David Eisner
University of Manchester, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.96.20a

As a long-time member of the Society who has enjoyed many previous GL Brown Lectures, I was delighted to be asked to give this year’s. My ‘tour’ was made up of nine venues. It certainly exposed the deficiencies in my knowledge of geography; how could it possibly take so long to travel from Southampton to Cambridge and why could I not get a direct train from Bristol to Milton Keynes? I travelled a total distance of almost 3000 miles. The various rail companies behaved more or less impeccably. My PhD students suggested that I should have had a T-shirt made listing the venues and, indeed, gave the impression that they would have happily joined me as roadies. A particular delight was to catch up with old friends and make new ones. It is impossible to list all the highlights or, indeed, to thank all my hosts who contributed to making it such an enjoyable time. I will, however, long remember the oldest member of any of my audiences, Otto Hutter, pointing out that he was GL Brown’s PhD student and that, since he supervised my PhD supervisor (Denis Noble), there was a direct genealogical connection linking me to GL Brown. My lecture at the Open University was apparently the first time that a GL Brown Lecture had been delivered there. It was timetabled to coincide with a Science Fair and the enthusiasm of the school students for science was tangible. I gave a different lecture to these students but felt that it still fitted within the aim of the GL Brown Lecture to ‘stimulate an interest in physiology’ in a ‘younger audience’.

David Eisner gave the 2014 GL Brown Lecture at Queens University Belfast, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, The Open and Southampton Universities and Imperial College, London