Alan North
President, The Physiological Society

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.55.7

Sunday

This day begins in the lounge at Heathrow airport, reading my email. I am returning from a very brief meeting in Minneapolis, advising a small company starting up in the pain area. I admire the entrepreneurs who will turn science into medicines, in this or any other area, but after another British Airways night I am wondering how long I can keep up this particular kind of long distance support. Among the email correspondence: Maynard Case has some pieces relating to my impending move to Manchester; David Brown is giving information on the up-coming St Petersburg meeting on membrane transport – and also responding to my suggestion to hold a symposium to honour the recently deceased autonomic physiologist Vladimir Skok – and, no surprise, a request to review a manuscript from one of the Senior Editors of The Journal of Physiology.

On the plane up to Manchester, I work some more on the further drafting of a paper destined for J Gen Physiol that deals with the channel vs pore features of the P2X7 receptor. Like many of my recent papers, this one was easily conceived, but has been too many months in gestation. It is getting close, though some aspects need to be played down a bit and a couple of figures re-jigged. I feel that the paper needs a quantitative model to illustrate the conclusions; I started on it some months ago but am doubtful now that I will ever find the time to finish it.

I currently serve as Chair of the MRC Cross Board panel and there is a briefing meeting scheduled for Monday at 3.30 pm. But when I get home to Sheffield I realise that the final set of papers (the referees’ comments) arrived at my office only on the Friday, so I have to go into my office at the University to pick them up. Not too bad, the pile of papers is only three inches high, and luckily it is also on CD. Sadly, I now realise that my mobile phone, which I had noticed missing at Manchester airport on Thursday, was not plugged into the charger in my office – the one place that I thought I was most likely to find it. I had felt rather naked without it in the US – funny how these recent technologies so quickly become essentials.

Monday

I am in the office soon after eight, which is about usual, having dropped off my 11 year old son at his school close to the University. Adrian prefers the croissants that are available there to the breakfast that I might prepare! There is not a lot of activity in the laboratory at that time of day, but my assistant Jessica Hinchliffe soon arrives. Even before she has taken off her coat I beseech her to help retrieve/cancel/replace my phone! She is unflappable – it will be done. A new meeting has appeared in the calendar for 9.00 am. This is with a colleague (Kei Cho), with whom I am organising a substantive collaboration with the Brain Research Centre in Seoul. It is a joint venture with neuroscientists in Bristol and Sheffield, and needs some urgent discussion in the light of my forthcoming transfer to the University of Manchester. And probably, I discover, it will necessitate an early trip to Korea.

Hye-Youn, a research assistant carrying out RT-PCR on lung ion channels, tells me that our stored human lung macrophage RNA has partially degraded after some months in the freezer. This project forms part of a collaboration with AstraZeneca and is run by a senior postdoctoral colleague Amanda Mackenzie: we get together to re-prioritize our study of some remaining channels. The choice is made more problematic by the realisation that the departmental fluorescence-activated cell sorter is no longer available (the technician recently quit), making it difficult to isolate a further supply of cells. It is the modern way of science, which requires a long term management effort to coordinate the participation of surgeons, other academic colleagues, FACS technicians, and electrophysiologists. Then suddenly one link in the chain breaks. A different form of physiology from my early days – take an animal and start the experiment in the morning, and continue until the cells or the preparation faded in the evening (or early the next morning!).

Jessica tells me about the missing phone — the bad news is that it is not in any of the obvious places where I might have left it, but the good news is that nobody has put thousands of pounds worth of calls on it over the weekend. There would normally have been a few phone calls to make on my journey down to London, although unlike most of my fellow travellers I have a distinct aversion to discussing any kind of business in railway carriages. So I find some fortuitous peace in that regard, and have the chance for a final read through the referees’ reports for the 44 MRC grants – they are easy to go through on a lap-top. The meeting at 3.30 pm is with the MRC staff responsible for the grant applications. It gives us the opportunity to highlight any particular areas of concern, so that we can alert primary reviewers if necessary in the two days prior to the review meeting itself.

That evening is a pleasant event in which I join about 20 others for dinner at a small Italian restaurant in the Lambeth area – they are the Council of the Physiological Society. Some say, indeed some Council members say, that the events are a boondoggle, and an unnecessary expense. In fact, I spend the meeting in conversation with Giovanni Mann and Maggie Leggett discussing possible new ways to support younger physiologists, and particularly how to involve physiology undergraduates and PhD students in school visits. The food and wine do
‘enable’ such discussions, and I feel that they are a useful adjunct to the formal meetings of Council.

Tuesday

The London hotel is not too luxurious and some Council members can find no seat for breakfast; those of us who do, continue much of the previous evening’s conversations. It is a 20 minute walk over to Guy’s for the meeting itself and its 9.30 am start. One of the most significant agenda items is the provision of substantial funds to rectify a pension shortfall for some of the Society’s staff. The Executive had previously considered this at length, and of course taken professional advice. Nonetheless, it is good to see significant Council discussion with many members taking part, which ultimately led to a revised decision which all considered fair.

