use of monoclonal antibodies. In 2010 he succeeded George Brownlee as EP Abraham Professor of Chemical Pathology. He set up the CIU Trust to manage royalties from sales of monoclonal antibodies generated within the Cellular Immunology Unit, and through this has partially endowed the Barclay Williams Chair in Molecular Immunology. He is also Chair of the EPA Cephalosporin Fund, and has founded a company, Everest Biotech, that is based in Nepal and uses goats to generate antibodies against human proteins for research.

Georgina Ferry interviews George Brownlee. George Brownlee FRS is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Pathology in the Dunn School. He obtained his PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, working with the Nobel prizewinner Fred Sanger on the sequencing of small RNAs. He continued to work at the LMB as an independent scientist, on messenger RNA and the RNA genome of the influenza virus. In 1978 he was invited by Henry Harris to become the inaugural Professor of Chemical Pathology at the Dunn School, where he introduced molecular biological techniques to the department and developed faster methods of sequencing RNA. He also bought the first computer in the department in order to store and analyse nucleic acid sequences. Brownlee continued to work on the influenza virus, work that was critical to developing some influenza vaccines, and also cloned human Factor IX, which is deficient in some forms of haemophilia. With the royalties from these discoveries he has partly endowed the Brownlee Abraham Chair of Molecular Biology in the Dunn School, and he is also a past Chair of the EPA Cephalosporin Fund.

Georgina Ferry interviews Herman Waldmann. Herman Waldmann FRS is Emeritus Professor of Pathology, and was head of the Dunn School from 1994-2013. He read medicine at Cambridge and qualified as a doctor in London before returning to Cambridge to do a PhD in the Department of Pathology. In 1978 he joined César Milstein at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to learn about monoclonal antibodies. Thereafter he pioneered the development of monoclonals as therapeutic agents, particularly Campath-1 (Alemtuzumab, now used to treat conditions including chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and multiple sclerosis). In 1990 he set up a facility in Cambridge to make these agents (with Geoff Hale), but on his appointment as head of the Dunn School, he moved the Therapeutic Antibody Centre to Oxford. His headship saw a massive development on the Dunn School site, with the building of a new animal house, the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre, the EP Abraham Research Building and the Oxford Molecular Pathology Institute (OMPI). The number of research groups also grew rapidly, and Waldmann's introduction of a central café has ensured that staff and students have a place to interact. Following his retirement he has continued to lead a research group working on mechanisms of immunological tolerance.

Georgina Ferry interviews Pete Stroud. Pete Stroud is Mechanical Facilities Manager at the Dunn School, where he runs the maintenance and construction workshop. He has literally worked at the department ‘man and boy’, as his father ran the workshop before him, and as a teenager he used to help out in the holidays; since coming to work at the department he has lived on the site, in the flat formerly occupied by Howard Florey’s animal technician Jim Kent. Having originally intended to become an automotive engineer at the Cowley Works, Stroud found that he enjoyed the variety of work in the Dunn School workshops, and joined his father there as soon as he finished school. He pursued a succession of technical qualifications on day release, while designing and building equipment for scientific analysis, such as electrophoresis tanks and radiation screens. Stroud has seen demands on the workshop change as more equipment became available off the shelf, and computers became central to the control of many laboratory processes. But while maintenance has become a significant part of the work, innovative experiments still require some equipment to be designed and built on site.

Georgina Ferry interviews Eric Sidebottom. Eric Sidebottom has been associated with the Dunn School for more than 50 years, as medical student, lecturer, and recently, official historian. Sidebottom came to Oxford to read medicine at a time when two Nobel prizewinners, Howard Florey and Hans Krebs, were still lecturing to undergraduates. He completed his medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and came to the Dunn School as one of Henry Harris’s first DPhil students in 1966. Sidebottom became interested in cancer, and used Harris's cell fusion technique to explore the ability of cancer cells to spread throughout the body, or metastasise. Following the death of John French, Harris appointed him to organise all the teaching in the department, which led him to administrative roles including chairing the board of the Faculty of Medicine. In the late 1980s Sidebottom moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund as Assistant Director of Clinical Research. Returning to the Dunn School after five years, he has since focused on the history of Oxford medicine, publishing Oxford Medicine: A Walk Through Nine Centuries, and Penicillin and the Legacy of Norman Heatley (with David Cranston).

