In science we have good, successful laboratories and scientists and we also have wasteful, inefficient and unproductive ones. The differences are not matters of chance.

It is not an accident that just one Cambridge College, Trinity, has achieved more Nobel Prizes than all of Japan. There was something in common amongst the Nobel prize winners Todd, Adrian, Perutz, Bragg, Crick, Ryle, Hewish and Mott that I was fortunate enough to meet and, in some cases, get to know well. Of course there was the personal and intellectual calibre of these people, their drive and determination. But also, there was the laboratory culture within which they worked, a culture still benefiting from the influence of Maxwell, Thomson and Rutherford.