| Description | Interview with Hugh Pennington, recorded on 17 May 2002 by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of Interview :
P I came to the University in '79, it was just a little bit before the roof fell in, we did have a little bit more than a year. We had the UGC and the University had to make all the front-loaded cuts and so on, and this started a sort of saga of events which went on for many years, in fact. It really reacted to these financial cuts and, as far as I was concerned, one of the big changes was the alteration in relationships between the Health Service and the University, which, of course, the funding cuts had a big impact on.
H How did that affect the Department of Bacteriology?
P Well at the… when I came to Aberdeen, the University was, in fact, funding the whole of the Department of Bacteriology which actually did a lot of the diagnostic work, in fact all of the diagnostic work for the hospitals at Foresterhill. And yet the staff were all funded by the University. And clearly, one of the things that had to be addressed, was: was this money that the University was spending, which was actually being spent on diagnostic work - it wasn't just the academic staff in the Department, but a very large number of technicians who were doing nothing but diagnostic work. Clearly something had to be done about that. There were staff cuts on the academic side, people took early retirement, and so on. A scheme was brought forward by the Scottish Office, as it was then, to pick up some of these posts, because clearly they didn't want the diagnostic side to suffer as a consequence of the University spending less, but that still left a problem with the technicians, a large number - there were about forty technicians in the Department - the majority of whom were doing diagnostic work. And so that started a whole series of negotiations that went on, essentially, for about the next - more than a decade - before the situation finally settled down, in terms of getting a final settlement of how the Department would be run. At the end of that, the Department was a good bit smaller in terms of the number of academic staff. We still had about the same number of graduates, but many of them were now working for the NHS, and nearly all the technicians also had transferred to the NHS. But this was a very difficult process, because essentially nobody in Aberdeen had had experience of running this kind of negotiation, and it was a very testing and trying time.
H It must have been a very shaky start for you. Where did you feel the responsibility for the trouble which it got into lay?
P Well, I think a lot of the difficulties were, the people conducting the negotiations had never really done this sort of thing before, and there had been really very little attention paid to the relationships between the University and the NHS, which actually were very important relationships because of the cross-subsidy that the University was putting in, and the reluctance of the NHS to accept that there was a cross-subsidy, and the usual kind of arguments between institutions, which are usually not very happy ones. And also some strong personalities. It was also compounded by the fact that the Health Service wanted to rationalise its own laboratory provision in Aberdeen. It had a laboratory down at the City Hospital and, at the end of the day, that laboratory was merged with the laboratories in Foresterhill and the staff transferred from there. So that was an added complicating factor which didn't make the negotiations run any smoother because, at the end of the day, two organisations merging into one left all sorts of questions to be answered about who was running the show, who was the budget holder and all that kind of thing, which again all had to be resolved and took a long, long, long time to be resolved.
H Then in 1981, there was this rather damaging Research Assessment and, obviously, financial consequences from that. What was your reaction to that?
P Well that was also a difficult time in that Aberdeen didn't do too well out of the Research Assessment Exercise. And I don't think anybody was particularly surprised about that. Aberdeen's claim that its strength was more on the teaching than on the research side, particularly on the medical side, but funding was going to depend on the research results as coming through the Research Assessment Exercise. So again, that was a trying time. We came out as sort of average/below average on the Research Assessment scores. And so clearly, there was a need to boost the Research, whilst at the same time, reducing the budget, which is a pretty difficult thing to achieve.
H As far as the Department under your predecessor was concerned, had it had an important research programme, or were you perhaps brought in to develop one?
P Well, I certainly had that sort of impression, that there was a higher priority put upon research, but not very much, I was never asked to do anything about it, it was left entirely to me. I spoke to the Principal shortly after I came, to find out how the land lay, and he didn't talk about that - and neither did the Dean at the time - talk about the need to boost research, except in the most general terms. I think the main emphasis was keeping the show on the road, rather than boosting research. It was difficult to boost research, because the Department had not been particularly active in research, there were one or two members - there was one member of staff who was quite keen on research but who had not published a lot, and apart from that, most of the work that the staff did was actually concerned with NHS diagnostic duties and so on. The Department had, I think it's fair to say that it didn't have a particularly - it certainly didn't have a strong research ethos, and it didn't seem particularly worried about that, either. So I clearly had a very difficult task ahead to actually change things.
