 I'd always been interested in nature from, you know, a young boy and also in geography I used to spend hours looking at maps and when I came to think about university at the age of 17-18 and of course in the UK system you have to you have to actually determine before you go to university what you're going to study and for many years I've been interested in birdwatching and I thought well it'd be great to do a degree in zoology and take up on ethology as a as a career but I came to realize there were very few posts in ornithology and then in any case my interest in plants grew and so I applied to university to study botany and geography a combined degree so I went to the University of Southampton in 1967 spent three years there half the time on my geography course was learning about landforms, glacial processes, river processes etc but the other half was a full botany degree and it wasn't really until I got into my final year and I'd become friendly with one of the staff and I'd taken a couple of courses he was a geneticist who'd worked on peanuts and he'd worked in Africa and he'd then done his PhD at North Carolina State in Raleigh and anyway he stopped me in the corridor one day and he said Mike you might be interested in this and it was it was a pamphlet about a new one-year MSc course in plant genetic resources that was being offered at the University of Birmingham so I thought well this is interesting it was sort of fitting in with some of my interests at the time all the way my interests were going and so I made an application as they say that you know the rest is history I went for an interview they offered me a place on the course and I started that in October September 1970 it was a one-year course and the intention was to finish the course and find a job but the head of department at Birmingham and it was a department of botany in those days which then transformed as many did into plant sciences the head of the department of botany at the University of Birmingham was a guy called Jack Hawkes an internationally renowned plant scientist who spent most of his career working on potatoes and who was one of the founders of the plant genetic resources conservation movement in the 1960s and one of the contributions he felt he could make to that whole movement was to train young people in the the discipline as it were of genetic resources because it had been determined that a real concerted worldwide effort was required to to to collect and conserve genetic resources anyway I went to Birmingham and got stuck into the course and at the end of the first semester he he actually went off to South America to Bolivia to on a potato collecting expedition that would be the end of November early December and he came back in February the following year 1971 and almost immediately on on return he phoned me up they said Mike he said how would you like to go to South America for a year how would you like to go to Peru well I had I mentioned a few minutes ago my interest in in geography and looking at maps and I was absolutely fascinated with the with the the map of South America this huge continent of jungles of mountains and for some reason or I still don't really know why I had always wanted to visit Peru and here was the opportunity somebody was offering me the chance to go and visit Peru and pay me to do so so I said like when's that when do I get the ticket well it didn't quite work out like that because what had happened he'd gone to Peru he had had collaboration from a USAID North Carolina State University Peru joint mission on potatoes this had been set up in the mid 1960s and it was slowly transforming itself into what became the International Potato Center and the then Director General Dick Sawyer was busy looking for funding and he'd been to the UK and he'd talked to the the people in the department that now is now called DFID looking for support had he really wanted somebody to go to Peru for one year to take over the management of a germplasm collection while he sent a young Peruvian to Birmingham for training well what got in the way of me going immediately was the CGIAR because in it would be or during 1971 the discussions were taking place to form what became the CGIAR and the UK agency were still debating whether it should join this entity or whether it should continue to give funding on a bilateral basis so instead of going out to Peru in October 1971 as was originally planned I got delayed for another 15 months so I actually started a PhD at the University of Birmingham funded by the UK government and eventually headed off to Peru in January 1973 so I had the best of both worlds in many ways I was employed by the by the center by the International Potato Center but at the same time I was doing my PhD in a country that I'd always wanted to visit and it was a marvelous time as a I was 24 years old as they say the world's your oyster and my fiance now my wife came out and joined me in mid-1973 July 73 we got married in Lima in October 73 and we stayed there for another couple of years or so and I had responsibility for germplasm collecting and carrying out a piece of research on one section of the germplasm germplasm collection that it was maintaining well I went back to Birmingham in mid-1975 spent a month or so writing up my thesis defending it making plans to go back to to Peru and the decision was made fairly early on that they would send me to Central America to set up a program here I was 26 years old and they said go to Costa Rica and set up a research program and so we moved to Costa Rica we moved to Turi Alba there was a an international center there regional center called Cati a and we had a they hosted me for nearly five years and I spent time looking at adaptation of potatoes to tropical conditions got involved in a lot of plant pathology work because there was a bacterial disease bacterial wilt that became a very important problem of potato cultivation in that environment so spent three four years working on bacterial wilt and also setting up a regional potato program that was really one of the first consortia if not the first within the CG system called preco depa funded by the Swiss and they funded it for about 28 years originally involving six countries in the region Mexico Guatemala Honduras Costa Rica Panama and the Dominican Republic but after I left it then expanded out into the Caribbean included Cuba Haiti Belize came in so all