Georgina Ferry interviews Elizabeth Robertson. Elizabeth Robertson FRS is Professor of Developmental Biology and a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow at the Dunn School. Having spent her early childhood collecting animals as pets in Nigeria, she came to Oxford in 1975 to read for a degree in zoology. She then went to Cambridge to do a PhD on cell differentiation during development. She was one of the first to isolate embryonic stem cells in the mouse, and began her career as an independent scientist in 1988 at Columbia University in New York, manipulating embryonic cells and generating lines of mice that bore the corresponding phenotypes - a technique called gene targeting. She subsequently moved to Harvard, using this technique to study the patterning of the mouse body plan and identifying key transcription factors. She returned to Oxford in 2004 as part of the newly-formed Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, and five years later accepted Herman Waldmann's invitation to move her lab to the expanding Dunn School. Her work on the early embryos of mice continues to elucidate mutations in the genes for regulatory proteins that give rise to developmental abnormalities in humans.

Georgina Ferry interviews Fiona Powrie. Fiona Powrie FRS is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Oxford. The first in her family to receive a university education, she studied biochemistry at the University of Bath. She thought better of her first choice of accountancy as a career, and came to the MRC Immunology Unit at the Dunn School to undertake a DPhil with Don Mason. She discovered a regulatory role for T cells in the immune response, and while pursuing this work during her post-doc at the DNAX Research Institute in California, discovered a connection between the immune response and inflammation in the gut. Her research has focused ever since on the role of interactions between gut bacteria and the immune system in inflammatory bowel disease. She returned to Oxford with a Wellcome Senior Fellowship at the Nuffield Department of Surgery before coming back to the Dunn School as Professor of Immunology in 2001. In 2009 she was appointed to the new Sidney Truelove Chair in Gastroenterology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, and five years later took up her current position at the Kennedy Institute. She has received many honours for her work, including the 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize.

Georgina Ferry interviews Gordon MacPherson. Gordon MacPherson retired as Reader in Experimental Pathology at the Dunn School in 2008, having spent almost his entire scientific career in the department. He first came to Oxford in the early 1960s to read medicine, where he heard lectures by the newly-appointed head of the Dunn School Henry Harris, and learned practical skills from Margaret Jennings (Lady Florey). He completed his medical training at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, before returning to pursue a DPhil in the Dunn School with John French on blood platelets. At Harris’s suggestion, he then took up a fellowship at the John Curtin Medical School in Canberra to train in immunology, and after his return established a group that was one of the first to characterise dendritic cells, key regulators of the immune response. He has subsequently led explored a wide range of interactions involving dendritic cells, such as how they transport the prion particles that cause diseases such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Alongside his research, MacPherson is widely admired for his skills as a teacher and lecturer. He is co-author, with Jon Austyn, of Exploring Immunology: Concepts and Evidence, a concise textbook for undergraduates published in 2012.

Georgina Ferry interviews Keith Gull. Keith Gull FRS is the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Professor of Molecular Microbiology. He studied microbiology at Queen Elizabeth College in London and remained there to do a PhD, moving straight into a lectureship at the University of Kent in 1972. There he used electron microscopy to study microtubules, first in fungi and later in disease-causing microbes, the trypanosomes. Gull moved to the University of Manchester in 1989 as Professor of Biochemistry, and participated in the restructuring of its School of Biological Sciences. Deciding to focus on science rather than administration, he won a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellowship, which enabled him in 2002 to move into the newly-completed EP Abraham Research Building at the Dunn School. His group explored the proteins that make up the flagella of microbes, conserved in evolution to form the cilia of mammalian cells. He has helped to reorganise graduate education in Medical Sciences at Oxford, and set up collaborations to improve the training of young scientists in Africa. Unusually, since becoming Head of House at St Edmund Hall in 2009 he has continued to lead an active research lab in the Dunn School.

