In 1947, he became a medical student at Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a First Class Honours degree in the Part 2 Tripos in Psychology.
In 1963 he was awarded the Gaskell Gold Medal in Clinical Psychiatry of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, and in the same year the degree of D.Sc.
In the 1980s in research with Kirstine Adam, he reported that the sleeping drug triazolam (Halcion), when taken nightly caused adverse mental effects by day.
[2] This led on to 1991 when triazolam was banned in the United Kingdom because, as the Committee on Safety of Medicines said after studying further unpublished research by the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo (Halcion's manufacturers), "triazolam causes frequent and disabling psychiatric adverse reactions at doses of 0.5 and 1mg when used in a population of young and middle-aged patients with no mental illness".
[3] He married fellow sleep researcher, Dr Kirstine Adam, and had four children from his late wife.