H During the 1980s, obviously there were changes, and perhaps you would talk about them in a moment, but I gather that the Medical School's Research Assessment for 1986 was not very good either. Was that considered in anyway a failure on the part of anybody in particular?
P Well I think that the Principal of the day, George McNicol, had the right analysis when he said that Aberdeen was really a rather inward looking institution, very parochial. He, himself, had a sort of house rule on appointments, senior and professorial appointments certainly, that there were to be no more internal appointments. That didn't always work to the advantage of the University, because sometimes appointments were made and the people from outside were not as good as the internal candidates even if they were to apply. But that's well… George McNicol had that view, that Aberdeen had been very much an inward looking institution…
H Was this because perhaps of the historically close association with the Health Service?
P Yes, I think the institution had seen itself as very, very much embedded in the local health scene. It provided, trained, all the General Practitioners. Many of the Consultants at the hospital were Aberdeen graduates, and so on, and, in fact, I think if you look at the figures, I don't think it would probably be that different from a London Teaching Hospital, which are also very parochial institutions, but in Aberdeen it was very striking because of Aberdeen's geographical remoteness and so on. It was very striking how much the institution really got local people to come to the Medical School to be trained, and then they stayed locally to do their medical practice and nobody saw anything wrong with that. And they thought they were providing a good quality service to the community and that research was something that you did when you had a bit of spare time, it wasn't seen as a major duty, there wasn't a strong academic ethos of having research, as a high priority. It was there, and it was regarded as a good thing when it was done, and there had been some outstanding research professors in the Medical School over many years, but they were seen almost as individual entrepreneurs rather than part of the sort of culture of the institution.
And I suppose, because of the poor assessment in '81, this cut back the making of new appointments. Were you able to make new appointments in your department in these years?
P Yes, I was, over the time, over the piece I was able to make some appointments and deliberately chose people who were really quite different from the people who'd been hired before. I was lucky to essentially fill [?] posts, one or two people that I'd done, when I worked in Glasgow, who'd gone to the United States and who were looking for work, and so on, and another person I appointed, who again I'd known in Glasgow as well, who I knew were good, solid researchers and would fit in with the Department. But this took a long time, because it was a small department to start with, we'd lost some staff, we'd lost some posts to the NHS, so we were definitely really going to be quite a small group, whatever I did, and I think, at the end of the day, I regarded myself as lucky to have any posts to fill at all. Not long after I came to the University I went on the University Personnel Committee and had a lot to do with a group that looked at all the non-academic appointments in the University, basically we reviewed every appointment, many of them we recommended that they shouldn't be filled - in order to save money. So I knew what the kind of background there was, that in fact you were jolly lucky to get any vacancies allowed for filling, on the principle that as soon as somebody left, the post was lost until you made a good case for the post to be essentially reincarnated.
H And on that committee, Medicine, in your experience, was treated on the same basis as other faculties, or did you feel you might have done better?
P I don't know, I think it was a pretty fair committee, in the sense that no faculty had any advantage over any other and we did look at each post on its own merits and I think that was done in a pretty straightforward way. There were lots of special cases made, of course, and the special case that kept on being made was that 'well, this post is connected with Health Service work' and so it was going to be very difficult to freeze that post and patient care would suffer and so on. And sometimes that argument had to be pleaded and so on, and it was tough on the Physicists or the Engineers, but at the end of the day, we did take things like student teaching, preparation of classes, practical classes, plus research support into account on as fair a basis as we could. But I think the argument about the health care did feed through into driving the negotiations with the Health Board to actually resolve this situation where the University essentially was propping up the Health Service to quite a substantial degree in the North East.
H It was still doing that?