languages of the region and at the end of 1980 I went back to Lima I thought that I'd done what I could in in Central America it was a great time beautiful part of the world to live our first child was born in Costa Rica we moved back to to Lima not quite sure what was going to happen originally Dick Sawyer the director general said well we'll send you to to to Brazil was the regional leader for the southern Cone countries but then the Brazilians said no they didn't they didn't want to yanky even though I'm British so we weren't quite sure and in the meantime a position had become vacant at the University of Birmingham and I decided to apply for that a teaching position went for interview flew flew from Peru for interview got the the job and and decided to return to the UK in April 1981 but I had it was a it was a quite an exciting time because the director general had already said to me I think it's a great idea that you go for an interview but if you're not successful here's a contract waiting for you when you come back and we'll send you to the Philippines well I didn't go to the Philippines in 1981 it took and further 10 years but here I am so went back to Birmingham set up a had to essentially devise a teaching program mainly graduate teaching on genetic resources set up a fairly active research program on potatoes but also on legume species had a good crop of PhD students came through and that was that was an interesting time second child was born during the during the 80s and second daughter I'd started become restless towards the night at the end of the 1980s in no in due in no small part to Margaret Thatcher and her government so and in a in a sense I can you can blame the fact that I came to to Erie on Margaret Thatcher her government was imposing a lot of measures on the university system and I was getting very uncomfortable with this and I started to question my role within the university system I enjoyed the teaching but advancement within the within the university system didn't necessarily take into account one's complete contributions I mean your research was paramount and yet you're expected to do all this teaching which I was doing and so when the opportunity came one day out of the blue an advertisement landed on my desk I don't know who it came from friend or foe and it was for the position of the head of what was then called the rice genetic resources center at Erie so I put an application that would be around about September or so 1990 and I was called for interview the first week of January 1991 it's rather interesting with three candidates that were interviewed we all knew each other obviously in the world of genetic resources but even more so we all had MSc's and PhD's from the University of Birmingham and we'd all been supervised by the same major professor which caused a little bit of consternation when amongst the the folks here at Erie because you know we all came in at the same time we we socialized with each other we talked about things and they were a bit concerned that you know that we would feel uncomfortable about being at Erie for interview and but no it all worked out fine I I waited a few weeks they they phoned me offered me the job I accepted more or less and came here in July 1991 came on my own in the first instance left the family back in the UK got myself settled in and then towards the end of December 1991 that's when the family turned up I'd only when when I joined Erie I'd only actually visited Asia once that was in the mid 1980s when I attended a meeting in in Jakarta and that's where I met TT Chang for the first time so I'd not traveled in Asia and I have to admit my my focus my interest was clearly in Latin America I absolutely adored living in Latin America I I'd always wanted to go there I became fluent in Spanish so it was it was a very exciting time in my life and I was obviously that much younger so I joined Erie when I was in my early 40s and this was really represented quite a quite a challenge as I said I had been given the chance 10 years earlier to come to the Philippines but had moved back to the UK so it was it was with both excitement and some trepidation that we made the decision to move to Asia and it was also a concern because I had daughters at that time who were 13 and 9 years old and taking them out of the education system in the UK and then faced with putting them into a really I would say alien education system in an international school as things turned out that that was not a problem and they both benefited enormously from the experience of living abroad from attending international schools and having a big circle of friends from from wherever I think that's really one of the positives that we take away from all our years is that multicultural experience for all of us in coming to Asia and Asia was also a big eye-opener I mean it's so different from all of my experiences to date and I'm sure for many people when they come to to Erie it's a time of adjustment took me I suppose three or four years maybe a little longer before I started to calm down driving and other elements of living in the Philippines but I think age also helps well in those days the the position had been advertised to bring together what had what at that time was called the International Rice Joan Plasm Center which was the gene bank the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice Injure and the seed health unit all into one entity and that's what I was interviewed for by the time between interviewing January 91 and arriving in July 91 a decision had been made to take the seed health unit out of the equation which I think was a very wise move because with both the gene bank and in your your managing seeds your distributing seeds receiving seeds and I think you know the the seed health unit is is there to ensure that you know things are done correctly and you don't really want to be in a situation of gamekeeper and poacher as it as it were in the management of seeds so that was out of the equation it really was a challenge in two ways on both the gene bank side and the genetic resources center in general on the gene bank side when I came here for interview we were all shown around the Institute we were shown the gene bank and they had this well-oiled entity the gene bank that operated you know it was slick everything happened etc when I got here and as it were pulled back that veneer and found out how