ABSTRACT
It was a great pleasure to speak at the Institute in September 1998, particularly to see my good friend and collaborator Sir David in his post-Manchester department. Latterly in Manchester, Sir David and I converged from our different starting points in social psychiatry and biological psychiatry to a common interest in brain mechanisms of vulnerability and destabilisation in common psychopathologies (Goldberg and Huxley, 1992; Deakin et al. 1990). Sir David initiated our formal collaboration in a study of surreal size and logistical complexity which examined interactions between biological, clinical and psychosocial measures in women in the community. We persuaded the Wellcome Trust to fund us and, amazingly, we completed the study in nearly 500 women. I presented some of the results in the lecture. It was also pleasing to speak at the Institute because I was inspired into biological psychiatry by the speculations of Hans Eysenck and then Jeffrey Gray on the neurobiology of personality (Gray, 1987). Furthermore, someone told me they had seen, in the Institute library, a copy of my PhD thesis on the behavioural functions of 5HT in the rat. This reminded me that the late Ted Marley at the Institute was my London University co-supervisor with Tim Crow. So for many reasons it was meet and right and satisfying to talk about the neurotransmitter that has interested me throughout my research career-5HT.
