Dr Gill Bullock interview

Owen Morton

In this issue, it is our privilege to speak to former RMS President, Dr Gill Bullock.

Gill served as the Society’s president from 1988 – 1990, and previously as Executive Honorary Secretary. In addition to a long and distinguished career in science and microscopy, she has devoted years of her later life to her charity work helping disadvantaged children in Kenya – for which she received the British Empire Medal last year. We caught up with Gill just weeks before she was due to emigrate to the US – where her two sons live and work – meaning (as she puts it) we “got to her just in time!”

So how did Gill first become interested in science, and what are her memories of her school days?

She says: “I went to a girls’ convent school where they just didn’t do science, so I had to battle my way through grammar school for my O-levels and managed to pass A-level biology after working with a nun in the laboratory dissecting dogfish.

“I went to Northern Poly [in London], as it was then, and got my other Science O-levels and got a place at Imperial College to study plant sciences, but I had such fun in my third year that I didn’t get my postgrad PhD place, but was allowed to do a Masters in microbiology, which I absolutely loved.”

In 1961 Gill went on to work at the Public Health Laboratories (PHLs) as a virologist. It was a time when the new-found knowledge in electron microscopy was transforming research, and Gill was using this to study a number of different viruses - including measles and smallpox. She began her PhD (which she completed in 1967) on identifying viruses isolated from rhesus monkey tonsils.

In 1963 she joined Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba-Geigy, based in Horsham, Sussex.

Gill says: “I had originally wanted to be a medic but by a backward route I got into medical research and to follow that along you had to be a biochemist in drug discovery, or using imaging analysis techniques.

“Ciba took me on as a biochemist and sent me to London for a year to train. In that way, I got into electron microscopy and was absolutely fascinated, as you can imagine, by suddenly being able to see all these new things. The next thing we bought was a scanning microscope and other equipment, and we basically set up as image analysis in the biological sciences. The whole thing was a discovery route, not knowing what was going to happen next – following my nose. I think I’m more self-driven, self-motivated than anything else. Not having had a very good education at school, every step had to be fought for.”

Above, top and bottom: Gill received the British Empire Medal from the Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex at an outdoor event in her local village

Gill is now 86, but has lost none of her sharpness and retains an excellent memory. It’s a gift that has served her well throughout her career, particularly when working with microscopes.

She explains: “I seem to have a very good memory – I can restore images in my head and bring them out again, and using that facility, I was able to look at things and say – ‘oh I have seen that before somewhere’ - and then develop something from that.”

In 1972, while still based in Horsham, Gill was awarded the inaugural RMS Glauert medal (named after Audrey Glauert, the Society’s first female president; Gill would become the second in 1988) for her work with subcellular structures in animal tissues. She continued at Horsham until 1986, when she took part in a job exchange with Ciba’s headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

She says: “I joined a cardiology team on secondment, and I was enjoying it so much I asked if I could become a Swiss employee. To my delight they agreed and I spent nine years in Switzerland working on image analysis and I had two or three PhD students working with me. And it was this voyage of discovery that one could see through the different microscopes.

“When I first worked in Switzerland they flew me home every other weekend, but once I became a swiss employee they said I could afford it after my new salary!”

In 1994 Gill moved to Ghent in Belgium, where she set up molecular pathology labs in the Pneumology and Pathology departments.

She says: “I consider myself an experimental pathologist, and that was the most exciting time, working with human tissues. We were looking for receptors in the tissues which might lead us to find new drugs for treatment. For example, we were working on breast cancer, using immunocytochemical techniques to identify receptors in the fibrosis that occurs in breast cancer. We published a couple of papers and a Japanese company got extremely interested in it, and I don’t know if they went on and designed any drugs, but there were a couple on the market that were going to be tried out.”

Gill (far right) receiving the Glauert Medal in 1972

Gill adds: “I had previously published a lot of papers which were of much more academic interest, whereas once I moved into the pathology department, everything I was doing was related to human treatment and development of drugs, so I think I was more useful at the end of my career than I was at the beginning!”

Gill has many fond memories of her time at the RMS, including a trip to meet the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace as part of the Society’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 1989, which coincided with her time as president of the Society. Along with RMS Vice President John Garrett, she presented Prince Philip with a copy of Gerard L’E Turner’s The Great Age of the Microscope – a history of the development of the RMS and a comprehensive catalogue of the Society’s microscope collection. As Gill recalls, the Duke was in characteristically good humour.