P Yes, it took a long time for that situation to change. Quite painfully so. And even now, as I'm being interviewed today, that situation has still not been satisfactorily resolved in Aberdeen. We're now seeing the reverse of the situation in many parts of the United Kingdom, the Health Service is actually putting money into Medical Schools and funding academic posts. We still, I think, we still regard Aberdeen as a poor relation in that regard.
H Is that anything to do with the Scottish Health Service attitude, are these things normally English?
P I think there is an element of that. The system where the Health Service funds academic posts is much better developed in England and maybe that's partly due to the fact that in Scotland there always has been better funding of the Health Service across the board. In Scotland, the Health Board, particularly the Teaching Boards, do have quite different policies. Aberdeen has always been noted for its efficiency, or you could say, its meanness, and I remember when I talked to some civil servants in the Scottish Office in the mid-Eighties and made the complaint that we had poorer funding per capita in Aberdeen than anywhere else but that we still ran a good Health Service, and they said, 'Well, that's good. Carry on.'
H They would, wouldn't they? During this period, what was the role of Principal McNicol? Because I have heard people say, non-medics, that they thought he'd made some very good appointments in the Medical Faculty and brought about - could be credited - with improvement?
P Yes. Well, he made it very clear to us in the Medical Faculty, Principal McNicol, that he wasn't going to give us any special dispensation. No favours would be expected from him. I suppose we felt, well, if that's what he says, that's the way it's going to be. He certainly wasn't in any way a soft touch as far as Medicine was concerned, and he was, he did know the situation about the amount of diagnostic work that the Medical School did and was very keen to resolve that. So we couldn't, you couldn't, in a sense, pull the wool over his eyes by saying 'Well, we do all this patient care work, therefore we should be left alone' He wasn't impressed, he said: 'Medical School should be doing high-quality research' and he stuck to that. In terms of making appointments, my own personal view - and this might be something that might have to be embargoed, I don't know - is that one of the things where George McNicol was at his weakest, was in making appointments. That I felt that he made some really quite poor appointments and I'm speaking there from being a member of Appointments Panels which he chaired, so I know the field and knew the people extremely well. And I felt that sometimes he made appointments which turned out to be as poor as we thought they would be when we were actually doing the interviewing. So I wasn't impressed with his skills at picking people.
H Was there any particular skill in which he was deficient?
P I felt he was a poor judge of people and he certainly didn't have the person to person skills that I suppose you could say would help a Principal in his way, that he wasn't really interested in trying to persuade people by smooth talk or rhetoric or anything. He was a very firm manager and didn't have the small talk, didn't have that kind of negotiating skill which some people would use. So at least you knew where you stood with him. And you did know where you stood with him and he was pretty straightforward and upfront about what he thought about things. He was a martinet in his own way, expected people to be on time, he was always on time himself, he set a good example.
H In 1989, I think, you became Dean, Dean of the Faculty. Perhaps, first of all, because I don't know that this has been recorded on any other interview, and I think it has changed, what were the responsibilities and priorities of the Dean of Medicine at this time?
P Well, when I started as Dean, it was a kind of Buggins turn type appointment where one or two senior professors would be in the frame for the Dean and soundings would be taken and so on. I got to be Dean almost by accident, because Derek Ogston, who was at that time the Dean and took some time off for ill health. So I was catapulted in as acting Dean, just because I happened to be there. I think there were one or two more senior people but they were away on holiday or something and so there was a need to make an acting appointment and I happened to be around. And then, clearly,- Derek came back, recovered from his ill health, and so I was next in the frame for the Dean, because I'd done this acting Dean bit. The duties were really to chair the Faculty meetings which we had at regular intervals, to sit on the appropriate University Committee, ex-officio, as Dean. The actual powers of the Dean were really very limited, one obviously had a say in the making of appointments and one would be on a senior Appointment Committee, again ex-officio. Obviously I had a sort of responsibility in terms of directing University policy but not very much, one wasn't really in the inner circle around the Principal at all. And it depended on circumstances, really ,whether one got involved in policy decisions, it wasn't done - there wasn't a group of Deans who were influential advisors to the Principal. He might talk to us about particular issues, and so on, and we would be basically exercising what influence we had through membership of committees in the University, of which there was a very large number, of course.
