Professor Henry Harris in interview with Sir Gordon Wolstenholme

Professor Henry Harris FRS talks first about early life and education in Sydney 'under a hot Australian sun', of family migrations there and Russian ancestry. There follows discussion of his decision to read modern languages at Sydney in 1941 and a later curious romantic attraction to medicine based on literary interests.How, following medical studies at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, he entered a research rather than clinical career is then reviewed, with reference to the influence of professors Pansy Wright and Hugh Ward who provided an introduction to Howard Florey and the William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford where DPhil studies were completed in 1954. The story then advances to Professor Harris' success in succeeding Florey as Head of the Dunn School in 1964 and his unexpected invitation to the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford in 1979 and the relevance of such appointments to his scientific and administrative interests.Professor Harris then returns to the main steps in his research career, beginning with disagreement with Florey on the choice of a post-doctoral project. Allowed eventually to go his own way, considerable interests in cancer cells led to studies of their differences from their less fissile counterparts, work which continued initially at the John Innes Institute to which Professor Harris transferred in 1960 as head of a new department of cell biology. It was during the three years in this post that interests focused progressively on the possibilities of genetic modification of the human cell lines under investigation, the idea of importing nuclei from other species into human cells with the prospect of increasing the range of genetic markers. In this interest he was primarily influenced by geneticist and colleague John Fincham's work on the parasexual cycle of Neurospora crassa which brought different nuclear species into the same mycelium. After returning to Oxford as Florey's successor in the chair of pathology in 1963 preparations for fusing two cell lines went ahead, accommodating a romantic notion of combining the cells of man and mouse, a headlines provoking fete achieved in 1964, bringing together the cells of mouse and man and the combined functioning of their nuclei in protein synthesis. Human genetics had taken a major stride forward.At this point in the interview Sir Gordon turns to Professor Harris's recreational interests, history and writing, especially a work of fiction about to be published by O.U.P. Finally, conversation turns to advances in biology and their impact on cancer research.Transcript availabl