 I'm John Pendry. I'm a Professor of Physics here at Imperial College and I've worked here for a good long time since 1981. I can't remember a time when I was not interested in things related to physics. You have to remember that when I was growing up it was the 40s and 50s when there was a huge excitement for science, the endless frontier and all that sort of thing. And so there's lots of magazines and books which enthused people for science. It was an extremely exciting time for the scientists themselves and also a lot of young people were brought into science at that time and I was one of them. I think you find that people who have had a career in academic science certainly very often their interest in science, as I explained, started well before school or certainly university and that was true of me as well. I had a great interest in all things to do with science and did a great deal of experimentation both in physics and chemistry. I used to build crystal sets and then radio sets. But those early experiments were very important in forming one's mind as to how science works and how you progress a scientific problem. I think the most exciting event was when I realised that these new materials we were working on, particularly the ones with negative refractive index, that you could give a prescription for a lens that was perfect. And I remember walking from my study to the dining room where my wife was preparing lunch and saying to her, if I publish this I will either be famous or infamous. Fortunately, the idea was right. It was a result that anybody could have shown since Maxwell wrote his equations down almost 150 years ago. It remained hidden from us all until I stumbled across it. I wouldn't say I was looking for the result, it was something I was testing, expecting to find quite a different result. This truly astonished me. It's an amazing result that you can find a material that will focus light without any limits to resolution. It was a real shock to my system. It's always important to be aware that whatever you're working on, it's very likely that in ten years' time it's not going to be the hot topic of the day. If you've done well, you should have made sufficient progress that it's probably finished in ten years' time. Planning to move on is part of career training for a scientist. I do that by trying to keep aware of results outside my own field, keeping aware of what's going on and watching brief and always be on the lookout for the next problem. About every ten years, I've shifted the emphasis of my research. Often it's been a case of carrying skills across from one field to another, so it's not been quite the step-function discontinuer that it's perhaps seen to a casual observer. I think it's very hard to barge into a field when one doesn't bring anything that one can contribute. It's much easier if you bring across some technique. One should always keep an open mind outside the narrow confines of what one's own research because you've got to be repaired to look for the next topic of research. If you don't, your research will fade and die. You have to be exceptionally lucky or certainly exceptionally improbable to carry in the same field of research successfully all your life. Working very hard on one's life, one gets little chance to look back and summarise and ask what it was all about and so on. Particularly changing fields, one comes across new characters all the time. They say that before you die, your whole life flashes before you. I think my pantry vests will be a little bit along those lines.