[1] They eventually established a home in the countryside north of Glasgow that became a welcoming focus of generous hospitality for their family and huge circle of close friends, embracing a wide range of talented people from all walks of life and nationalities.
Over the years they engaged in sports that carried a certain frisson: mountaineering, skiing, motor rallying and particularly sailing, on the west coast of Scotland, France and Mallorca.
When a local veterinary practitioner drew to his attention to a household of cats in which a large number of cases had occurred in a short period of time, Bill considered that the reason might be that the disease was infectious, like the condition in domestic poultry and laboratory mice.
The discovery of FeLV immediately provoked great interest in the field of oncology, coming at a time in the early 1960s when viruses were becoming seriously considered as causes of cancer in man.
Gallo was persuaded to explore human T-cell leukaemias for viruses after Bill found that most lymphomas caused by FeLV in cats were of T-lymphocyte origin.
With substantial funding from cancer charities, Bill then recruited a team which investigated the biology of FeLV in depth, together with collaborators throughout the world.
When Jim subsequently moved his group to the Veterinary School and established a Laboratory of Molecular Oncology, he began to use this device in other systems to identify novel oncogenes.
Bill’s detailed pathological studies of haematopoietic disease in the cat showed that FeLV caused several types of anaemia as well as leukaemia and lymphoma.
Through a large abattoir survey, he showed that papillomas were more common and occurred in greater numbers in animals of all ages on the cancer farms compared to lowland cattle, and that they were caused by a novel virus, bovine papillomavirus type 4 (BPV-4).
In older cattle, he noted that cancers could develop from existing papillomas and proposed that immunosuppressants and carcinogens in bracken were responsible for this malignant progression.
Bill was one of a group of eminent scientists who successfully made the case to the Thatcher government that this novel disease was so important that it required new investment in research despite public expenditure cuts.
With colleagues in Glasgow, particularly Jim Neil and his brother Oswald, he established a research group that exploited another newly discovered retrovirus, feline immunodeficiency virus, as a model for HIV vaccination.