The Bristol laboratory, which is sadly no more, was in the Medical School. It was just one floor in the Anatomy Department of the building, and I moved here for various reasons but it was quite a good choice I think, I like Bristol. Bristol University has been very good to me indeed and, indeed, goes on supporting me in my old age, you know, I still have the secretary and a couple of offices and so on in the university, which is great, and I was given funding from the Medical Research Council, really, quite honestly, to do whatever I liked. It was amazing. I didn’t have any special thing we had to work on and I found the Medical Research Council absolutely amazing employers. Once they sort of liked you, obviously they’ve got to trust you to some degree, you get total support. They’re wonderful, I think, and I just hope that remains. I really would like to say that I think if that ability to find a niche for yourself where you can do your own thing, if that goes and the competition gets so great that there are no places to just work away without worrying about support and so on go, I think we’ve really lost science in this country. I think it’s absolutely crucial, really, and, of course, it also attracts students because they know that with a bit of luck they can end up in their own choice of environment and work on what they want to work on, which is what science is about, plus accepting challenges as well but you need that part of it. Anyway, I was very lucky because I got my niche in that little laboratory with about 12 people and we worked on lots of things. One of them was the hearing aid. Now, the hearing aid is the thing that I think I most regret in my entire life because I think it was a really good idea and we all get a bit deaf, I’m damn well getting deaf, everybody does, yeah, and I felt that hearing aids are pretty awful things really. I mean when you think of the industry of ophthalmology and glasses and so on, it’s a very reputable, very, very good industry, I think, they do a wonderful job, they really take care of their patients. I didn’t feel the same was true, to be honest, with hearing at that time at least. Mark you, the problem is much more difficult, the problems of deafness are much greater than the problems of needing glasses; it’s a relatively easy thing to deal with. But anyway, I got interested in it from having measured the signal to noise ratio in the nervous system, relating it to aging, when I was at Cambridge. Then I thought, well, why don’t we use these ideas to try to design a new sort of hearing aid which would increase the effectiveness of the available signal and somehow diminish the noise level which is a random activity going on all the time, you hear it, very often, buzzing in your ears, which gets in the way, like being at a party where you can’t hear other people because the other people are making a racket, drowning them, so that we’re really living in a sea of randomness in the nervous system and you have to pick out what’s significant from all that randomness. I wanted to try to make a hearing aid that would help.
