During this period, there was also... I discovered that although Greg Winter was very interested in all this, and when Greg Winter was set up... when Cambridge Antibody was set up, he became Research Director, part-time Research Director, so he earned some extra money, but they also wanted people to push it. Michael Neuberger, who I heard can make antibodies, showed no interest in developing them or exploiting them. In fact, he said to one of the Ministers in the Government, I've done my bit, let the others do it. Now, it doesn't work like that. You can't develop anything unless you have a champion of the science and technology. You have to have that. And Greg was a marvellous champion. He wouldn't go to America, but he did talk about it. So the... so it was... there was no... the awards to inventors... there was an award to inventors based upon the Government policy and Ken Holmes may remember with Bill Longley getting an ex gratia grant of a few hundred pounds, 250 was it?
[Q] 250 pounds.
250 pounds. That was called an ex gratia payment, so if something had been invented in the public sector, you would... and had brought in money to the Government or to the country, could be to the country, you could apply for an ex gratia grant, and a prime example of this were the people invented the cavity magnetron which is what powered RADAR. Now that helped win the war. The inventors of the cavity magnetron after the war, Randall and Boot, got I think something under £3,000 which could buy a house at the time, but these were the most... the greatest invention of its time, the invention of RADAR and they got... and that was the system of awards.
So also, I argued for having awards to inventors, and eventually by now this time the Head Office at MRC was waking up to this, that we were doing these things and so over the year or two, we created a system of awards to inventors which... a complicated system, it's been revised over the years, but roughly speaking, if you get an invention which is in the... not bringing in great amounts of money, one third goes to the Lab, one third to the inventors and one third to the MRC, because they supplied the money. Now the inventors are not necessarily the people whose names appear on the patent, but everybody who has helped get it, and the 'inventors' – inverted commas – I as Director decide on the inventors, so when it came to Greg's invention, there's at least six people on it, not just Greg himself and Peter Jones and so on, all who'd helped in one way developing the technology, and the other thing about the... we were committed to do was that in Cambridge Antibody Technology we were, César and I and Greg, became... I become a Director of Cambridge Antibody for which I got £1,000 a year, which was novel, César became a Consultant and he got £1,000 a year... we were equal because he invented... and Greg got something also similar. Later the money was increased, but it was the first time we could receive, and I had needed the permission of MRC, so there was now a... so this was the first that this had ever been done, which broke the old Cambridge... you know, the old academic adage which you find in Cornford's book... in academia nothing should ever be done for the first time. Roughly, this is what they basically... was in the culture at the time. So that was technology transfer.