“We had a lovely 20 minutes with him talking about the book”, she says. “We went into a side room and then Prince Philip came in and started flattering us, and he was so well informed. He was someone who was extremely affable and easy to get on with and that was certainly true. I remember he had a great chat with John Garrett.” She also recalls a particularly memorable dinner held in London as part of the 1989 celebrations and attended by a number of world famous microscopists including the pioneering cell biologists George Palade and Marilyn Farquhar.

She says: “That was an amazing evening. I think there were six Nobel prize-winners there. There were also the two guys from IBM (Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer) who showed the very first IBM putting atoms together and forming the word IBM under the microscope.”

Of all the different aspects of the RMS’s work, Gill feels the educational value of meetings, courses and other events is perhaps the most important. Having visited hospitals all over the world, she has often encountered situations where staff are held back by a deficit of knowledge in relation to equipment and techniques.

She says: “You realise they are not using their equipment properly or not getting as much out of it as they could be, and so pointing them in the direction of training is absolutely vital and I think the RMS does that really well through all the different courses.”

One thing Gill is keen to stress, is the importance of team-working, and the supportive role of colleagues, both in science and other aspects of life.

She says: “I have just finished organising our local village fete and it went really well, and I told everyone that it was because we had a good team. So teamwork is probably one of the most important things I would emphasise right through.

“I so enjoyed the joint work I did with other people. Like with David Hurst at St Thomas’s Hospital - he was absolutely so supportive of microscopy. Professor Hurst and I also had a visiting lectureship at the University of York and I worked with Tony Robards on many different aspects of microscopy. One thing I will say is I never had any problems with being a woman in research; it was everybody supporting everyone else. Even when I was working in Horsham and a man came up to me and said: ‘this is the first time I’ve had to work with a woman’ - we got on great. I think in science it’s more equal than in many walks of life.”

Away from science, Gill has devoted many years to her charity work helping disadvantaged children in Kenya – for which she received the British Empire Medal in the Queen’s New Year Honours List last year. The seeds for what became Gill’s major passion were sown in 2007 when she visited Kenya with her husband and got involved with the idea of building a paediatric centre in Nanuki. She worked for three years on the project with a charity called Kejani Kenya, fundraising in the UK, and eventually co-founded her own charity, CHADIK (Children’s Health and Development in Kenya) providing outreach clinics, IT infrastructure and funding for children at a mixed secondary boarding school.

She says: “When people ask me ‘can you help?’, if I can, I do. It’s just my nature. And having had healthy children myself, I wanted to do something to help children who were less fortunate. One of our major projects was with Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital in Nairobi. They sent outreach teams which I travelled with quite a few times – doctor, nurse and a nutritionist as a wholistic view of treatment.

Gill opens proceedings at the London Science Museum exhibition to mark the RMS’s 150th anniversary

“We also worked with a co-educational boarding school north of Nairobi, which was an offspring of another charity. Through them we were able to fund children through secondary school, and we were particularly proud that one of the last students who came through got a scholarship to MIT. Sadly, the charity is having to wrap up, but the money is there to keep going for a couple of years.” Gill received the BEM from the Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex at a special outdoor event in her home village of Marsfield, with the local community present to share in the moment. Gill recalls: “It was amazing for a small charity to be recognised in that way. It was just such a joyous celebration with friends and family and everything. I was proud of the team.”

At the time of speaking, Gill is busily preparing to embark on the next significant chapter of her life – namely emigrating to the United States to be closer to her two sons and their families.

She says: “My younger son Tim is in science like me. He has just been made full professor in pathology in Virginia and I’m moving to live near my elder son in California. Neil is a ‘chip man’ and Tim is very much involved in using imunocytochemistry microscopy - so he’s inherited that gene from me.

“I have got six grandchildren and the eldest I saw when she was two weeks old, and the youngest I saw him when he was 24hrs old, so they have grown up with me right from the start and the two eldest have just finished their second year at university.

“I have accepted an offer on the house and I have met the people coming here. It is a lovely community so they will have no problem settling in.”

In her spare time Gill enjoys reading and doing as much gardening as she can – “I try to grow everything I can from the seed”, she says.

But what words of wisdom does she have for any young person considering a career in science?

“One thing I would say is your first degree only opens the door and it’s what you do with it afterwards - so further training in different aspects is vital. If you do go into research, only go in if you have got a real desire to follow things up. You need infinite patience, because so often you have got to choose which red herring you don’t follow. So patience, determination, self-improvement. And don’t let anybody walk over you.”

Our thanks once again to Gill for giving up the time to speak to infocus.