It was so long ago, that sometimes it feels like only yesterday. It was the end of 1987, and there I was, a graduate student in Cambridge, finishing my Ph.D. and minding my own business (see photo below)
Picture of Fitzwilliam College MCR, 1987. I was the President, in the middle at the front. Actually, the REAL President was Spocket the College Cat, seated on my lap. Pic retrieved thanks to Asako Saegusa.
… when I was suddenly hired by the Submerged Log Company on a 3-month contract as a junior news reporter (my first ever published piece is here), but with the main aim of re-starting a column in The Times that the S.L. C. had had in the 1960s. This was all very ancient history — before the internet; before the web; when the best I had at home was a dial-up modem; when the only computer in the workplace was in the Editor’s office; when we had typewriters (electronic) and faxes, and working from home was a virtual impossibility — and I submitted copy to The Times by a flaky pre-internet digital transmission system called MCI Mail.
However, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a historian of science (and, as it happens, a near-contemporary of mine at the Zoology Department in Cambridge) who was writing the history of this venture and sent me some of the evidence. I had long since recycled all the scrapbooks I’d kept from that era (I wish I hadn’t) so it was with a mingled sense of delight, apprehension and vertigo that I reviewed the first ever piece I had published in The Times. It was from the Op-Ed page of the issue of 30 January 1988, and you can read it here:
The piece seems prescient: it concerns this paper by James A. Lake of UCLA, whom I later came to know very well after I spent the first three months of 1996 as a Regents Professor there. In the paper, Lake presented a molecular phylogeny that grouped eukaryotes with a subset of prokaryotes he called ‘eocytes’. We now know these as archaea, and over the past few years their status as closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes is now established. Now, I used to have a photograph of me and Lake in evening dress surrounded by people dressed as orcs… but that’s a story for another day.
