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This time at Birmingham turned me into a general biologist, and ever since then I have always tried to take a biological approach to any research project that I have undertaken.

In 1962, Popjak and I left the service of the Medical Research Council and became co-directors of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology set up by Shell Research Ltd.

I'm involved in Project ALS which is trying to get money for stem cell research. That's one I've been pretty involved with because if you can cure that, you can cure so many other diseases.

My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

The Director of the Laboratory, George Reynolds, was most supportive of my efforts to work independently. There followed for ten years a glorious time for research.

I promptly fell in love with scientific research and soon had assigned myself, as a major vocation, the task of elucidating the mechanism of action of the antidiabetic hormone.

In 1986, I was asked by the then-Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, Dr. R.C. Miller, Jr., to establish a new interdisciplinary institute, the Biotechnology Laboratory. I decided that it was time for me to start paying back for the thirty years of fun that I had been able to have in research.

I also found out that I liked biochemical research and that I could do it.

I did help to set up an undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry and made progress in modelling and analysing pharmacological activity at the tissue level, my new passion.