There are other key items: a bid to host the 2013 International Union of Physiological Sciences congress must be prepared by the end of September. And, talk about forward planning, a small budget was approved for lobbying efforts to place physiological sciences in the funding picture with respect to the Aurora manned mission to Mars scheduled for 2031. Whereas Meetings Secretary Bridget Lumb apologised that she would not be holding her post in 2013, there was no such humility on the part of Mike Rennie with respect to the Mars mission in 2031!

I bring the meeting to a close at 11.45 am and, after a quick sandwich with Council members, I take a cab over to the London offices of Nature Publishing Group. They publish the British Journal of Pharmacology (BJP), of which I am currently Editor-in-Chief. At the meeting are two of our Senior Editors, the journal manager, Nature Publishing Group staff and an outside consultant. On the agenda there is a new meeting that is being planned to promote the BJP, very much modelled on The Journal of Physiology symposia that have been held around the world in the past few years. This time the topic is ‘Pharmacology of the Lower Urinary Tract’, planned for December 2005 in association with a meeting of the Scientific Branch of the American Urological Association (SBUR). These things need a good head start – in this case the arrangements are potentially complex, involving NPG, BJP and the SBUR. We discuss the outline of a joint contract, and the urgent need for a provisional business plan to get the project off the ground.

Back in Sheffield at 5.00 pm I have a meeting scheduled with Mark Dunne. Mark was, until recently, the Society’s Meetings Secretary. He is head of the Division of Physiology, Pharmacology and Toxicology in Manchester, and this meeting has to do with space and facilities in Manchester when I move there in July. Thanks to Midland Mainline I arrive 30 min late for the meeting – the journey is not atypical (service first delayed and then cancelled at Luton and the entire train contents disgorged onto an adjacent train). On the other hand, one journey from London to Sheffield last year that should have been a 2 h 10 min direct service involved me travelling on four different trains and arriving 3 h late, so all things are relative. The loss of my phone prevented me from telling Mark of my delay. But the train journey allowed me to make a start on this article…

After some time spent poring over future floor plans I leave the laboratory around 7.00 pm. This was good timing to pick up my son from his football practice, and get home to watch the game between Arsenal and Celta Vigo with him. And, as the day was Shrove Tuesday, the half-time interval allows me to cook the traditional pancake fare. In this part of the world these are thin crêpes served slightly crisped with sugar and lemon juice: they are most often eaten for breakfast, but evening serves equally well!

Wednesday

A day in the laboratory, with few appointments. Still a lot of reading to do in preparation for the panel meeting at the MRC tomorrow. The day starts with a session with Jessica, which brings the urgent realisation that the date of the next meeting that I had proudly announced to the Physiological Society Council yesterday was the wrong one. I am a slow learner, but now I have at last figured out that my calendar is best left entirely to somebody else. Jessica calls David Sewell and we send out an immediate correction and abject apology.

A third year undergraduate student comes to see me about his library project on P2X3 receptors and pain. I was most impressed at the list of a dozen or so papers that he had prepared for discussion, including a very recent review by R A North in The Journal of Physiology entitled ‘P2X3 receptors and pain’. Seems like one student on his way to a First Class degree!

At 12.30 pm the informal ‘journal club’ takes place; this is a 10-15 min whiteboard presentation by someone in the lab of a recent paper. The event has been running daily at 12.30 pm in my laboratory for about 25 years, with many stops and starts, and survives because of its essential informality (which is another way of saying that you don’t come to listen if you have something more important to do, like an experiment, and you don’t come to present if you are lazy, fearful or uninspired). The presenters rotate through all laboratory members – professors to PhD students; today it is one of my own graduate students.

Half an hour with another member of staff dissecting and discussing a paper prepared for submission that I had read on the last US trip. Half an hour spent writing a letter of reference for an appointee to an overseas professorship. Two hours reviewing overdue manuscripts for The Journal of Physiology and other journals.

And then home around 4.00 pm because that’s where the MRC grants are (the 12 inch pile) for tomorrow’s meeting. I put another 3 h into them before it’s time to fix dinner. My wife Annmarie Surprenant (who is also a professor in the Institute of Molecular Physiology at the University of Sheffield) has spent the latter part of the day visiting AstraZeneca, with whom she holds a research collaboration. She is enthused about the possibility of perhaps, at long last, being able to publish some of the work that has been carried out with their compounds; in fact they have turned out to be good tools with which to probe physiological function, and the scientific community needs them in the public domain. She was less enthusiastic about the earlier part of the day, which saw her taking an examination set by the Home Office. Nonetheless, she had some entertaining stories –such as one of her biochemical colleagues who had asserted in response to one question that the typical weight of an adult laboratory rat was 1 kg.

