Before I left, while I was still at Smith Kline, I can't remember now how I met John Vane, but I remember going down once a week to the Royal College of Surgeons where he worked as a Professor of Pharmacology there, and we did some experiments together. And then he was head-hunted to become the Research Director of the Wellcome Foundation, and so he'd gone to Wellcome, and he recruited me as a consultant. So I used to go down to Langley Park at Beckenham, which was the headquarters of the Wellcome Foundation, and I got to know the place. And I loved the idea of it. So let me recap what that was. Henry Wellcome was a Canadian and another young American, Burroughs, did pharmacy together at University of Wisconsin and then they moved to Philadelphia and they set up a little manufacturing business and they moved to the UK and we have Burroughs Wellcome Limited which pro... produced a lot of things – digitalis, this kind of thing – but also they introduced antibodies. And... and so they were producing antibodies for... help me... horses... it'll come... my nominal amnesia. Anyway, the point was that Wellcome, Henry Wellcome, had moved south of London into Herne Hill area, to a big estate so that he could have horses that would generate the proteins, the vaccines which the company used. And then that became too small so then he moved into this much bigger site in, near Beckenham, Langley Park. By the time we got there the horses had gone. That was done elsewhere. But it had become a conventional pharmaceutical company, and, with dedicated buildings and so on, but the idea was... what happened was in 1936 Wellcome died and in his will he directed that the company should be handed over to trustees, and it was set up as the Wellcome Foundation, and the Trustees had the fiducial duty to manage that business with the idea that profits from it would go back into medical research. And that was the condition where we were, and I liked that idea, frankly. Everybody did. We all liked it. So when I got frustrated at University College and John, I suppose, detected this; he then head-hunted me to go down and join him. Well, that was a mixed blessing, and John and I, really, temperamental-wise just didn't fit, and the way I wanted to do things he didn't want, and so... on the positive side I think I helped to bring to the market three products which might not have happened otherwise, lamotrigine, the anticonvulsant, and the short acting neuromuscular blocker which falls apart, and the 5-HT agonist.
