Sir William Dunn School of Pathology Oral Histories

In 2017, as part of the '75 Years of Penicillin in People' project funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Bodleian Libraries commissioned a series of oral history interviews with scientists, administrators, and technicians who work, or formerly worked, at the University of Oxford's Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. The interviews were conducted by Georgina Ferry.

Follow on

Podcasts are better in Metacast mobile app

Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episodes

Siamon Gordon

Georgina Ferry interviews Siamon Gordon. Siamon Gordon FRS is Professor Emeritus of Cellular Pathology in the Dunn School. He was born the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in an Afrikaans-speaking village in South Africa. Having excelled at school he qualified in medicine at the University of Cape Town before taking post-doctoral research posts in London (at St Mary’s Hospital) and Rockefeller University. While in New York he heard a lecture by Henry Harris on his then new technique of cell f...

Jun 04, 2018•1 hr 26 min

Neil Barclay

Georgina Ferry interviews Neil Barclay. Neil Barclay is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Pathology in the Dunn School. He arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate in 1969 to study Biochemistry, and undertook a DPhil in the same department supervised by Alan Williams. After a post-doctoral position in Sweden, he returned to Oxford to work on monoclonal antibodies with Williams, who had just been appointed head of the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit within the Dunn School. Barclay pioneered the sequencing...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 55 min

George Brownlee

Georgina Ferry interviews George Brownlee. George Brownlee FRS is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Pathology in the Dunn School. He obtained his PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, working with the Nobel prizewinner Fred Sanger on the sequencing of small RNAs. He continued to work at the LMB as an independent scientist, on messenger RNA and the RNA genome of the influenza virus. In 1978 he was invited by Henry Harris to become the inaugural Professor of Chemical Pathology ...

Mar 06, 2018•2 hr 18 min

Herman Waldmann

Georgina Ferry interviews Herman Waldmann. Herman Waldmann FRS is Emeritus Professor of Pathology, and was head of the Dunn School from 1994-2013. He read medicine at Cambridge and qualified as a doctor in London before returning to Cambridge to do a PhD in the Department of Pathology. In 1978 he joined César Milstein at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to learn about monoclonal antibodies. Thereafter he pioneered the development of monoclonals as therapeutic agents, particularly Campath-...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 25 min

Pete Stroud

Georgina Ferry interviews Pete Stroud. Pete Stroud is Mechanical Facilities Manager at the Dunn School, where he runs the maintenance and construction workshop. He has literally worked at the department ‘man and boy’, as his father ran the workshop before him, and as a teenager he used to help out in the holidays; since coming to work at the department he has lived on the site, in the flat formerly occupied by Howard Florey’s animal technician Jim Kent. Having originally intended to become an au...

Mar 06, 2018•30 min

Eric Sidebottom

Georgina Ferry interviews Eric Sidebottom. Eric Sidebottom has been associated with the Dunn School for more than 50 years, as medical student, lecturer, and recently, official historian. Sidebottom came to Oxford to read medicine at a time when two Nobel prizewinners, Howard Florey and Hans Krebs, were still lecturing to undergraduates. He completed his medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and came to the Dunn School as one of Henry Harris’s first DPhil students in 1966. Side...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 12 min

Elizabeth Robertson

Georgina Ferry interviews Elizabeth Robertson. Elizabeth Robertson FRS is Professor of Developmental Biology and a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow at the Dunn School. Having spent her early childhood collecting animals as pets in Nigeria, she came to Oxford in 1975 to read for a degree in zoology. She then went to Cambridge to do a PhD on cell differentiation during development. She was one of the first to isolate embryonic stem cells in the mouse, and began her career as an independent scientis...

Mar 06, 2018•51 min

Fiona Powrie

Georgina Ferry interviews Fiona Powrie. Fiona Powrie FRS is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Oxford. The first in her family to receive a university education, she studied biochemistry at the University of Bath. She thought better of her first choice of accountancy as a career, and came to the MRC Immunology Unit at the Dunn School to undertake a DPhil with Don Mason. She discovered a regulatory role for T cells in the immune response, and while pursuing this work during her ...

Mar 06, 2018•40 min

Gordon MacPherson

Georgina Ferry interviews Gordon MacPherson. Gordon MacPherson retired as Reader in Experimental Pathology at the Dunn School in 2008, having spent almost his entire scientific career in the department. He first came to Oxford in the early 1960s to read medicine, where he heard lectures by the newly-appointed head of the Dunn School Henry Harris, and learned practical skills from Margaret Jennings (Lady Florey). He completed his medical training at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, before retu...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 10 min

Keith Gull

Georgina Ferry interviews Keith Gull. Keith Gull FRS is the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Professor of Molecular Microbiology. He studied microbiology at Queen Elizabeth College in London and remained there to do a PhD, moving straight into a lectureship at the University of Kent in 1972. There he used electron microscopy to study microtubules, first in fungi and later in disease-causing microbes, the trypanosomes. Gull moved to the University of Manchester in 1989 as Professor of Bio...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 53 min

Gillian Griffiths

Georgina Ferry interviews Gillian Griffiths. Gillian Griffiths FRS is Professor of Immunology and Cell Biology and Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge. While an undergraduate at University College London she was encouraged by immunologists Martin Raff and Avrion Mitchison to apply for a PhD with César Milstein at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Under Milstein’s guidance she was the first to sequence the complete variable r...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 36 min

David Greaves

Georgina Ferry interviews David Greaves. David Greaves is Professor of Inflammation Biology at the Dunn School. He did a first degree in microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Bristol before going to King’s College, London for his PhD. He worked on the expression of the beta globin gene in the same laboratory where Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had carried out their studies of the structure of DNA. A first post-doctoral position took him to Amsterdam to work on gene expressio...

Mar 06, 2018•55 min

Matthew Freeman

Georgina Ferry interviews Matthew Freeman. Matthew Freeman FRS joined the Dunn School as Professor of Pathology and head of department in 2013. He remembers meeting the Nobel-prizewinning immunologist Peter Medawar as a teenager, who told him 'Chemistry is dead, Physics is dying and Biology is the only science that’s worth pursuing.' Inspired by this, Freeman read Biochemistry at Oxford before going to Imperial College London to undertake a PhD in on the genetic control of the cell cycle in frui...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 23 min

Paul Fairchild

Georgina Ferry interviews Paul Fairchild. Paul Fairchild is Associate Professor and Lecturer in Medicine at the Dunn School and was Co-Director of the Oxford Stem Cell Institute from 2008-2015. He first came to Oxford in 1987 to undertake a DPhil in the Nuffield Department of Surgery, working with Jonathan Austyn who had been a student in the Dunn School with Siamon Gordon. Fairchild worked on the role of dendritic cells in preventing autoimmunity through the induction of tolerance in T cells. H...

Mar 06, 2018•49 min

Peter Cook

Georgina Ferry interviews Peter Cook as part of the Peter Cook has retired from his post as Professor of Cell Biology, but continues to pursue his research half-time in the Dunn School as a departmental lecturer. He read Biochemistry as an undergraduate at Oxford, and moved to the Dunn School in 1967 to pursue research for a DPhil under the supervision of the head of department, Henry Harris. He has remained in the department ever since. Cook’s research as a graduate student used cell fusion to ...

Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 35 min

For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android

Open in Metacast