things were actually operating I was really quite shocked there was very little application of best practice it was very little application of some of the latest science and the staff showed very little initiative well this surprised me given the nature of the job they were doing but it was clear to me that they had never been asked to show any initiative and therefore didn't offer any and it was a challenge to get them to understand it maybe took six months to a year I think they they had been used to one regime that had not changed for years and here was this strange person from halfway around the world coming in and asking all these questions about how the gene bank was running and what one should do and I think they probably found it quite a threat but in in exploring these issues with them and and getting them to understand that they're you know they're always two sides to a situation that you can you can ask questions about what they're doing and why they're doing it and then making suggestions as to perhaps it might be worthwhile looking at some different options over time they realized that I wasn't there to to really well as I think they thought I was going to destroy things but to actually make opportunities for them to get more involved to free up time to give them more exciting things to do and so we made major changes in our data management the management of the seeds we were given the opportunity very excitingly to to renovate our facilities and there was a big renovation of facilities in the Institute in the early 90s anyway and I was able to persuade eerie management to include the gene bank and we were good beneficiaries of that but almost everything that the gene bank did we had a you know a serious look at and and the staff responded and in responding and participating and and taking ownership of what they did and and at the same time we were able to get the majority of the staff positions upgraded so that people took responsibility and accepted accountability within about four years we had what was clearly a top-class genetic resources program that was built on the very solid foundations of my predecessor but we had we had brought it up to the end of the the 20th century as it were so when we had a a gene bank review I think it was in 1996 it was clear that the eerie gene bank came out way ahead of of the other gene banks in the CG system and and that review that good positive review is in doing no small part to the excellent staff that the genetic resources center on the gene bank side has so what was my other challenge well frankly it was a an injured group that didn't see that they needed to be included in a new organizational structure and were really quite obstructive in trying to bring about changes that would have led to greater efficiencies they just did not want to be part of the genetic resources center and that really was quite a battle over the years now as we know India has now moved out of GRC and is now in plant breeding I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing and then you know India has to decide what it has to do but I had been given a mandate to try and bring about some some efficiencies there I mean I wasn't head of India I wasn't running it on a day-to-day basis but I did have to try and provide the the resources under the umbrella of the genetic resources center for India to to operate and I wanted to bring about changes particularly in the field so that we could you know use the staff resources in a much more flexible and beneficial way to all the operations in the gene bank as I say it was not a particularly comfortable number of years we did get there in the end and by the time I left the gene bank there were various parts of the operations of both India and the gene bank which were working much more closely with each other and a single set of administrative procedures which in the end I think brought about efficiencies well I've actually been fortunate that I've actually had five careers but I've only worked in three places because I had two careers in in SIP in Lima and then when I moved into the regional program my career in Birmingham and as you say two careers at Erie and when I joined Erie I more or less said to myself you know ten years that'll be about the right sort of time and here we are almost 19 years later and I'm still here but I said to myself ten years would be the appropriate time to to be at the Institute and towards the end of the 90s a number of opportunities outside Erie did occur which I did look at and in one or two cases was interviewed but it was clear in my field that carrying a British passport was not necessarily the best thing given the circumstances but anyway we'd had a group I'm can't remember who they were I think it was associated with future harvest in some way that came to look at in what they were considering is philanthropic fundraising and somehow or other I got involved in these workshops and I believe that one of the people involved in organizing the workshop had a word in Ron Cantrell's ear and my name came up that's what I'm led to believe anyway the outcome was that I received a phone call from the DG's office one day saying would I come over and for a discussion well I had at that time thought it might be something to do with the emerging global crop diversity trust and had got at the back in my mind that perhaps somebody asked for me to be seconded that's what I you know the only scenario that I could possibly think of so it was a bit of a shock when I walked into the DG's office and he was sitting there and there was Ren Wang the DDG research and Willie Padelina the DDG operations and support services sitting around the table and Mike sit down what's all this about anyway the way Ron and Ron Cantrell put it he said you know if a donor was to come to Erie tomorrow and offer a five million dollars he said I couldn't refuse it he said but I have no idea how it would fit in with the scheme of things we really do not have much idea of what money we're raising where how it's being spent etc and we really do need to bring some order to this whole process and we'd like you to set up a new unit it'll be at a director level there had been a liaison coordination planning unit before but for whatever reasons it appears that that had not been as successful as it might have been and he said we want you to to you know clean sleep the clean slate set something up