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Careers: best-laid plans...
At the end of September 2019, I retired as Head of Bacteriology at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) after 10 years as part of the senior management team. The aim was to seek new challenges and restore a sensible work–life balance by eliminating management responsibilities, leaving more time to think about science. Little did I know how dramatically plans would have changed by the start of 2020. I began studying bacteriology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Newcastle University) in 1976, where Max Sussman (former SfAM President) would be my undergraduate tutor for the next three years. It was an interesting time to embark on a career in microbiology, given recent developments in genetic engineering. By the late 1970s, nucleotide sequencing methods had also been published and were increasingly being used to characterise bacterial genes. Together with the recent discovery of transposable elements in bacteria, these developments provided a new toolkit for studying bacterial genetics. I remained in Newcastle using many of these molecular tools in my PhD research on the virulence factors of uropathogenic Escherichia coli, which was funded by a Luccock scholarship from the university. The project was co-supervised by Steve Parry and Colin Harwood (former editor of Letters in Applied Microbiology (LAM). I am indebted to Colin in particular for his continued support and friendship throughout my career.
Ian Feavers Meetings Secretary, SfAM
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microbiologist
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March 2021
In 1982, I moved to the University of Sheffield as a postdoctoral research assistant with Anne Moir, using funding released by her recent appointment as a lecturer in microbiology. Anne had recently cloned the gerA locus from Bacillus subtilis in a bacteriophage λ vector; our task was to characterise the genes and their expression. With PCR yet to be developed, this largely involved subcloning, transposon mutagenesis and nucleotide sequencing. GerA was the first germination receptor to be sequenced and became the model for other germination receptors in the Bacillus genus. The product of a tricistronic operon, it is developmentally regulated as a member of the sigma G regulon along with other genes expressed only in the forespore compartment of sporulating cells. During my time in Sheffield, I attended my first international conference in Asilomar, California, which was followed by a ‘mini-sabbatical’, allowing me time to work with collaborators at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, as well as explore Yosemite and the Sierra Wilderness. After four years in Sheffield, it was time to broaden my experience and in 1986 I took a postdoctoral fellowship at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, which was developing innovative ways to study the
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