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OPUS • Issue 4 • Spring 2011

Portsmouth Grammar School • www.pgs.org.uk Issue 4 • Spring 2011

Keeping in touch with OPs wherever they may be

Joe Stork triumphed in a shortlist of eight applications for the post of PGS Headmaster in 1937. Of the 115 applications received, there were submissions from the Heads of Derby School and King’s School, Chester as well as Senior masters from St Paul’s, Whitgift and Repton and heads of department from Bristol Grammar School, Rugby and Charterhouse. Joe Stork, the 33 year old Head of Biology at Charterhouse, was appointed to succeed outgoing Headmaster Canon Walter Barton. Well-known for his text books, he was the first scientist to run the school. 9

Inside 19

Introducing the new face of science at PGS The Bristow-Clavell Science Centre unveiled

Black Magic! OP Roger on his extraordinary career

Professor John Lee OP (1953-1961)

John is Emeritus Professor of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He has been the keynote speaker at the International Eco-Summit in Beijing (2007) and is one-time President of the British Ecological Society. His primary area of research centres on plant responses to pollutant deposition and the adaptations of plant growth in extreme environments. 2

Dr Justin Whatling OP (1987-1992)

Justin is Chief Clinical Officer for BT, Visiting Professor at University College London Centre for Health Informatics, Vice Chair British Computer Society Health Strategy and Policy & Non-Executive Director at BMJ publishing Group Ltd. His wife Rosemary Whatling (née Knight) OP (1990-1992 is a Consultant in Paediatric Dentistry at Barts and the London NHS Trust and is the daughter of former Head of Biology Nik Knight. 3

Cover shows a montage of some of the scientific faces past and present to don a PGS lab-coat.

Professor David Warrell OP (1948-1958)

David Warrell is Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine and Honorary Fellow of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford, UK. After training at Oxford, St Thomas’s Hospital and the

OP mariners’ epic voyages to Bermuda, Brunei and Basingstoke!

Portsmouth Grammar School www.pgs.org.uk

26 The Magazine for former pupils, former parents and friends of The Portsmouth Grammar School

Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, he has lived and worked as a physician, teacher, researcher and expedition doctor in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. He has published more than 400 research papers and textbook chapters on malaria, rabies, relapsing fevers and other infectious and tropical diseases, comparative respiratory physiology, respiratory diseases, herpetology, venomous animals, envenoming and plant and chemical poisoning. He is a consultant to the World Health Organization (on malaria, rabies, snake bites, anti-venom production), British Army, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Medical Research Council, Royal Geographical Society, Zoological Society of London and Earth Watch International. David has kept in regular touch with PGS since leaving and has been both a guest speaker at Prizegiving and a member of the school’s Development Board. Read more about David in OP News in this issue (please see page 47). Professor Michael Usher OP (1950-1959)

Michael is the retired Chief Scientist of Scottish National Heritage and an Honorary Professor of no less than three Scottish Universities. Whilst a research scientist he met his wife Fionna and discovered a new flea to science on the Manx shearwaters of the Isle of Rum that he named in her honour – Ceratophyllus fionnus!

Anthony Errington OP (1946-1957)

Tony received a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston in 1970 and went on to work on the Apollo and Shuttle Guidance and Control and early Space Station studies while employed by Lockheed Electronics Co at the Manned Spacecraft Centre. During 25 years with the European Space Agency at ESTEC he was responsible for Data Management and Communications Systems development on the Spacelab, Hipparcos, Columbus and DMS-R programmes. He is now a Board Member of the British Interplanetary Society. 6

Simon Scarff OP (1950-1960)

Simon is the Chairman and Managing Director of SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, based in New Delhi, India. He has been with the group in India since 1978, and was awarded the MBE in 1984 for his services to the British community in India. This was followed in 1999 with an OBE for his services to British industry. 7

James Scott-Brown OP (1996-2010)

James had articles published in Physics Education journal and won €1,000 of scientific equipment for the school in a European science essay writing competition before he left in 2010 to read Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. 10

Making Waves

Joe W Stork, PGS Headmaster (1937-1942)

Kieran Bates OP (2003-2010)

Kieran’s enthusiasm for his subject was further fuelled in his last year at PGS, when he secured a summer internship at Berkeley University’s Paleontology Department. The trip, partly funded through an OP Club travel grant, saw him in good stead for the start of his university career at University College London, where he is studying Biological Sciences.

