Adventures with membrane lipids.

It is a very great honour to have been awarded the Biochemical Society’s Morton Lectureship for 1994. T o be chosen by one’s peers for an award of this stature is indeed the ultimate reward for one’s life’s work, even more so when one considers the high level of achievement reached by Professor R.A. Morton himself and by the previous awardees. This award is particularly gratifying to me in recalling that the first awardee was the late Professor Laurens van Deenen, whom I knew and admired as a colleague and friend. I’m pleased to have the opportunity of presenting and discussing some of the research I have been doing over the past fifty years. There is a story about Isaac Newton, who was asked how he viewed his life’s work. He replied that to himself he seemed to have been only a boy playing on the seashore and now and then picking up a brighter shell or a prettier pebble, while all around lay the great ocean of truth undiscovered. I use this story to indicate that many of the problems that I have worked on and the resulting findings have more often arisen from serendipity or fortuity rather than from deliberate planning. Thus I can easily identify with Newton’s boy playing on the beach and I can tell you now that I’ve had a lifetime of fun and adventure