Hail fellow

. . . well met. I must have met Dan Bradley in the Summer of 1990 when I came back to Ireland for a week long scoping exercise in Trinity College Dublin. I was then 'resting' in the NE of England having run out of steam as a population geneticist. I had secured an EU 'retraining fellowship' to convert whatever number-crunching skills I had from pop gen into a more useful area of science. That would be molecular evolution using bioinformatics. During that week, I hung out in the binfo lab which was hosting the fellowship, found I could do the work, found an old farmhouse to rent out near the airport, found my way down to coffee and probably had a few pints in the Summer evenings.

When I came back in October on salary, I defo met Dan because by a peculiar set of circumstances his boss was my boss. Dan had just finished a PhD looking for lesions in genes that resulted in retinitis pigmentosum which causes late onset hereditary blindness. Like me, he was also stepping sideways - into the genetics of tropical cattle. His boss Paddy Cunnngham had bigger fish smaller flies to fry running the screwworm eradication programme out of the FAO in Rome. Cunningham had recently landed a huge research grant, and hired a postdoc [Dan] and two post-graduate students Ronan Loftus and Dave MacHugh to prosecute the cattle project.  My boss, Paul Sharp, as tenured faculty could act in loco parentis for these three orphans. But they didn't need much hand-holding; being recklessly brave and technically competent in adverse circumstances in the Third World. And quite undaunted by the institutional bureaucracy of TCD. For the next tuthree years, the two labs would have a joint Christmas dinner which seemed to require G&Ts between each course, and telling cray-cray war stories from the bush.

Irish science had been absolutely in the doldrums through the 1980s, and the cattle project was one of the first big-money rumblings of what became the Celtic Tiger. in 1992, TCD scrabbled together the money to create a new lectureship in Genetics. It was exciting: we all sat through job presentations from the short-listed (Top Gun) candidates - before they went in to be formally grilled by the search committee. In the pub that evening, Paul Sharp confided [I got all the important information in the pub] that he'd been asked his opinion for the best candidate as "the person most like to bring in the largest grants". The most intellectually stimulating science or the best teacher of genetics came further down the list of desiderata. Paul's unequivocal answer was "Dan Bradley"; and it was so.  Turned out Dan had an even better nose for writing citable papers of which he's contributed more than 25 to [super-prestigious Nature | Science | PNAS]. That's about as many papers (crappy + marginal + okay + pretty good = all my papers) as I've been party to . . . six of which were actually coat-tailing on Effectives from the Bradley lab.

Pure science is fine; bringing in big grant money gets you Best Boy status with your employer; launching a successful Campus Company is pure gold. Dan was one of five founding directors of Identigen [multiBlob] which is still trading well into its third decade.

I should add that as well as being a great scientist who can tell it so that non-specialists can appreciate its importance, Dan is a good bloke and a loyal friend. He brought me to hospital when I was whacked off my bike in Westland Row in 1998 and was smart enough, and kind enough. to know that I'd be so long in A&E that I'd need a Mars Bar and an Irish Times.

In the middle of May, Professor Bradley was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Short of a Nobel, that's about the biggest gong you can acquire as a research scientist in the English speaking world. No slouch the chap who escaped from a chicken farm in Maghera, Co Derry to go to Cambridge. Chapeau! and a sweeping respectful bow.