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. Sidebottom became interested in cancer, and used Harris's cell fusion technique to explore the ability of cancer cells to spread throughout the body, or metastasise. Following the death of John French, Harris appointed him to organise all the teaching in the department, which led him to administrative roles including chairing the board of the Faculty of Medicine. In the late 1980s Sidebottom moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund as Assistant Director of Clinical Research. Returning to the Dunn School after five years, he has since focused on the history of Oxford medicine, publishing Oxford Medicine: A Walk Through Nine Centuries, and Penicillin and the Legacy of Norman Heatley (with David Cranston).