In Trinity I focused on chemistry and biology. Neil Hamer and Brian Hartley sustained my interests brilliantly, each in their own way. Neil would review the University lectures, and as you might expect from a chemist, distill the content into some simple questions that would thoroughly test and expand our understanding. He would alternately help and gloat as we struggled to find the answer. If we did well he might offer us a sherry. Brian was very different. He would take a piece of biology, and as you might expect from a biologist, he would ferment it. He went from facts into fantasy, exhorting us one minute to think big and the next moment to keep our feet on the ground. To imagine but to be critical. And to design killer experiments. ‘That’s right lad, put a stake through its bloody heart.’
In my third year in Trinity I dithered between taking chemistry or biochemistry. My good friend Norman Blackwell, who is here tonight with his wife Brenda as my guests, opted for chemistry, which he found more exciting to study. In fact, I also found chemistry more exciting to study. However I knew that I wanted to do research, and I opted for biochemistry on the grounds that the research problems were more interesting. I quickly regretted this sophistry. I discovered that biochemistry as taught at the Part II level seemed to require prodigious feats of memory, rather than the exercise of those powers of reason or imagination that had been so well developed by Hamer and Hartley. Anyway, I got my come-uppance in the finals. I probably didn’t help myself. I went in to the oral examination in rowing kit, and when asked by the examiners about the paper, I launched into a critique of each question and then the entire course. For my pains I ended up with 2.ii, normally the kiss of death for a research career. However, Denis Marrian stepped in again, and got Trinity to underwrite PhD funding for me. Brian Hartley also offered me a place with him to do a PhD and persuaded the MRC to fund it.
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Brian also arranged for me to have a summer job at the MRC LMB, building a molecular model of the enzyme trypsin for David Blow, another Trinity Fellow and an X-ray crystallographer. Unfortunately the model didn’t work out well. I didn’t rivet the backbone with enough plastic hydrogen bonds, and a section of the polypeptide backbone collapsed. However, it was a good lesson for later when I came to build real proteins by genetic engineering. I focused on antibodies that have a really nice scaffold in which the chains are all locked together with large numbers of hydrogen bonds.