[3] Goffe was born in 1920 to a black Jamaican father and a white English mother, who were both practising physicians.
During his two years serving as Specialist in Pathology in the Royal Army Medical Corps,[6] some of which was spent in Egypt, he turned his focus to intestinal pathogens such as typhoid.
Once his national service had been completed, Goffe returned to the Central Public Health Laboratory, where he studied the poliomyelitis virus and helped to introduce cutting-edge techniques developed by Enders in the US to the UK.
He set up a tissue-culture laboratory; worked on preparing inactivated versions of the virus; and was a member of a Medical Research Council (United Kingdom) committee aiming to bring learning from the US to develop a vaccine in Britain.
[1] In 1955 Goffe moved to the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Kent, where he worked as the Chief Medical Virologist.