Q & A

What turned you on to biology? I grew up amongst the wildlife of the West of England, and when I encountered an inspiring biology teacher, John Keylock, he introduced me to bird-watching and ecology. This included the systematic recording of winter wildfowl movements, and my first published observations were of bird numbers on seasonally flooded Somerset Levels. Finding errors in school biology textbooks was a sport in John’s class, so I soon learned not to trust all that ‘experts’ say or print. The school library’s copies of New Scientist let me follow the DNA revelations of the 1950s — biochemistry looked like a good way to understand biology.