My Ph.D supervisor was Prof. E. George Gray FRS and in his laboratory in the Anatomy Department at University College London I learnt electron microscopy and became interested in microtubules. When George was appointed head of the newly established Laboratory of Biological Ultrastructure at the Medical Research Council�s National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, he asked me to go with him and I was there for 4 years pursuing my interest in microtubules in neurons. I was then appointed to a Research Fellowship in the Brain Research Group at the Open University, Milton Keynes, where I started to work on neuronal growth cones and supervised my first Ph. D student, Owen Lockerbie. Owen and I development a method for the isolation of neuronal growth cones as a subcellular fraction from developing brain for biochemical and physiological analysis. Since then our method has been widely used. In 1985 I was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology at King�s College London where, in 1990, I helped to establish the Developmental Biology Research Centre. In 2000, I published a monograph on growth cones: �Neuronal Growth Cones�, Developmental & Cell Biology Monograph Series, Cambridge University Press, which is now available in electronic format. When King�s merged with UMDS, I became a founding member of the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology.
