He was educated at the
University of Birmingham (BSc, 1964 in Microbiology) and at the
University of East Anglia (PhD, 1967 focused on the genetics of acetate utilization in
Neurospora crassa). Following that he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, Stanford, California, 1967–69 where he studied mitochondrial structure and function in
Neurospora crassa. He then took up an appointment at the
Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, in the Department of Cytogenetics under the leadership of
Ralph Riley. In the following years he built up a team of plant molecular geneticists that was one of the first to clone plant DNA, to produce transgenic plants and to determine the structure of a plant mitochondrial genome. ==Works==