We went down to the slaughterhouse in Oxford - they had one then - and we extracted joint fluid from a... a steer about to be made edible, and I worked on that for the next two years, two plus years and I ended up with... you know, most of the things I did... didn't consume a lot of the material, it was non-destructive, you know, optical techniques. So, you start off with a few cc of this icy clear liquid and you end up with maybe, you know, half a cc, and a bunch of numbers, but nothing much has happened to the... to the clear fluid itself. But nevertheless, that was a really good experience and one of the... one of the things I learned from... it was... it was a big contribution to my understanding of the science. First of all, Sandy had this idea that you do science in a way for its own sake. He was very interested in applications and had a very practical turn of mind. But he also had an appreciation for this, I... I think it's a kind of British style, in how you go about it. And also this idea of a lot of thinking before you design an experiment and a lot of talk about scientific process. Much of it wasn't formal in any sense, but it kind of... it kind of was part of the atmosphere in the lab and then kind of an attachment to the past in biology, you know, the big debate between Wilberforce and Darwin took place at the university museum right there. Polymorphisms, which I became interested in when I was there, sort of started, the contemporary view and looking at polymorphic phenotypes in those days, began in the Department of... or in a way began, in the Department of Zoology there, by Dr... with Dr Ford, Professor Ford.
But in any case, so I worked on this hyaluronic acid stuff for a long time and the thesis worked out pretty well. But one of the things that I learned is... is that enzymes, proteins and then subsequently genes, have multiple functions and they're just not the one that it was named after. There’s... there’s a funny phenomenon, you know, you have an enzyme, and you named after its substrate, which turns out to be the first substrate you work on, it turns out it's not the only one. And the... and the study that I was doing was based on the notion that if we used papain that it would only attack protein in this carbohydrate protein molecule and the issue was, was the protein essential for the physical characteristics, the non-linear viscosity and so forth of the hyaluronic acid protein complex? So we used papain and the argument was, okay, you take papain, get rid of the protein and see what happens. Well, what happens is it changes its physical characteristics considerably. Later, it was determined that papain actually has an affect on the carbohydrate chain as well, and that was, how shall I put it, negated the argument for the experiment. Well, it turns out despite the fact that it could have attacked the... the carbohydrate, it did not. And the protein is essential for the... but now it's a... it’s a big field, hyaluronic acid, it's a major medication.
