Professor Alan North grew up in West Yorkshire and studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen before taking a PhD in pharmacology (1973). He moved to the US in 1975 as Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, before becoming Professor of Neuropharmacology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Senior Scientist and Professor at the Vollum Institute of Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland. In 1993, he was appointed Principal Scientist at the Glaxo Institute for Molecular Biology, Geneva, and returned to England in 1998 as...