Professor David Rand OP (1951-1961)

David is Chief Research Scientist for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, where he has worked since 1969. He is the leader of the Novel Battery Technologies Group and his primary research interests include the development of batteries and fuel cells for hybrid electric vehicles and solar-based remote area power supplies. He has been the senior Technical Official of the World Solar Challenge, an epic odyssey for solar cars from Darwin to Adelaide through the heart of Australia, since its inception in 1989, and looks forward to the day when PGS enters a team! 11 Professor Jeremy Bloxham OP (1968-1978)

First appointed to the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1987, Bloxham was promoted to full professor in 1993 and assumed the Mallinckrodt chair in 2005. In 2002, he was named a Harvard College Professor, a distinction recognising exceptional undergraduate teaching. He currently serves as the Dean of Science in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Bloxham studies how planets generate magnetic fields, a long-recognised phenomenon that is still not fully understood. His research group has developed a threedimensional numerical model that could explain why the Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by as much as 10% over the past 150 years. Other interests include the application of high-performance computing and visualisation to problems in geophysics. Read more about Jeremy in the Inside Track feature in this issue of Opus.

Nick Coffin OP (1995-2009)

The soon-to-be Doctor Coffin is in his second year at Birmingham University reading Medicine. 13

Mike Taylor

Mike is one of the longest-serving PGS teachers of recent times, a stalwart of the Chemistry Department who Roger Black credits with getting him into Medical School (see article in this issue of Opus.) His two children Matthew and Alison are both OPs. Matthew read Natural Sciences at Cambridge while sister Alison is studying Biological Sciences at Exeter. 14

Babak Javid OP (1984-1994)

Babak, one time ‘Young Immunologist of the Year’ (British Society for Immunology) , is a Visiting Scientist at Harvard University’s Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and an Honorary Registrar in Infectious Diseases at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He specialises in the study of the unique aspects of the translational apparatus of mycobacteria. 15 Professor Michael Craddock OP (1945-1954)

As part of the Canadian contribution to the Large Hadron Collider project Michael and his graduate students have collaborated in various aspects of its design, and in the upgrades of CERN’s existing accelerators to form its injector. Michael was one of the OP donors who helped to create the school’s Memorial Library. 16

Dr Alex Webb

Alex joined the Chemistry Department at PGS in September 2009. 17

David George OP

David cites his Biology teacher Ron Wells as instilling in him a lifelong fascination for the sea. He has a BSc in Zoology and a PhD in Marine Biology and began a career with the Natural History Museum with a senior research fellowship in 1965. A longtime council member of the Marine Conservation Society, which he chaired from 1984-1988, he is also an accomplished underwater photographer, and has been a member of the British Society of Underwater Photographers since the late Sixties as well as being voted best British Underwater Photographer. His textbook Marine Life which he co-wrote with wife Jennifer (who is Head of Biological Sciences at the University of Westminster) is widely regarded as the definitive guide to marine invertebrates. Although semiretired, he has recently worked on a project in Abu Dhabi examining the biology of coral reefs that have been decimated by rising sea temperatures.

Peter Russell OP (2005-2010)

P J is pictured here in his last year at PGS enlisting the help of Minister of State for Schools, Nick Gibb MP, in a science practical experiment. He is now reading medicine at Cardiff University. 19

Professor John Lee OP (1959-1969)

John Andre Lee is a consultant at Rotherham General Hospital and clinical professor of pathology at Hull York Medical School. Lee gained his medical degree, a BSc. and a Ph.D. in physiology at University College London. He is most notable to the wider public as co-presenter (with Gunther von Hagens) of Anatomy for Beginners (screened in the UK on Channel 4 in 2005), Autopsy: Life and Death (Channel 4, 2006) and Autopsy: Emergency Room (Channel 4, 2007). 20

Royston Powell OP (1934-1939)

Roy won a scholarship to PGS in 1934 and built short-wave receivers. This led him to join HM Signal School in 1940 as a laboratory assistant helping to develop radar for the Royal Navy. After the War he was appointed to the new Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and assisted in the development of radiation detection equipment. This work also took Roy to Oceania where he measured radiation at atomic bomb trials on Pacific coral atolls. He headed up Harwell’s instrument Technology Group, based in Bracknell before retirement. Roy was a great friend of the school and to the Development Office, taking a central role in drumming up support for the 2004 Development Campaign, part of which was to install and equip a brand new science laboratory. Sadly, he never saw the school’s Bristow-Clavell Science Centre finished before he died last year, but his proud daughters Mary Lord and Sally Goodman attended the official opening of the building and made a very generous donation to the building in his memory. 21

Nick Weaver

Nick took up his new challenge as Headmaster of Ipswich School last September following 3 years as Director of Studies and member of the Physics Department. He combined his love of music with his subject to broaden its appeal to pupils. Few will forget the famous ‘The Science behind the Electric Guitar’ lecture he gave in order to demonstrate electromagnetic induction! 22

Sophie Giles OP (2003-2010)

Sophie, a 2010 leaver, is in her first year of Medicine at Birmingham University. It was a remarkable year for prospective medics, with a total of 23 pupils leaving to read Medicine, Veterinary Science and Dentistry at university.