H What about students, were admissions done by an assistant Dean?
P There was an Executive Dean who was a full-time person who did a lot of the admissions work. I was obviously a member of the Admissions Committee, which was a fairly broad-ranging committee, most of its work was pretty routine in the sense that students were accepted or rejected on the basis basically of academic grades, plus a school report, but there were a small number of students who would be interviewed where there was some question about school report or we wanted to take somebody who had some unusual attributes or there was somebody we wanted to have a particular check on a particular issue or health problem. Even at that time we were trying not to reject people, because they'd had some episode of bad health, automatically and so on. But the Executive Dean, he did a lot of the administrative work behind the scenes and also did quite a bit of sort of pastoral work with students and so on.
H Would you do the interviews with the difficult cases you spoke of yourself?
P Well that was done by the Committee, and it would depend on whether one was on that Committee on that particular day most of the time we'd be doing interviews on a rota basis, a couple of members of the Committee would be doing interviews so we'd see a portion of them, but not all.
H Is there any difficulty in a non-clinical professor being Dean?
P This came up as an issue when the present Dean was being appointed. I was one of those who said that I couldn't see a particular reason why there shouldn't be a non - well, you know - against having a non-clinical Dean. There were contrary views: you had to have a Dean who had to have a medical background and knew the problems and issues and so on, but we have [?] our current Dean is non-medical.
H Did it restrict you, these questions of negotiations with the Health Service, did it inhibit you in any way?
P Well, they were very time consuming.
H I mean you're providing services for the Health Service, obviously?
P That's right. I mean the negotiations about trying to look at laboratories which were, I think the University saw as, a major sink for their money from which they were getting no return. I mean they were, essentially, paying for Health Service work. Those negotiations started in 1985 and they didn't really come to an end until 1992 through various vicissitudes and changes and implementations. The negotiations took, in fact, less long than the implementation. I think on a ratio of about 2:1. The negotiations would be the 1 and the implementation took a long, long time. So during that period there was a lot of uncertainty as to how things would develop. Quite a lot of difficult meetings and so on and it did tend to dominate one's life on a kind of sporadic basis. Negotiations would come to a bit of a crescendo or the implementation difficulties would be being looked at, so about perhaps a quarter of the time this was pretty dominant.
H There is now, I gather, a new medical curriculum. When did discussions on that start, was that in your time as Dean?
P That was really after my time as Dean. The General Medical Council basically drove that forward although, of course, the Medical School is not obliged to do what the GMC tells it. The GMC would not say it was telling anybody to do anything. Nevertheless, it does call the tune because, at the end of the day, one has to really get approval from the GMC, we are visited by them, we're inspected by the GMC on a regular basis. And there has been a fashion to change the curriculum away from the traditional didactic subject-orientated, with a lot of formal teaching, into a course which is orientated round areas like, for example, Organ Systems rather than traditional disciplines like Bacteriology and Pathology. Now we're looking at the heart and the liver and the lungs instead. And also having much less formal teaching, the students obviously use computers an enormous amount in self-learning. So the whole course has changed, really very substantially. This was beginning to start when I was Dean but the full force of it didn't happen till after I was Dean. I think Aberdeen has been very successful in the way it's implemented its new curriculum, it's been done quite painlessly. One had to change from the old curriculum to the new whilst students were still around, so a corpus of students would be going through as the last group doing the old curriculum whilst the new corpus would be coming through doing the new, so there was a transition period for several years whilst both curricula were being run, which is quite difficult but it was done, I think, in Aberdeen, quite remarkably efficiently considering that we didn't really spend any money on it - or hardly any. Hardly any - one or two relatively junior posts were involved pretty well full-time during the curricular changes, but most of it was done by academic staff who had other jobs to do and in contrast to places like Harvard, where they spent 20 million dollars on their new curriculum, we spent about 20 thousand pounds on ours!
H That's remarkable! In the restructuring do the same principles apply through the clinical years as through the pre-clinical years?