Georgina Ferry interviews Gillian Griffiths. Gillian Griffiths FRS is Professor of Immunology and Cell Biology and Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge. While an undergraduate at University College London she was encouraged by immunologists Martin Raff and Avrion Mitchison to apply for a PhD with César Milstein at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Under Milstein’s guidance she was the first to sequence the complete variable regions of antibodies. She then spent five years as a post-doc at Stanford University in California before moving to the Basel Institute of Immunology in 1990 to work on the cell biology of killer T cells. In 1995 she won a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship and two years later came to the Dunn School to set up her lab. Her work revealed the mechanisms by which killer cells neutralise infected or cancerous cells with exquisite precision. In 2001 she was given the title of Professor, the first woman to hold such a title in the department. She moved to Cambridge for family reasons in 2008.

Georgina Ferry interviews David Greaves. David Greaves is Professor of Inflammation Biology at the Dunn School. He did a first degree in microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Bristol before going to King’s College, London for his PhD. He worked on the expression of the beta globin gene in the same laboratory where Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had carried out their studies of the structure of DNA. A first post-doctoral position took him to Amsterdam to work on gene expression in trypanosomes. He returned to the UK to join the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill before briefly working in the laboratories of GD Searle Monsanto. His return to academic research in 1993 came in the form of a post-doctoral position with Siamon Gordon at the Dunn School, using transgenic models to study the role of macrophages in inflammation. Since 1999 he has continued this work as a group leader, also developing the use of live-cell imaging to study the process of phagocytosis. Since the early 2000s Greaves has been responsible for organising the teaching of pathology and microbiology to up to 150 medical students per year.

Georgina Ferry interviews Matthew Freeman. Matthew Freeman FRS joined the Dunn School as Professor of Pathology and head of department in 2013. He remembers meeting the Nobel-prizewinning immunologist Peter Medawar as a teenager, who told him 'Chemistry is dead, Physics is dying and Biology is the only science that’s worth pursuing.' Inspired by this, Freeman read Biochemistry at Oxford before going to Imperial College London to undertake a PhD in on the genetic control of the cell cycle in fruit flies, in a department that was one of the first to use recombinant DNA methods to clone genes. This led to a post-doc at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he returned in 1992 to set up his own lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, working on receptors that are critical to the development of the Drosophila eye. He remained at LMB for 21 years, for the last six as head of the Cell Biology Division. Since his move to head the Dunn School he has focused on encouraging collaboration between research groups, under an over-arching definition of pathology as ‘the cell biology that underlies human disease’. He is a trustee of the EP Abraham Research Fund.

Georgina Ferry interviews Paul Fairchild. Paul Fairchild is Associate Professor and Lecturer in Medicine at the Dunn School and was Co-Director of the Oxford Stem Cell Institute from 2008-2015. He first came to Oxford in 1987 to undertake a DPhil in the Nuffield Department of Surgery, working with Jonathan Austyn who had been a student in the Dunn School with Siamon Gordon. Fairchild worked on the role of dendritic cells in preventing autoimmunity through the induction of tolerance in T cells. He then went to the Department of Pathology at Cambridge for post-doctoral research on how this system fails in multiple sclerosis. There he met Hermann Waldmann: when Waldmann succeeded Henry Harris as head of the Dunn School he invited Fairchild to join his group in Oxford. Fairchild developed a technique for differentiating embryonic stem cells into dendritic cells. In 2008 he became the founding director of the Oxford Stem Cell Institute, which brings together 50 laboratories in 17 departments across the university, in collaborative projects initially supported by the Oxford Martin School. He has also been editor of the Dunn School magazine, Fusion, for ten years.

Georgina Ferry interviews Peter Cook as part of the Peter Cook has retired from his post as Professor of Cell Biology, but continues to pursue his research half-time in the Dunn School as a departmental lecturer. He read Biochemistry as an undergraduate at Oxford, and moved to the Dunn School in 1967 to pursue research for a DPhil under the supervision of the head of department, Henry Harris. He has remained in the department ever since. Cook’s research as a graduate student used cell fusion to study how gene expression was controlled. His subsequent research has focused on the structural basis of transcription, looking at the coiling and folding of DNA in chromosomes and the interaction of the genetic material with enzymes. Working with a colleague in Engineering Science, he has set up a company called iotaSciences to develop an invention that can handle very small volumes of liquids for purposes such as biological experimentation. He is a Trustee of the Guy Newton Research Fund and chairs the CIU Trust set up by Neil Barclay.