University College Oxford Record 2020

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of
BSE, and the National Audit Office reported that
the cost of BSE between 1996-2000 was £3.4 bn
and included the slaughter of 2.6 million animals.
The son of a butcher and abattoir owner,
Pattison knew about the basics of meat
production. He also had the essential prerequisites
for his controversial part time job: finely tuned
management, diplomatic, and interpersonal skills,
and outstanding academic credentials. Pattison
did not appreciate how his BSE role would
thrust him into public prominence. His first BBC
Newsnight appearance was described as “stilted,”
but he was a skilled communicator and became
an accomplished media performer.
Pattison was brought up in the mining town
of Bedlington, Northumberland. As a boy he
progressed from Barnard Castle School to
Oxford to read medicine. But he failed his
anatomy exams twice and later speculated that
he should have grown up more and taken a gap
year before starting university. Pattison’s son,
Giles, a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon, believes
that his setbacks made him more sympathetic,
as a medical school dean, to the demands facing
medical students.
Bitten by the research bug, Pattison spent his
entire career in academic medicine, taking both a
BA and BSc at University College Oxford before
obtaining positions at the Middlesex, Barts, and
the London Hospital medical schools. After seven
years as professor of medical microbiology at
King’s College Hospital Medical School, he took
the medical microbiology chair at UCL in 1984.
He also became dean of the school in 1990-8
and vice provost.
From 1992-5 he was chairman of the
Physiological Medicine and Infection Board and
a member of the Medical Research Council. He
was on the board of the Public Health Laboratory
Service (1989-95). In 1999 he left UCL to
become NHS head of research and development.
His legacy includes a lecture at the Faculty of
Public Health in February 1999 that resonates
today. He commented that the basic principles of
microbiology and virology were not intellectually
demanding and were “rapidly learnt and equally
rapidly ignored.”
Pattison’s Who’s Who entry lists his interests as
family, windsurfing, and books. A keen sportsman
who captained his Oxford college rugby team, he
took up windsurfing in his 50s after being enticed
by boarders in the south of France, and continued
it well into his 70s. Widely read, he collected rare
first editions of 20th century novels.
He leaves his wife, Pauline; his son, Giles; and
daughters Emma and Katie.
DANIEL ARTHUR POLLACK
(Harvard) died on 25 October 2019 aged 80. He
read PPE at Univ. The following obituary appeared
in the The New York Times:
Daniel A. Pollack, a lawyer with a storied career,
died suddenly and unexpectedly on the morning
of October 25th. He was 80.
Dan was widely recognized as one of the
preeminent trial lawyers in the country. Most
recently, as the court-appointed Special Master,
he successfully managed the historic negotiations
that enabled Argentina’s 2016 return to the
global capital markets. Early in his career, he came
to public notice in a lengthy trial against Goldman
Sachs arising from the collapse of Penn Central.
His ground-breaking work in that trial was
chronicled in several books published in recent
years. He led the Pollack & Kaminsky law firm
for more than 40 years, then joined McCarter &
English in 2009. His clients looked to him as a
University College Record | October 2020 81