P It applied much less in the other departments, like, for example, Medicine and Surgery and Obstetrics. It applied a little bit in Clinical Genetics, but its main impact was in Microbiology and Bacteriology and Clinical Chemistry and on Pathology. And all the departments there really had - Microbiology less, I think we came out of it academically better, Clinical Chemistry ceased to be an academic department and Pathology went through very, very hard times indeed, which it's now coming out of, but very hard times indeed as an academic discipline - not entirely for reasons to do with their relationships with the NHS but they were part of the problem in the sense that they had to continue doing a lot of diagnostic work. In Pathology the problem is that the academic staff, even those who worked for the University, after all the negotiations, had sort of created a body of NHS staff as well as a body of University staff to do the work, the University staff still do quite a lot of diagnostic work because of the nature of the work. A Pathologist has to spend several hours a day at the microscope. A Bacteriologist can delegate most of the laboratory work to technicians and comes in as a interpretative person rather than as an actual person who's handling bacterial plates on the bench and so on and would go onto the wards and so on. Whereas the Pathologist still has to sit down at a microscope.
H And through the nineties, how is your view as to how the Medical School has faired?
P I think it's faired pretty well on balance. We've had problems in some areas. Some of the appointments that were made didn't turn out to be as good, and these, I've always felt that the most influential thing, for example, a Dean could do - or a Principal could do - is to make sure that the appointments that are being made at a senior level are at a top, highest quality and this sometimes means waiting before filling a post before you can get somebody to apply and then accept who is the person you want. But sometimes we did make some very good appointments and those are fed through in terms of research output and I think on balance, we've done pretty well in that hiring staff into Aberdeen is significantly more difficult than, for example, than the London Medical Schools find, because there you are fishing in the London pool and somebody doesn't have to move house, whereas to come and live in Aberdeen is a bit of a culture shock for some people.
H And a considerable expense, too, compared with some places.
P That's right, and Aberdeen is a relatively small institution - the University is a small institution and so on. So we do have particular problems which other places don't have to quite the same degree, but nevertheless, the Medical School, I think, has not suffered in the sense that there has been continuous progress, maybe not at the rate one would like, but it has steadily got better through the nineties in terms of its research output, in terms of the teaching of medical students, it's done well on the Teaching Quality Assessments, it's steadily improved itself on the Research Assessment Exercise, it's got, if you look at all the other indicators like Research Grant Income, they've gone up very satisfactorily and we've got our new buildings - we've obviously done the internal politics in the university reasonably well as well. Without, perhaps, having quite the hostility to us from the other faculties that was shown in the early eighties when we were seen as the problem. I don't think that's quite to the same degree, although I do think that some people in other faculties do still regard us as taking too large a share of the cake. It doesn't seem to be so much of a problem as in the past, that we're no longer seen as a weak part of the University, we're seen as a strong part and I think that is borne out by all the indicators one cares to look at. It wouldn't compare us with other Medical Schools, however, basically we're been holding our own, rather than moving ahead of other schools, because there's been a substantial improvement throughout the UK in medical schools.
H [You've given your view of ] Principal McNicol, what is your impression of the two Principals we're had since then, particularly as regards their dealings with the Medical School?
P The impression that we, certainly I, had of Maxwell Irvine is that he was brought in for, as a sort of period of calm after the… after the McNicol years, in a sense. Clearly in his time, the Medical School was pretty well left to get on with it, but we moved into the new Institute of Medical Sciences, planned towards the end of his time…
H Whose plan was that, essentially?
