James spence medallist, 1980.

James Tanner spent much of his childhood abroad, in the baggage train of the British Army; when he was 9 years old the family returned to their home in east Devon and he began his schooling. He attended Marlborough College from 1934 to 1938 on a scholarship reserved for the sons of Army officers. Having specialised first in modern languages and then in mathematics and engineering, he found himself ill-equipped when at 17 he decided on a career in medical research. After a 6-month premedical course at the University of Exeter (then the College of the South West) he reached medical school in 1939 by means of a scholarship for athletics: this was at St Mary's Hospital (London University). In 1941 he went to the USA in the first batch of war-time Rockefeller students; he took most of his clinical course in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, and interned on the Osler medical service at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At St Mary's, Professor A St G Huggett had initiated him (as he initiated Kenneth Cross, last year's James Spence Medallist) into physiological research work and in Philadelphia, under Professor Isaac Starr, Tanner undertook his first serious research which led to a paper entitled 'The construction ofnormal standards for cardiac output in man.' After Johns Hopkins, he returned to London, completed his English qualification, and served as junior medical officer in the Emergency Medical Service at the war-time Maudsley Hospital at Mill Hill, working on the physiology and psychiatry of effort syndrome (the soldier's heart). He was subsequently junior psychiatrist at the Prisoner-of-War Rehabilitation Unit at Dartford, Kent, under Dr Maxwell Jones. In 1946 he joined the Department of Human Anatomy at Oxford where, at the suggestion of Professor Le Gros Clark, he initiated a course on growth in children. This led to an invitation from Dr E R Bransby of the Ministry of Health to organise a long-term longitudinal growth study at Harpenden. He returned to London and taught endocrinology in the Sherrington School of Physiology at St Thomas's Hospital where he became increasingly concerned with child growth. In 1948 he was joined by R H Whitehouse and their association has lasted to the present time. His long connection with the Institute of Child Health started in 1951 when Sir Alan Moncrieff invited him to give a lecture on the growth of children in the British Postgraduate Federation Lecture Series: this lecture was the basis on which Growth at adolescence was written a few years later. In 1956 Dr Frank Falkner, who ran the longitudinal growth study started by Moncrieff at the Institute of Child Health, left for America and Tanner and Whitehouse moved over to the Institute where they eventually established a full-scale department of growth and development with financial help from the Nuffield Foundation. A few years later, encouraged by Dr George Newns, he returned to clinical work and started a growth disorder clinic in The Hospital for Sick Children. Here the expertise acquired in studying the normal was used to monitor the growth of children with disturbances, especially those with growth hormone deficiency, in the treatment of which the clinic played a pioneering and prominent role. In 1966 he was designated Professor of Child Health and Growth at the Institute of Child Health, and the chair was made an established one by the University of London in 1977. He has always been a strong champion of the science of human biology; in 1958 he was one of the founder members of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, and is currently one of the editors of its journal Annals of