[1] He was born on 28 March 1935 in Yorkshire, the son of teachers and spent some of his childhood in Wales.

[2] He was educated at the Mill Hill School in London then won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge,[3] where he was awarded a Double First in the Natural Sciences Tripos.

In 1986 he was made the Dean of the Medical School and during his four years in this post he supervised a period of expansion.

As Chief Medical Officer, he worked to build awareness of the influence of diet and smoking on health, as well as contributing to the responses to Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and HIV/AIDS.

[6] Much of his work focussed on the classification and diagnosis of mental disorders[4] He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002.