P It's slightly difficult to say whose idea it was, I think various people had inputs into that and it was driven by different forces, there was clearly an impetus, I think a significant, quite a significant impetus from Alec Forrester, one of the Vice-Principals, who saw us, I think, as the sort of Quincentenary thing to go for. Clearly, Graeme Catto had an input into it, as my successor as Dean, but it happened after my time as Dean. And also there was the notion, I think, of sorting out Marischal College, which helped it along, although the Institute of Medical Sciences was clearly intended as 'research hotel' if you like, where people would buy their way in with their research grants. But it's never actually been that. It's been really a place where you decanted Marischal College, and also one or two people in there who are good researchers. So it ended up as something quite different from was, at least on paper, intended. Whether people really intended it to be a 'research hotel' or not, I don't know, but that was the fashionable concept at the time, so people were happy to go along with that. But in practice it would never work because people don't get enough research overheads off their research grants essentially, to pay their way anyway, particularly as the other policy of the University, which turned out to be slightly mis-guided, of focussing our Wellcome Trust grants in the Medical School. It was a very successful policy and we got lots of grants from the Wellcome Trust, it was a very unsuccessful policy in the sense that the Wellcome Trust doesn't pay your research overheads, so although a lot of money was coming in, and a lot of people were coming in on the money, it was actually costing the University money at the end of the day. The hope was the Wellcome Trust would put a large chunk of money into the Institute of Medical Sciences, which they didn't. So it was a high-risk policy which didn't come off financially, although, I mean it worked in the sense that it gave us standing and credibility and we were looked on favourably by the Wellcome Trust. In terms of sheer money it was not a good policy.
H Most of the new chairs in that Institute are on the 'hotel' principle are they, or?
P Well most of the chairs, they were actually chairs where the post had existed and they were actually being filled with new people, and there was an element of publicity about who got these new chairs in the Institute of Medical Sciences. If you look at the posts to sustain these chairs, they were posts that already existed and people had left, so they weren't new posts. There was an element of expansion there but a lot of it was really a natural development that would have happened anyway, but by associating it with the Institute of Medical Sciences, clearly made it more attractive for people to come to: to get a new post in a new building with new laboratories and so on. But many of the people in there are people who've been at Aberdeen for twenty years.
H Has the existence of a new building affected the people who don't live in the new building, in their work and their research?
P Yes, up to a point. I think there is a slight degree of envy of the people who are in the new building. Some people have the choice of going into the new building but chose not to because they have what they feel better premises in the Polwarth Building anyway. But not really, I don't think, at the end of the day, there's been a negative impact at all. There's been a positive impact in the sense that instead of having the old Biochemistry Department and Pharmacology and so on, they're all now into different units. Having them up at Foresterhill has been a good thing, although I think the advantages, the arguments that were used to have the IMS at Foresterhill, were slightly spurious, in the sense that people expected or said that all these basic scientists would collaborate with clinicians, but there was no reason why they couldn't have done that before and it hasn't happened any more than it happened before either, because, actually to get into the IMS building you have to have a swipe card and the clinicians don't have swipe cards, so they can't wander in there anyway. I mean that's the way modern buildings work, so I think the notion that having the building on site was going to get the NHS consultants doing high quality molecular biology was always a silly idea, that certainly doesn't happen.
H But reviving Marischal as the Institute of Medical Sciences was not a starter?
P No, I mean Marischal obviously is a problem in the sense that it doesn't look like the place where you would be doing molecular biology and it was separate from the point of view of library facilities. I think, from the library point of view, I have benefited more by the move to the IMS, although I'm not in it, because we now have all the basic science journals in Foresterhill instead of Marischal Library, so there have been benefits from it but not the ones that [?]
H We got on to that by way of the Principals, this started in Maxwell Irvine's time. Was it a pet project of his?
P Well he was quite keen on it, I don't know that I would call it a pet project of his, I think he sort of gave it the seal of approval and left us to get on with it basically. He was a jovial sort of character whom we didn't see often.
H Did the Quincentenary appeals bring much new money?
P Well it did bring money for the IMS building, basically. It was quite a successful fundraising campaign there. I think there was still money to be found at the end of the day and so on, I'm not certain how successful that campaign was in terms of - it certainly wasn't anywhere near as successful as Oxford's campaign running at the same time, but certainly it was very good for morale in the Medical School to see a new building going up, and a very substantial building going up, as part of the Quincentenary so it has been a success and the building itself has been a great success. The people who work in it are very happy with it and so on, so it has been entirely a good thing.
H And the present Principal?