so we had a bit of a question and a discussion on it and I do remember saying something else I said well okay I've got to think about this but I think I can make it work if I can get somebody like Carinta Guerta to come and work with me well I'd never worked with Carinta she is she was a soil chemist in another division but I'd been aware of some of the things she'd been involved in and I'd been on an interview panel promotion panel a couple of years before and was very impressed with what I'd seen anyway to cut a long story short Ron Cantrell asked me to consider moving from essentially a research division into the senior management team and for a number of reasons I actually turned him down said no and we left it at that there were certain aspects of the to our terms of reference that I wasn't particularly happy with and he wouldn't budge on and about six weeks later through a roundabout way I got a message that they were still looking to fill the position and if I was interested he'd like to have another chat with me about it so we we had another chat and there were certain aspects of the to our that he wouldn't budge on but there were others that he would and so we came to an agreement and on the 1st of May 2001 I started as director for program planning and coordination and that's what I've been doing for the last nine years essentially yes it's very different from running a gene bank but in some ways it's not a gene bank in order for a gene bank to operate you have to make sure that all the different elements all the different processes the flows of information are integrated and work together and in the gene bank you manage samples of seeds which we call accessions well managing donor relations managing projects managing contracts etc there's a little bit like running a gene bank instead of packets of seeds we have grants we have projects we have contracts and all the information that flows between them and one of the important things that I I think I've I brought to the gene bank and to this particular office is some systematic way of doing business it one of my biggest frustrations a dairy is the fact that in the past we have ended up when you asked to do something doing it multiple times because the instructions for doing something have never been clearly spelled out and so you waste an awful amount of time with people interpreting what they have to do well I like to try and do something once and do it right and I was able to build a team here in we call DPC who understood what I was trying to achieve and I think we achieved it we've set up systems of interaction with the donors we've certainly raised the profile and the reputation of the Institute with the donors I think we've contributed significantly to increasing the budget of the Institute by ensuring that our the Institute's response is coordinated in such a way that the identity of the Institute is clearly there in any communication branding that the quality of the communications is as high as we can achieve it and for that I have to thank the support that we have received over the years from the communications and publication services staff who've helped us and I think have clearly understood what we were out to achieve both in the presentation of materials and the editing and the quality of writing and to be able to deliver not next week or the week after or the week after that but when there's something to be done it gets done and delivered and I think that is very important. I mean one of the significant issues when I when I did move was that A the Institute didn't really know how many grants it had it more or less on the back of an envelope type operation so within the first week we actually made an inventory of all the grants we thought the Institute had and then we then we applied a really high-powered piece of rocket science we gave everything a unique ID just like we would an accession in a gene bank and that way through all our database work the database development all our communications we'd done it was then able we were then able to track information between these offices between the finance office HR wherever and and to provide you know a backbone on which you could then start to assemble all the other pieces of of information and the other thing we discovered is that the Institute was about 90% deficient shall we say in reporting its grants back to donors and the Institute was getting hurt we were getting a bad reputation as the bad boy of the system you know eerie does not deliver now you can argue I suppose the value of reporting and I know our scientists get quite frustrated at times that they are required to take time out from what they see as more important things to sit down and write reports but that's part of the contract part of the deal of receiving research funding that you you report back to somebody how you actually spent the money did you achieve what you say you were going to do and this is this is important for accountability because I think we have to accept that the the funding we get is somebody else's tax dollars or tax pounds or euros and the agencies that give us the funding have a constituency to report back to so they have to be able to say whether the funding was applied appropriately but every wasn't reporting well we got that down to about 10% within six months just by making the whole reporting process part of doing research you write a concept note a proposal it's submitted you implement your your research you report back periodically and at the end of the project you bring it all together and hopefully it leads to out out those outputs lead to outcomes and an impact but you have a way of monitoring that all the way through those weren't in place before it's absolutely standard operating procedure now at Erie and I think it's one of the strengths that the the the office brought to the whole research management at the Institute I was joking with somebody a few weeks ago about when it's my time at the at the guesthouse for the hail and farewell when they said what do you want on your plaque and I said well I don't particularly appreciate you know these these long statements that go on forever about everything you ever did and I would like if it were possible for people to remember my contributions at Erie in the following way he left things better than he found them and I think in terms of the gene bank we we made significant changes in the way