He attended Burnley Grammar School and the City of Leeds and Carnegie College, where he gained a Cert Ed in 1963.

Following the 2005 general election, he was appointed chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, succeeding Labour's Ian Gibson.

[3] As two further candidates came forward to challenge the eventual winner, Sir Menzies Campbell, Willis did not stand.

At the Liberal Democrat Federal Conference in Spring 2007 (held in his home seat of Harrogate) he proposed a change to official Liberal Democrat policy on the future of Trident in an amendment to commit the party to getting rid of Britain's nuclear deterrent.

Professor Reiss, in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, had commented that in his experience as a teacher, children with creationist views were difficult to persuade otherwise, and that merely silencing them didn't cause them to change their minds at all.

He suggested an alternative approach: that such pupils should be allowed to express their opinions, not as science, but as 'a world view'.