John Young, always called J.Z., and he was an absolutely wonderful man. He was professor of anatomy in University College in London and he was the only professor of anatomy who wasn’t actually a doctor. He wasn’t medically qualified. In a way this was an advantage, I think, because he ran his department in an extraordinary way. He got interested in cybernetics, the idea of, well the beginnings really of artificial intelligence. These were machines that could control themselves with feedback, very much inspired by the war, actually, war gadgets and devices, and then he realised that organisms have feedback control and groups of organisms also had feedback and control and sort of dynamic system. He also saw it as in a way mechanistic and he worked on nerve impulses, particularly in the squid. He worked on the octopus brain, he was a world authority on the octopus brain and he worked in Naples for many, many years every summer, and he was an absolutely inspiring character. I mean in the evenings he would drink gallons of beer with the boys sort of thing, but everybody respected him so that the discipline in his group was absolute and completely informal through respect for him as a leader. It was really a lovely thing. I had two summers working with him in Naples, not actually on octopuses, I never work on octopus, but on a unique eye in nature, I think, and it’s called capelia, Copilia quadrata, and it’s little teeny weenie creature called a cotapod which has an extraordinary eye which has big, well, two eyes, it has big lenses like headlamps in front of it and behind that there’s a little teeny weenie lens and one optic nerve into its brain in the middle. Now, the lenses inside the body of the animal is completely transparent, wiggle in and out scanning the image from the front lens so it works like a mechanical television set so instead of in the case of the human eye a million fibres from the eye into the brain, this only has one. It works by scanning, entirely different principle and he got quite excited by this, arranged that I could go there, a long time ago, and I spent the summer working on this eye and he’s that sort of chap. He’d get excited by something, support a younger person, help them to do it, and it all happened and it all worked out, and he’s a person I respect enormously, really do. And I think this is one of the things about science, I mean there’s a lot of warmth in it, there’s a tremendous amount of friendship in it but also always a rivalry, you know, and it’s a funny thing, a lot of people don’t understand but it’s the rivalry and therefore the standards that were set up by always a possibility of criticism that keeps a thing sharp but it’s also warm because when somebody does do something exciting, then people will follow that person, they become a sort of leader in a smaller or bigger way, and J.Z. Young was a fantastic leader in that regard. He was always having ideas, help other people have ideas and extremely high standard and he was just, I think, somebody to emulate where possible, you know. I can’t think of anybody else quite like J.Z. Young.
