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long as we know. Where did you come from, before you came to live in Chatteris?’
‘From Wimblington,’ he replied.
‘And where is Wimblington?’ I enquired, ready to be told it was in Yorkshire or Dorset or
somewhere else a long way away.
‘It’s up the road towards March,’ he replied. And so it is, by 5 miles!
I think of that episode from time to time. The man is almost certainly still living in Chatteris and
whenever I am asked how on earth I could ever expect to compile a genetic map from today’s
inhabitants that will reveal anything about the distant past, since people are so mobile these days, I
tell them about the man from Chatteris.
Things were going nicely. We had more or less completed our DNA collections from Scotland,
Wales and East Anglia and we had just been awarded another two years’ funding from our major
sponsors, the Wellcome Trust, which would give us ample time to complete our collections from
the rest of England. I had arranged with other blood-transfusion regions in England to continue our
work along the same lines. Word had got round that we did not interfere with the smooth running of
the donor sessions. Indeed, donors on the whole enjoyed hearing about our work and it added a
little more interest to their visit. I had a wonderful team who had honed their skills with, by now,
three years of practice. In particular two of them, Emilce Vega and Eileen Hickey, who were
assigned full time to the Genetic Atlas Project, were literally irresistible.
Nobody, male or female, young or old, could refuse Eileen and Emilce. They were, and still
are, both striking young ladies, but in utterly different ways. Both are tall and slim, but while
Eileen has the bright blue eyes, pale skin and auburn hair of her Irish ancestors, Emilce has the
dark hair and deep brown eyes of her Argentinian forebears. Travelling to donor sessions with
Eileen and Emilce was always interesting and our arrival at the small hotels we regularly used was
always eagerly anticipated, and not because the owners were glad to see me again. Yes, things
were going very well. Then disaster struck.
In scientific research the way is rarely smooth. Funds can be withdrawn, labs may have to be
moved, extra duties of teaching or administration can be suddenly announced. It was none of these
things. I put it all down to Ally McBeal. She, for those of you who do not know the TV series, was
a glamorous Boston lawyer, though prone to fits of hysteria and some very strange dreams.
Suddenly a career in law became a very attractive option for young women. Two of my team
announced that they were abandoning their scientific careers to retrain as lawyers. And one of them
was Emilce. It’s always sad to see that happen, but it is also very understandable. Despite all the
publicity about how badly the country needs scientists, the prospects for young scientists are
actually pretty dismal. Even if you succeed against very stiff competition in landing a junior
academic position with the chance of a career in science, the pay is not good. With the upsurge in
biotechnology in the late 1990s, law firms were keen to recruit and retrain geneticists for work in
that sector as either patent or commercial lawyers. I could hardly object, and I did not. Soon
afterwards, Eileen decided to move into forensics, which at least offered the prospect of long-term
security, which young scientists crave. Of course, I cannot really blame Ally McBeal, but the loss
of my two best fieldworkers was a blow. By the time I had recruited replacements for Eileen and
Emilce, there were only ten months for the project to run. It was too late to get the new recruits up
to speed on the delicate technique of charming the DNA out of blood donors.
So I decided to fall back on Plan B. This had its origins in an unexpectedly fruitful visit a few