When I became President, it seemed to me that very little was being acted on. This was ten years later. I should say that I was on Council for two years. I hadn't realised that I'd been put on Council because I was offered the Presidency in... to succeed George Porter in 1990. Now in 1990 I'd only been in the lab for a little while, so I turned it down. I didn't know this at the time, but when I said, 'No' I was only the second person to turn it down after [Michael] Faraday. Faraday turned it down because he said it would... I don't remember his words, but the modern word would be: would blow his mind. He wouldn't be safe afterwards, or words of that sort. I think there was a class element to it as well. But at the time I had, of course, had experience by 1990 of four years in the lab and experience of Whitehall, but I... and I had a Nobel Prize, so the... but I decided that I was just setting up the neuroscience and I thought that... I really believed that... that it was more important to be in a lab than it was important to be Head of the Royal Society. That's a kind of... people say, it's a kind of arrogance, you see, to turn down something like that, and I was told... that it was my duty to become President of the Royal Society, because of the need for British science and all that, by various people, and... Duties, other duties... Duty, yes. So George Porter who had engineered this, I hadn't realised this at the time, was most upset.

Anyway, they found Michael Atiyah to succeed, a mathematician, and that turned out to be quite a success because there hadn't been a mathematician President of the Royal Society for a hundred years. The last one was George Stokes, you know, the famous man of Stokes' theorems, Stokes' formulae and all that, that same George Stokes. And I thought that was the end of it, but after Atiyah retired, I was approached again, but by this time... I never thought I would do it, because by this time I was 68, I would be turning 69, and I said, 'I'm too old to do this.' They said, 'Oh no, not at all. Lord Todd, the chemist, he became President when he was 69, and anyway, you have a lot of people who can help you and so on.' I was still Head of the lab, but I had another year to go, because I retired as Head of the lab in 1986 so there was one year, so to speak, between the two, and they said, 'Well, you can have light duties there.' So I became President. I was told very sternly it was my duty. If you've been brought up in the British school, an English school, the word duty... duty's one of those rallying calls like duty, loyalty, endurance, patience, all those kind of virtues that you have... well, either of the Boy Scouts or the public schools, you can't deny the call of duty. I don't think the word is used much nowadays. It was my duty to do it. So I took it on, and I became President in November 30th 1994. The Royal Society year starts in November, because it's St Andrews Day, because of Charles II. And I retired on St Andrews Day 1995 as the President.