Sizing Up

I decided that the move from Sheffield was an opportunity for a reappraisal of my research.

In the lab I took up the ageing thymus as a model of cellular ecology, where the central question, still unanswered is ‘How does a mass of dividing cells know the shape and size it should be? When this process goes wrong, cancer is the result of uncontrolled cellullar proliferation. On the other hand, human ageing is an expression of a relentless decline in cell mass from our second decade; an expression of the gradual failure of the biochemical management of cells to keep to a youthful structural specification. This led me to cross the boundary between science and medicine where I found a termporary professional home in the British Society for Research on Ageing, eventually becoming Secretary and President. On the way, in partnership with Prof. John Phillips, who I had worked with in Sheffield, I obtained funds from the Wolfson Foundation to build a research lab as an extension of the zoology department in John’s University of Hull to study the endocrinology of ageing. I was the Wolfson co-director of research but still based in Cardiff. This link was made possible with a career development award from the Turner Foundation.

The Department of Biological Sciences now occupies the Wolfson Building wth its teaching and research laboratories, an electron microscope suite, freshwater and marine aquaria, a state-of-the-art genome analysis lab, lecture theatres and staff offices.The department still has very good links with industrial biotechnology companies and local hospitals.

On the strengths of my position in the British Society for Research on Ageing and the research I was carrying out in Cardiff and Hull I wrote a book to pull all the threads of biology and medicine together in relation to ageing as an integral part of human biological and sociological evolution. Its title is Ageing: A Biomedical Perspective. and I am developing it as an on-line interactive resource for an experimental time/place syllabus.