“Great leaps often need eccentric thought”.

As I cook at week-ends, Saturday mornings are spent shopping for groceries and, when these are packed away, I make a jug of good coffee and we settle to read the newspapers. It is a relaxing, and informative, way to start the week-end and there are occasions when a particular story stands out. That happened on Saturday 10th August when an interview with Hugh Montgomery, Professor of Intensive Care at UCL, was published in the FT Weekend Magazine. The whole article is shown below, together with a highlighted section, and it started me thinking.

Of course, I agree with Hugh Montgomery’s sentiments about UCL, as I taught, and carried out research, there for 23 years. I have also taught in other leading UK Universities, and been a student at others, so have some basis for supporting the view that Montgomery expresses.

There is increasing pressure from high-fee-paying students that courses should be relevant to the workplace and that extends beyond vocational training, like that in medicine, law, architecture etc. However, one of the greatest experiences that a student can enjoy, and benefit from, are enthusiastic teachers with vision and creativity who introduce eccentric thought (to quote Montgomery). The same qualities are also important in research. Unfortunately, the pressures of student needs, and the unimaginative world of research funding, mean that there are fewer and fewer “eccentrics” being appointed to University posts and those that are may be encouraged to conform to certain mores.

I make no claim to be an able teacher and researcher, but I was fortunate in being allowed to do my own thing at UCL. After several years of rather dull research, I decided to branch out and look outside my narrow discipline. That took me further and further into scholarship and away from practical science, so I gained black marks for not having much research funding (a conventional measure of being any good…). Having worked on the biology of streams and rivers, I became fascinated by many other aspects of aquatic science and ended up publishing a book and several review papers. I felt excited by my discoveries, especially in the role of exopolymers: ubiquitous compounds that are very important to all living organisms, including humans.

I devised a course in aquatic biology (freshwater, marine, coastal and oceanographic approaches being integrated) that started from first principles and then followed through to looking at the metabolism of life in all water bodies. It was a big task, but was eventually reduced to just 20 lectures and an accompanying web book entitled “Life in Water” that had live web links kept up to date until seven years ago, when I retired. Many of the students who took Aquatic Biology had taken a course with me in their second year, based largely on old-fashioned zoology that has certainly now gone out of favour in the current world. Some students were expecting more of the same, but all engaged with what I was trying to say about aquatic biology and we had good fun – well, I certainly did.

The question then arises as to whether my “eccentric” approach was of value to the students. I like to think so, but I have no way of knowing. The course was designed to show the results of scholarship and to convey my enthusiasm for an unconventional approach. If that is something that students took on board, they may be able to contribute to some of the great leaps that Montgomery describes in his interview. Who knows? They were certainly excellent students.