that we manage rice germ plasm in the field in the screen house in the the the the whole processing that prior to the material going into the gene bank in our data management systems etc we we built a series of operations that I think a world-class and that the Institute should be proud of and I'm certainly proud of that and and and I think it was a good basis for my successor Rory sight of all Hamilton to come in and he's been able to build on those as I had built on the on the the foundation that TT Chang established and much of what we built in the 1990s is in place I'm pleased about the contributions we made to the debate discussions about on farm conservation we were successful in the mid 90s to to receive over three million dollars from the Swiss Development Corporation for a project to collect germ plasm around the world and we increased the size of the collection by 25 percent we also trained a lot of people in germ plasm but I was able to recruit a population geneticist and a social anthropologist to work side by side on a project on farm conservation there was a lot of propaganda shall we say that this was the you know gene banks were were what people were calling gene mortuaries you know don't put your seeds in a gene bank it'll be forgotten the material will die and needless to say I do not believe that if the gene bank is is is properly managed and everybody was a lot of people were saying we we need to increase our investment in on farm conservation my concern was or on farm in situ conservation it was very it was quite dangerous promoting an approach or a technology without really knowing what it meant what the dynamics of such a situation system were so it was good that we were able to get a population geneticist who could actually look at how farmer varieties were changing genetically if indeed they were changing and to have a social anthropologist trying to put that into some sort of social context so I was very pleased about that and we got a number of quite important publications out there and made a contribution to that overall debate I would say in general the clamor for on farm conservation has in fact declined over the last decade since we finished that work in terms of another area I was able towards the end of the 90s to persuade the system my genetic resources program to provide funding for a workshop that I conceptualized and in fact we ran in the Netherlands at what was then is now over a three or four day period in September 1999 I'd heard of a paper at a one of the rice genetics congresses here in Manila given by the late Dr. Mike Gale who had done a significant amount of work on the genetic similarities between wheat and maize and rice etc and it got me thinking that you know if it were possible to find a gene in wheat safe for drought resistance or let's take a better example in sorghum that you could find the genetic basis for drought in sorghum could you use that information I was thinking from a molecular point of view could use that to go on probe a germplasm collection of rice to find drought genes well we organize this workshop in in the Netherlands we got some of the best people are from around the world in comparative genetics and genomics I think we were four or five years too soon because some of the technologies that we now take for absolutely for granted were only beginning to emerge but there was you know that sort of glimmer on the horizon that we weren't being too fanciful I wasn't able to take it forward for a number of reasons it it didn't find a lot of favor here at Erie but within 18 months they'd formed the generation challenge program as you know Bob Ziegler was the first director of that challenge program and he had attended my workshop and so I think some of the thinking that we put into comparative genetics from a germplasm collection management point of view found its way into the thinking of the of the generation challenge program and I think that was quite interesting that a group of genetic conservationists should have as it were been pushing the agenda in that area and he goes without saying that the I think the the stability that we have brought to our donor relations and fundraising here at Erie has has put us ahead of the game compared to many other institutions and yeah and it's you know it will be with a sense of satisfaction when I do finally come to leave the Institute in a few weeks time that we've we've put in place some solid foundations from which the Institute can continue to grow Erie is a very complex organization I mean it's in many ways it's it's a Filipino organization over which you have this sort of layer of international staff some of the ways that the Institute does business I still don't understand because the relationships at various levels you have that added complexity of the international staff I forget how many nationalities well 30 national and we all look at the world in in in different ways what is of what is a value to somebody say from France or from India may be very different to what I perceive as a value as a British citizen so we do look at the world in different ways and that is is both a fantastic opportunity when you're working though in this sort of group and of course I had lived abroad before worked in a CG center 10 years more than 10 years before I joined here so it wasn't new to me but it's both an opportunity and a great challenge and so I would say there's never been huge frustrations there's been lots of small battles that one has had to to wage Erie is I know this because I've talked to people in other centers Erie is regarded as being of quite an arrogant center and I think it has good reason in many ways but I mean we do set ourselves some targets to reach we do esteem good science do we always reach it well that's for others to to judge our peers to judge the sometimes I think and it's can be dangerous a sense of self-satisfaction that leads people working at the Institute to accept the status quo and not want to push the boundaries not you know there's that there's there's very much well this is the way we've done it for the last 30 years why change and so there are things that happen or don't happen that are based on that sort of attitude which I don't think are really acceptable in an international organization 50 years after its after its foundation so that can be frustrating getting people to to to accept that there's you can always make