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About the Author...a brief bio.
 I was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, although growing up spent some time in a small town just north of Liverpool, England before returning to live in Glasgow, Scotland. I attended the University of Glasgow between 1982-1986, graduating with a Bachelor of Sciences in Botany. Fine training indeed for a career in transgenic research! After struggling to find employment in the recession years of the mid-eighties, and working as a bartender, hospital porter / mortuary attendant and laboratory technician (sex behaviour research in non-human primates), I started at Dr. John Bishop's laboratory at the University of Edinburgh as a research technician working in a transgenic lab environment. Here I began my training in the fundamentals of any transgenic outfit; screening of many tails by Southern analysis (no PCR back then), and reporter gene assays. I met some fine researchers along the way who helped and / or encouraged me along the way. Raya Al-Shawi, Paul Smith, Melville Richardson - I am indebted to you for your efforts. Through this laboratory I also met my wife, then Lisa Smith, an American rotation student in a Ph.D. program at UMBC. I am undoubtably living in America because of her, and happy to be so. She now works as a genetic counselor At the University of Florida's Shands Cancer Center, close to our home in Gainesville, Florida.
I began working in the US at Fort Detrick, the National Cancer Institute's facility out in Frederick, Maryland. This site was established for the NCI by the then President Nixon in 1972, and continues to provide a strong research presence along Maryland's I-270 technology corridor. I worked for Program Resources, Inc., a not-for-profit contractor to the government, and participated in AIDS-related research (on Bovine Immunodeficiency-like Virus). BIV proviral transgenic mice were generated and studied in my lab at Fort Detrick; other duties included service transgenic injections for BRMP investigators at this site. Unfortunately, through what I would consider mismanagement and poor judgement, the principal investigator of my lab chose to not publish and make broadly available the results of these transgenic analyses, and much of this effort has now gone to waste and been lost. Indirectly, the taxpayer has paid for what I still believe were poor decisions motivated by petty personal vendettas against other scientists.*
I moved to St. Louis, Missouri to take up a position with Dr. Stanley Korsmeyer at Washington University (St. Louis), working within the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. At this location I studied the bcl-2 family of oncogenes and their implications for disease, and during the course of this work generated over 20 independent germline transmitting chimeric lines. I also had the fortune to meet several fine individuals at Washington University, and would like to recognize all the transgenic people that would get together to toss around various problems or helpful hints. Additionally, special mention should be made of the finest veterinary and animal support staff I have had the pleasure of meeting - Steve Kinkead, Sherilyn Hall, Nicole Duffy, Marie LaRegina and in particular Dr. Ken Boschert, whose efforts in the form of his excellent "NetVet and Electronic Zoo" site inspired me to get writing web pages and get INVOLVED. Thank you all!
After a stint as the Core Manager for the now defunct Institute of Human Gene Therapy's Transgenic Core, at the University of Pennsylvania, which (pulling no punches here) was a lesson in the "politics of personal destruction"(!), I moved on to the sunny state of Florida. Here, in addition to finding what can only be described as climatological Nirvana (for a Scotsman), I am enjoying my position as Coordinator of the University of Florida's Transgenic Core Facility in Gainesville. I'm now enjoying the many varied challenges that my position gives me here.
* these statements are my own opinion, and the expression thereof is guaranteed under the First Amendment Right to Free Speech.
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