After graduating from Queen’s University Belfast in 1969, I set sail (literally) for Liverpool to do a PhD under Tim Glover in his newly established Unit of Reproductive Biology in the School of Veterinary Science. Tim had a ‘sink or swim’ philosophy with students and we were left very much to our own devices. It was a hard experience but one which taught me the virtues of self-reliance. In 1972 I moved to the Animal Research Station, University of Cambridge, on 2-year postdoctoral fellowship with Thaddeus Mann that eventually turned into 5 years. I arrived at the same time as Joe Tash from Chicago who was doing his PhD. Joe was given a project on cAMP and I was asked to investigate the effects of oxygen free radicals (now known as ROS) on sperm survival. Both topics subsequently grew into major areas of importance. It was at ARS that I met some of the ‘giants’ in sperm biology. Besides Thaddeus, there was Hector Dott, Cyril Adams and Chris Polge on the staff with frequent visitors like M-C Chang, Mike Bedford, Brian Setchell, Roger Short, Bob Edwards and Ryuzo Yanagimachi. Chang was especially inspirational and I was always impressed by the way he took time to talk to students and young scientists about their research.

In 1976 I moved to Boston USA on a Ford Foundation Fellowship with Don Fawcett and David Hamilton. Harvard was a very competitive place with people under considerable pressure to obtain grants to support their salaries. I hadn’t experienced this intensity of research before (12 hour days in the laboratory were common), but I found a niche and spent a year learning electron microscopy. In Boston I shared a laboratory briefly with Trevor Cooper before he moved back to the UK and on to Munster.  At the end of my year Fawcett commented ‘you’ve taken some nice pictures’. Praise from Fawcett was praise indeed and I was happy with that. From Boston I took a Lalor Foundation fellowship to NIH, Bethesda, where Richard Sherins had established a male infertility clinic and I had my first experience of working on human material. At this time human sperm research was at a very rudimentary level and I found it frustrating. I was accustomed to large quantities of boar, ram and bull sperm on demand and I did not find working in a clinical setting attractive.