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Abingdon News is the newsletter of the Abingdon Foundation, Park Road, Abingdon, Oxford OX14 1DE Tel: 01235 521563
Edited by Sarah Wearne Tel: 01235 849108 email:
Design by Boo
Tel: 01865 407610
Abingdon School: A company limited by guarantee Registered in England and Wales Company No. 3625063
Registered Office: Stratton House, Bath Street, Abingdon OX14 3LA Registered Charity No. 1071298
Dr Mark Bretscher, OA 1958, is a
distinguished biologist who was head
of the Cell Biology Division at the
Medical Research Council Laboratory of
Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge
between 1984 and 1995. From
Abingdon, he won a Major Scholarship
to Gonville and Caius, Cambridge,
took a First Class Degree in Chemistry
and joined the MRC Unit as a research
student in 1961, working on protein
synthesis and the genetic code under
Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner.
He was a postdoctoral fellow with
Paul Berg at Stanford University and
then became a member of staff at the
new LMB. He continued working on
how proteins are made, but switched
in 1971 to study the structure of the
erythrocyte membrane, and soon after
the endocytic cycle and how cells
move. He was a visiting professor at
Harvard (1974) and Stanford (1984)
and was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society in 1985.
Mark’s two brothers also went to
Abingdon; their father Egon Bretscher
was head of the Nuclear Physics
Division at the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment, Harwell. Peter
Bretscher, OA 1961, is Professor of
Microbiology and Immunology at the
University of Saskatchewan in Canada
and Anthony Bretscher, OA 1966,
is Professor of Cell Biology in the
Department of Molecular Biology
and Genetics at Cornell University
in the US.
n
Neil Carson, OA 1992, is Chief
Technology Officer of
Fusion-io
, makers
of next generation data storage devices
for servers. He studied Software
Engineering at the Royal Military College
of Science, Cranfield University. In his
spare time at university he consulted
in software development for clients in
the UK and Hong Kong and worked
on porting BSD unix to the ARM family
of processors, used in the
Apple
iOS. After graduation he set up a
consultancy company with a friend.
This took them to Palo Alto in Silicon
Valley where Neil led the operating
systems group at
Network Computer,
a
subsidiary of
Oracle
, and later worked
for various start-ups and enterprise
software companies. Not all prospered
but some went on to build software
used by tens of millions of people or to
be bought out by
Dell
. Neil has been
with
Fusion-io
since its start up days;
it is now a publically listed company
with Steve Wozniak, the inventor of
the original
Apple
computer, also on its
management team.
n
Michael Grigsby
In 1970 Michael Grigsby, OA 1955, went
to Texas to interview three soldiers on
their return from Vietnam for his powerful
documentary
I Was a Soldier
, forty years
later he returned to interview them again.
The resulting film,
We Went to War
has
been hailed as a masterpiece, the epitome
of Mike’s quiet, patient style of film making
– allowing the subjects and the silences to
speak for themselves.
Mike died on 12 March after a short illness,
and his obituary is on page 13.
“If you want to watch a resonant,
intelligent, ambitious and beautiful piece of
documentary filmmaking then you won’t
do much better than
We Went to War.
”
Total Film
n
Foals
Foals’ third album
Holy Fire
was
released on 11 February and
made the charts all over the world.
The band, which includes Walter
Gervers, OA 2002, and Jimmy
Smith, OA 2002, is set to play at
Glastonbury this summer following a
tour of North America.
n
OAs in Science and Technology
Dr Mark Bretscher
Neil Carson
