Profile

Play the piano for relaxation.

I was born in Frankfurt, but because my father was Jewish Germany had to leave Germany in 1938 when I was just 2years and 6 moths old. I went to school in Manchester and studied Maths at Cambridge  university. But then I became fascinated by statistics and genetics and did my PhD with one of the world’s greatest scientists  of the 20th Century, Sir Ronald Fisher. He was the founder of modern statistics and an outstanding geneticist. After a period of time Stanford University with another outstanding scientist, Joshua Lederberg , who got a Nobel prize for showing how you can do genetics with bacteria, I returned to England with my family and, when I was on the young side, became a professor of genetics in Oxford University. I later became involved in cancer research which has subsequently been my main interest. I have also been very involved in promoting the public understanding of science and public engagement with scientists.

I have previously done a lot of work on how the body’s immune system recognises “foreignness”. It is this recognition that means you have to match transplant donors with their recipients because we are  mostly quite different genetically with respect to our inherited tissue types.

I also do some mathematical modelling of cancer progression and have done studies on the genetic variability of human populations. That can help us to say something about our genetic origins.