P Yes, well, in a sense Duncan Rice has continued the same sort of policies that Maxwell Irvine started off in that he certainly is very positive about the Medical School and goes out of his way to say how well we're doing and so on, and certainly is still continuing to make sure, I think, that the Medical School gets its fair share of cash from within the University. How much of that is his doing and how much is a success of the medical politicians in the University making their case and winning, it's difficult for me to say because I'm not on any of these committees, to see the internal dynamics of that, but certainly he's, I think he's, my guess is that his American experience has given him that kind of knowledge of the way medicine in a university relates to the rest of the faculties in the university essentially that medicine is a very, very good way of raising lots of research income, because there is a lot of research income to be raised out there by medicine and he's fully appraised of that and he's very keen on that, he's not at all negative about medics…
H The raising of new research money, I suppose it's a departmental head with the Principal backing up?
P That's right, most of the money that comes in is raised by research grants through peer review. So that's entirely down to the staff in the Medical School and the main influence a Principal can have on that is essentially by his hiring policy that if he's hiring people of a high enough calibre and he's not hiring people who are just average, at the end of the day, the pay off there is that these people will be going out and getting research grant income and so on. I know that Principal Rice is really quite draconian about his hiring policy at a certain senior level, he's very interested in that and he's got very high standards…
H And he's applied them successfully and so on, yes. Anything else you'd like to say about the state of the Medical School today?
P We did, in terms of the Research Assessment Exercise that's just finished a few months ago, we did pretty well as we expected and hoped, in that we're now, we can now sort of not worry about our standing. We've still got a ways to go, but the majority of people are either in the 4 or the 5 category. We still have one or two small areas which are in the 5* category but quite a few medical schools have a lot of areas in the 5* category so we're still not in the top bracket, we're still in the middle bracket as far as research is concerned and we do have some hot spots and my own policy as Dean - what's been continued since, really, is to build these hot spots. Not to try and get everybody in the Medical School into a 5* category, because we know that's not possible, but to get more of these hot spots of areas in the Medical School doing really top quality research. Which Aberdeen has always had, one or two areas, but we want to have a few more than one or two and we want to have them bigger and more substantial so they will survive when the leader leaves, either because he's approached by somebody else, or he retires.
H What are the present and future hot spots?
P Well the one that's an obvious one is the Bone Research Group which has gone from strength to strength. It's very good on the basic side and it's also very good on the applied side, it got really very good ratings on the basic research side in the Research Assessment Exercise, and it does very good work locally in osteoporosis and things like that. I'm quite pleased because I was on Stuart Ralston's appointment panel and he's the guy who's leading research and you know I was pleased to have a hand in appointing him all these years ago because he's done everything that we certainly hoped and thought he would do at his appointment. What we need to do in the Medical School is to get a few more people like him. They're not very common unfortunately and there is the problem, of course, of inducing them to come to Aberdeen, etc. etc. etc.
H Now, in your own work, you've been sort of conspicuous in combining research with public health concern and you've probably got the highest public profile of most, a higher one than most people in the University at present. Can I ask you, do you welcome this or is it in any way a distraction?
P Well, I suppose you could say that it's a distraction in that it takes up a lot of my time, but being relatively close to retirement and having some good research people in the department who can do the research, I feel I can get away with actually quite a bit of my time on the sort of public affairs kind of side of work. I talk about the research to my colleagues and you know, we make plans and so on, but it's a long time since I've been at the bench doing research, most researchers of my age and vintage, they're in the same old position. We spend most of our time raising money, injecting the ideas in and so on, rather than actually doing the actual experiments ourselves.
H And the high profile helps to raise the money perhaps?
P The high profile does no harm at all. I think there's a little bit, I think some academics disapprove slightly - 'if you're on television, there must be something wrong with you' - but well, that's too bad. It really came out of my work with the E.coli outbreak in 1986 when I'd done a bit of media work before then, but that really forced me into the public arena and I found it useful to try and get the policies that we were pushing at that time, from the public health side, implemented by… Having a high media profile makes civil servants frightened of you, basically. It's not that you can tell them what to do, but they know that you're watching, sort of thing, so that they're slightly more inclined to pay attention to the line your taking, if you have a high media profile, because the media is so powerful.
H Well, thank you very much indeed, Hugh Pennington
End of interview
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