Dr Bob Banks - Dunelmensis Award

Durham University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Karen O’Brien, and St Cuthbert’s Society Principal, Professor Tammi Walker, present Dr Bob Banks with The Dunelmensis Award in 12 South Bailey Garden. (photograph © andrewheptinstall.com)

Dr Bob Banks

Chair of St Cuthbert’s Society Fellows Dunelmensis Award

The Dunelmensis Award is given by the University’s Senate to a Durham alumnus or alumna for meritorious and exceptional service in support of the University, particularly for institutional advancement and for enhancing the University’s reputation, nationally and internationally. Bob Banks was nominated by Professor Tammi Walker, Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society & Professor of Forensic Psychology, Dr Jon Warren, Vice-Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society and Ms Charlotte Imlach, Former Assistant Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society.

St Cuthbert’s Society was proud to welcome Durham University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Karen O’Brien to a very special formal dinner on Wednesday May 18th 2022 to present the Dunelmensis Award to Dr Bob Banks (Chair of Cuth’s Fellows). The Award recognises the exceptional commitment he has shown to the University over the years. We were delighted to congratulate Dr Banks on this honour.

Dr Bob Banks gave an uplifting and emotional acceptance speech for which he received a standing ovation from inspired staff and students. It was also a pleasure to welcome Bob’s family - Mrs Gillian Banks (Former Cuth’s Artist in Residence), Mr Thomas Banks (Bob’s son) and Mrs Nicola Banks (a Cuth’s Alumna herself) with their daughters Miss Charlotte Banks and Miss Georgia Banks.

Dr Bob Banks. Acceptance Speech. May 2022

First and foremost, it is a great honour to receive a Dunelmensis Award and I thank Tammi Walker, Jon Warren and Charlotte Imlach, our Principal, Vice-Principal and former Assistant Principal, most warmly for proposing me. I am now officially “of” or “belonging to” Durham, but, like many of you, I suppose, I was not born here so how is it that Durham may now claim me as one of its own?

We can think of our lives as a series of associations, some that occur accidentally, some of which we deliberately choose, and some more important than others. The most important for me, unquestionably, has been my marriage to Gillian, herself a long-term member of Cuth’s Senior Common Room and former artist-in-residence, whose mince pies at Cuth’s carol service are legendary.

Next has been the great good fortune and happiness I have had in being able to spend my whole adult life in universities. And thus, on leaving school with my clutch of A-levels, off I went to Nottingham to begin the process of becoming a scientist. Three years later I emerged with a Joint Honours degree in Botany and Zoology as a scientific bachelor, and just a couple of months later, ceased to be one matrimonially on marrying Gillian. We spent the next three years as students in our home city of Sheffield, where Gillian trained as a primary teacher and I began my life-long research career in the Department of Anatomy. As was usual at that time, the Anatomy Department had already been allocated one or two postgraduate studentships by the Medical Research Council, when I enquired about research there. The Head of Department, Professor Robert Barer, showed me around and the members of staff each told me a little about their own research. Evidently having satisfied himself that I was a suitable candidate, Professor Barer asked me if I was interested in any of the topics. Without realizing just how momentous and fateful my choice was to become, I said, yes, I would like to work on the muscle spindle. Unlike black holes, Higgs Bosons and dinosaurs, muscle spindles do not hit the headlines, indeed, I should be surprised if many of you had even heard of them. But actually the overwhelming majority of science is like that and lack of what I might term celebrity in science does not make it any less important. So you, in turn, might be surprised to learn that there are probably 3 or 4 million muscle spindles in this hall right now, and that is because each of us has about 50,000 of them in our skeletal muscles and because they are necessary to sense and control our bodily position and movements.

It was the muscle spindle that brought me to Durham – my research in Sheffield came to the attention of David Barker, professor and Head of the Zoology Department here, and the world authority on the structure of the muscle spindle at the time. Following the award of my PhD from Sheffield I joined David’s lab as a post-doctoral fellow. After a spell in Toulouse learning electrophysiology with Professor Paul Bessou and a few years in London at UCL I finally returned to Durham, initially working with David on nerve repair and reinnervation using the muscle spindle as a model system. During those years of wanderings our family was also growing: our eldest son, William, was born in Durham during my first post-doctoral fellowship; he was followed a few years later by our daughter, Sophie, born while I was at UCL. Our youngest son, Tom, was born about a year after our final return to Durham and is here this evening, with our daughter-in-law, Nicola, who is herself a Cuth’s alumna, and their daughters, Charlotte and Georgia, two future Cuth’s alumnae, as you see.

My own association with Cuth’s goes back to the last years of Leslie Brooks’ Principalship, when I would often join the group that accompanied visiting departmental seminar speakers to dinner in the SCR.

That informal association continued until 1991 when I became a tutor and joined the then governing body ex officio, and when Sam Stoker was Principal. I continued to serve on governing body and its successor, college council, until the latter was abolished along with all the college councils. In the years since those convivial dinners hosted by Leslie Brooks, Cuth’s became my collegiate home, one might even say home from home. Just a few months before I retired from my teaching post in what was then the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, in 2013, I had the honour to be elected as a Fellow of St. Cuthbert’s Society.

photograph © andrewheptinstall.com

The Dunelmensis Award is only given to Durham alumni, so with a BSc from Nottingham and a PhD from Sheffield, how is it that I was eligible for the honour? It was an unforeseeable outcome of one of my choices. David Barker retired soon after our work on nerve repair was finished and I then established collaborations with Prof Yves Laporte’s lab at the Collège de France in Paris and with Dr Manuel Hulliger’s lab in Calgary, Alberta.

photograph © andrewheptinstall.com

By the early 1990s I had a substantial body of published work and was considering whether to submit it for the degree of Doctor of Science. I had several reasons for this, not the least of which was that under recently introduced regulations staff members who were not previously graduates of Durham were permitted to register for higher doctorates. So, this time the choice was where I should register for the degree: Nottingham, Sheffield and Durham were all possible, though of course the choice was easy. By then, having carried out most of my research in Durham and having spent most of my adult life here, the acquisition of a Durham degree was a possibility “devoutly to be wished”. The degree was conferred at the Winter congregation in 1995 and I was pleased to receive congratulatory notes from Bernard Robertson and Sam Stoker. The 1990s was a decade like no other in biology. This was the time of the Human Genome Project, made possible by a combination of advances in molecular biology, genetics, and high-performance computing. Whatever the motivations and expectations might have been for the outcomes of the project, its effects on the whole of biology were revolutionary. At the end of the decade my own work took a new turn when I began to collaborate with Dr Guy Bewick of Aberdeen, who, I am delighted to say, is also here this evening. It has been my longest and most successful collaboration and is still ongoing. We are studying the events by which muscle spindles and similar sense organs are able to detect mechanical stimuli such as stretch, and many of the molecular techniques that make this work possible were developed or facilitated during the Human Genome Project, nicely demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of science. In 2010, Guy and I organized an international symposium here in Durham, with the support of the Physiological Society. Together with Rade Durbaba from Northumbria University, and Susan Pyner from Durham, Guy was also the driving force behind another such symposium held here in 2014 with support from the Biophysical Sciences Institute, to mark my retirement from my teaching post in what is now the Department of Biosciences, where I remain a visiting researcher.

There is an aphorism usually attributed to Terry Pratchett that inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. At one level this old person can look back and think “how did those fifty-odd years pass so quickly?”, but the young person who is, I assure you, still in there, can at least now also look back and see how very fortunate he has been. Today is another addition to my great good fortune; I can only hope that you who are young persons inside and out will be as fortunate as I have been.

Thank you all, very much. Bob Bank