change and things better and to be thinking about those opportunities rather than sort of sitting back in and being comfortable all the time I have to say I've been blessed I have had two fantastic groups of staff who come to understand the values that I have and the goals and objectives that I set for myself and I'll set for the for the for in the first case GRC and then the program planning and coordination and they've gone along with me and understood why I've wanted to do things in a particular way and it's not been a struggle working with them they've been extremely supportive and that has been one of the joys of working at Erie you say hindsight hindsight is a wonderful thing some of the things I would have liked to have done were not possible because we didn't have the technology there are things they're doing now that you know I had thought wouldn't it be nice to be able to do but we couldn't yeah they couldn't afford it I mean the fantastic opportunity we have now that the rice genome has been sequenced we have a whole range of molecular technologies and approaches that just weren't available in the early 90s we take for granted that everybody has a computer on the desk when I arrived and Mark of Vanderburg who is head of IT now was head of IT in 1991 and I sort of had to almost get down on my knees and beg for a for a PC on my desk it just wasn't that routine and now there are a number of things that we do and we really couldn't contemplate doing without access to some of these technologies so I often think boy if I'd had that available when I was running the gene bank what would we have done so but the opportunities presented themselves at a later date and other people have taken up the up the up the mantle as it were and so it's great to see some of those those ideas being taken taken forward so I certainly you know there's never been a time I can't think and I've thought about this quite long and hard there's never really been a time joined the 18 plus years that I've been here nearly 19 where I felt so frustrated I just wanted to get out of it lots of petty frustrations but we all find that in in in working in an organization like this yeah I it's it's it's not been plain sailing far from it but it hasn't been stormy weather either I'm looking back on 40 years of a career and okay 40 years actually takes me back to when I was a final year or senior year undergraduate because it was at that time that you know in a sense my career was was pushed in in a certain direction but we are all the result of the ideas that we've picked up the people that we we have interacted with and and how they've influenced what we do I mean for it for example you know what made Melissa Fitzgerald become a soil chemist and Eugene became a writer editor in the communications business why did I become a botanist and then move into it's all its environment in a sense there must them there must be something genetic there but it's a lot it's a lot is environment so the people and looking over my career it's the people that I've I've interacted with I have been very fortunate I think to have had a number of people who were fantastic mentors and I've always made it a point wherever I've been it's to sort of establish an interaction with one or two people with whom I could share you know aspects of of of what I was doing you know there's it's always good to have somebody who you can trust who you can bounce ideas off and get their reactions you don't have to follow what they they say but it's great to have that and everywhere I've been I've had somebody that I could go to and say well look this is a concern or what do you think of the following and and got that sort of feedback that I think is very important in some of his career but having spent most of my career working overseas and I got in the as you can imagine the CG right at the ground floor the CG had been formed I think in the back end of 1771 or early 1772 and I joined SIP in 1973 January that's over 37 years ago and in SIP we were six members of staff no laboratories virtually no offices and that was quite an experience I was 24 years old and sort of thrown into this the deep end and I got to meet many of the people who helped form the CG I wouldn't say people evangelical about it but there did seem to be a sense of purpose as to why you were there working in the center and what you could achieve and the donors certainly I think had a much better understanding then than they do today now it's always dangerous saying all things were better in the good old days but with this whole process that has gone on now for two or three years the so-called change process I really do think that there are quite a significant number of people outside the centers but also within the centers who have frankly lost the plot I don't think there's a good understanding any more of what the centers can or should deliver there seems certainly amongst colleagues in other centers a feeling that science is not a good science is not a something that we shouldn't necessarily strive for science doesn't seem to you know appear part of the equation process seems to be more important than output and I think you were talking we were talking about frustration a little while ago and I suppose talking about this now maybe is my biggest frustration and a little sad at the end of my career having come in at the ground floor now leaving the CG or leaving an area as the CG is trying to trying to change in a way that I I don't think if things go the way there they could go is going to be particularly helpful for Erie but more importantly for the for the people for whom Erie works and that is that that has been over the last couple of years or so a serious frustration but that is not a frustration of me doing my particular job it's a general frustration as to in the ways in which international agricultural research seems to be going with research now with a lower case R rather than a lover case yeah I am I it the things I really remember the people who who who contributed to that whole development of international agricultural research people who were contemporaries of of Boulog and they were ex Rockefeller people who'd been in Mexico those that had helped set up the centers the donors in those days were many of whom would also work to work overseas and so they understood better what the centers were trying to achieve and that's all become rather blurred