Thursday

Today is a 6.00 am start, and I am into London soon after 9.00 am. The two hour train ride allows the final preparation for the Cross Board meeting. The MRC Council room is filled today, no apologies received. The 20 members of the Board are drawn from all areas of medical science, ranging from clinical trials and public health to protein structure. They have a tough task, reviewing grants that are sometimes distant to their expertise, but aided with several expert referees’ reports. Some grants reach early consensus in minutes, other require discussion for an hour. The meeting is business-like and forthright, and I am once more impressed by the care and fairness with which these Board members contribute to the peer review process. This is the penultimate meeting of the Cross Board Group, which is destined to be replaced in the summer of 2004 in the new portfolio of MRC grants recently announced. The meeting finishes at 4.00 pm after a final reflective view of the outcomes, aided in this modern age by a projected display of a spread-sheet on a large screen. I like this system because it is fully transparent, and gives all the Board members the opportunity to re-open discussion, or to revise or refine their assessments of the grants considered for support. Most importantly, it allows the entire group explicitly to take responsibility for the collective decision.

The 4.00 pm finish allows me time to visit Waterstone’s down by University College before meeting my 19 year old son Chris. I am looking for a book by Donald Kennedy, a scion of American academic life who is now Editor-in-Chief of Science. Chris is a student at the Guildhall School of Music, specialising in Composition. We find a nice restaurant on Charlotte Street and after another beer or two I finish up running for the 9.25 pm train from St Pancras. This means home around midnight.

Friday

The morning begins with a 9.00 am laboratory meeting. I hold joint laboratory meetings with Annmarie. Today one of her group is talking – Richard Varcoe is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow studying the role of P2X7 receptors in endothelial cell function. He has become the resident expert on quantitative RT-PCR and, as usual, I learn a lot from his presentation.

The meeting is followed by an appointment with a visitor who wishes to discuss the possibility of a position in Manchester, and then by a meeting with Liz Seward, another staff member in the Institute of Molecular Physiology. Liz and I are jointly supervising a new PhD student and we sit with him together to look over his recordings of ATP-induced currents from PC12 cells transfected to express P2X receptors. It is known that these cells have a native channel that is very likely homomeric P2X2, and the student has found that this can be readily suppressed by transfection of a ‘dominant-negative’ P2X2 subunit carrying a point mutation in its ATP binding site. We are trying to devise experiments that will allow us to use this finding to determine the normal trafficking cycle of the native subunits.

But at 11.30 am a taxi is waiting. Off to Manchester again. I have taken a new position there as Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences. Although it does not start until 1 July 2004, the merger of the University with UMIST has thrown up some issues that cannot wait. Today it is the appointment of Associate Deans for Research and for Teaching. The meetings are billed as ‘interviews’, a notion that I rather dislike. I see it more as a dialogue to try to persuade the best people to give up some of their research time to help with the substantial administrative load imposed largely by outside (i.e. government) forces. This reminds me how antediluvian I find the whole procedure for recruiting academic staff in UK institutions. I have been thoroughly influenced by my 18 years in US academia, and find mildly absurd the notion that people are being considered in competition for posts with the pathetic salaries and the meagre facilities generally on offer in the UK. Choosing one’s colleagues is by far the single most important aspect of the professional life of any senior academic: it can only be done by a series of one-on-one meetings to identify the best candidate and then providing him or her with every possible reason to join. It cannot be done by a 40 minute revolving door series of interviews.

By the time the meeting ends I have no time for the planned beer with a few of my future colleagues before journeying home. The good news here is that the train stops in Dore before reaching Sheffield; by alighting here I can take a 10 min walk and arrive home at 7 pm.

Saturday

The snow covered ground dissuades me from the ideas of a run along one of the nearby ‘edges’ – the rocky gritstone cliffs that border many of the nearby moors. The great attraction of life in Sheffield is undoubtedly the proximity to the Peak district with its wealth of walks through open country. Often on a weekend morning I run along the cliff top trails. These are the same gritstone crags that influenced my teenage years, and turned me towards a life that for many years involved exploring the world’s distant mountain ranges. This love of mountains was an important reason for studying medicine, since a medical degree is a ready passport to expedition climbing. My interest in physiology developed as an out-growth of the medical curriculum, driven primarily by my frustration at the lack of quantitative thinking in biology but also influenced by a fortunate interaction with Hans Kosterlitz who was one of my physiology teachers in Aberdeen (before he became Head of Pharmacology).

So, instead of running and walking over the moors today I head into the laboratory for a few hours to finish off the revisions of another manuscript. This one is a re-submission for the British Journal of Pharmacology; after 2 months of further experiments we hope that it might now be acceptable. No special dispensations for Editors-in-Chief.

The only other person in the laboratory this Saturday afternoon is our American visitor Jim Galligan. He is an autonomic physiologist with substantial programmes back home in gastrointestinal motility and the innervation of veins, and some years ago he identified ATP as a transmitter between neurons in the wall of the intestine. In Sheffield he is recording currents through P2X receptors expressed in HEK cells, and happy with the ability to be able to do experiments undisturbed at the weekend. I drop him off on my way home at around 6.00 pm. He’s coming over to our house for dinner tomorrow evening, which means I’d better stop by the grocery/liquor store… but then tomorrow is another week.