Now I know that Defra have the prize-winning Twitter team. They use Twitter more skilfully than any other government department, which I think is really interesting. And I also know that the NFU (National  Farmers Union) put in place a Twitter mechanism and encourage their county chairs to use Twitter. These are really big changes – this technology didn’t exist in the early part of the period that we’re reviewing. But nevertheless it is about social engagement and it’s about trying to influence policy, which is based on something very complicated.

What dialysis did as regards the changing attitudes to patients: I remember clearly the business of sharing accommodation between males and females and we were having to defend ourselves to the matron. She was astonished that we had put a female patient with a male patient for dialysis. We said: ‘Do you want her to die or do you want her to live? It’s as simple as that.’ Dr Rosemarie Baillod, History of Dialysis in the UK: c. 1950-1980.

While we’re talking about the Christmas party for the children, which Ian’s talking about, I was organizer for that for I don’t know how many years... The main thing was we had these two entertainers called Naughty Uncle Wally and Aunty Wendy who would come in and they would do the bulk of it. The main problem I had was whether they would turn up... We also had Walt Disney cartoons – this is before television had cartoons on. We used to get those from the Rank Organisation in the Great West Road – they had a place there.

...we had to go up and be what was called ‘desensitized’... We had to go in to the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) office for two days and sit there while every term connected with sexual activities was told to us, because the project managers were concerned that when we all went out to do the interviews, we would come across all these sorts of things and we were not supposed to respond, obviously. We had to be separate from it. Do you remember that? Two days we were there.

I know that Henry Thompson (Surgical Officer, St Mark’s hospital) one day went to visit someone at home who wouldn’t agree to be screened, and Thompson was an Oxford blue boxer and the person that he went to visit was from an East End London boxing family.And he said that he would challenge the man who wouldn’t be screened to a boxing match and the purse would be the examination. So there were lots of stories like that from the early days when the surgeons really went out of their way to find these people.

One reason why this paper caused a paradigm shift was that the received wisdom was that light did not suppress melatonin in humans and that light did not affect circadian rhythms in humans. The received wisdom then was that social cues were the main synchronizers of human circadian rhythms, that humans had evolved in such a way, that we were so intelligent, that we had risen above control by the light/dark cycle.

I remember medicine before the NHS, I had my tonsils out for example. It was an unpleasant experience in a nursing home before the NHS. I remember my mother having to pay the bills of the doctors, and that sort of thing, and I remember my first essay at school, at the age of about six, I was asked to write an essay having been told that doctors were going to be nationalised. I wrote an essay in favour of it. So I’ve always been a great supporter of the NHS...

Screening for a genetic disease is often seen as genetic screening in the world out there. It’s not, it’s case identification. Neonatal screening is case identification for management, like screening for non-genetic diseases. What we’re talking about here is screening for identifying carriers in order to inform them of risk, to allow them to manage their risk. Prof Bernadette Modell, Clinical Molecular Genetics in the UK c.1975–c.2000

So if I go back perhaps over to the 5-HT3 work we did, that led to the development of anti-emetic drugs, and I think revolutionised the care of cancer patients. You’ve got to remember I never saw these patients. I heard the stories of transformed lives and so on, and they were great. What I did see though were at the time of an economic depression, was the reality of the fact that that work created jobs. I saw teams of people coming in both to the lab work and development work. I saw nurses being employed.

In terms of lessons learnt, it’s totally clear to me that at the beginning of the journey for anti-TNF antibodies... it seemed unachievable clinically to get the required amount of antibodies produced... I think the lesson to be learned from that for us as basic scientists interested in finding new ways to treat diseases is: don’t let yourself be talked down by people telling you, ‘Oh, we cannot make this into a drug.’ Professor Henning Walczak, The Recent History of Tumour Necrosis Factor (TNF).

What we were worried about was delivering our professional duty of care, and in other parts of medicine the professional duty of care focused largely on the individual was much better defined than with clinical genetics initially. We were feeling our way, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. And just to talk about giving bad news, in 1966 when I was a house officer, I told a patient who was having a biopsy for what might be Hodgkin disease, I think, I promised that I would tell her the result when she came back from the operation. My consultant was horrified.

A phenomenon was mentioned earlier today about the supposedly strange reaction of one of the original donor relatives who wished to visit the recipient in whom the heart of his daughter beat. It is, in fact, a common reaction. That aspect of organ transplantation has been present since its inception and is very much with us today.