I had said, when I took the position, that I would do it for no more than 10 years and then go back to the lab, and in the seventh year I went to... I took a sabbatical. The hospital, the, the department was put in the keep of... of Howard Frazier and Dick Nesson, and I went to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories of Michael Stoker at Lincoln's Inn Field's in London. I went there to study nuclear transfer, a rather new area of biology, but I chose to do it in the UK because I was very interested in the National Health Service, and in the way in which general practitioners functioned, particularly the interactions of general practice and social service. Indeed, one of my former residents at, at the Beth Israel, a remarkable man named Brian Jarman had returned to the UK where he had become a GP.

And, I found myself in London out of the lab some of the time making house calls with Brian, something that, as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, I had only rarely done, but it was, it was routine practice for Brian and it opened my eyes. I recall, on our first house call we went fifth floor of, of a, an apartment building on the south bank of the Thames, and were greeted by a man who was a truck driver who told us about his lorry, but told us about his child who had a very bad sore throat and fever, and a second child with the same problem. Well, Brian examined the first child and I examined the second. We both agreed that both kids had strep throats, and while Brian was making out prescriptions and filling in the paperwork, I did what I did on all of my ventures in such settings, I asked, 'What do you think of the, of the Health Service?' And, with this Cockney accent he said, 'It's the best thing here, Governor, the doctor, it's the best thing here'. He said, 'Every time I have a, I come into it in one way or another, it gets better, for example, how did you people know that there were two, we needed two doctors today?' This was a... an experience, not precisely in those terms, that I experienced from virtually everybody, their reaction to the health service.