Sir John Bell

We agreed that a half a million people late to middle age, 45 and above, would probably over time, when you did the power calculations, give you a pretty good insight in most of the major diseases.

And then it was really a question of collecting them and storing the samples.

So, in order to get it funded, at the time I was on the council of the MRC and George Ratta, who you may remember was quite a distinguished NMR physiologist here, he was the chief executive of the MRC.

So, I approached him and I said, look, George, this would be a great thing for us to do in the UK because we have all the clinical records of these people going back for a decade and we'll continue to do that.

And so, of course, we immediately sent it out to a peer review committee in the MRC who completely trashed the idea and said, you got to be joking.

So I thought, OK, you'll be good.

That's a lesson.

And I did say to George, I said, that must mean this is a really good idea, because if it had gone straight through peer review, you know, you would have known you were toast.

So anyway, I think we had one more swing at peer review and decided in the end that wasn't going to

So in the end, George, to his credit, took it to MRC Council and we pitched it and everybody thought, what a great idea.

Let's just get on and do it.

And then the welcome came in.

Mark Walpert was at the welcome at the time, great guy and did a really good job at bringing the welcome on board.

And so we, and, and, you know, people forget the amount, the quantum of money we had to do this at the time was about 60 million pounds.

I mean, it was, it was, it was astonishingly small.

So, and, and, and then, then of course we had a couple of wise people who came in to give us advice and,

The first thing they said, well, if you ever thought you were really going to be able to do genetics on 500,000 people, forget it.

That'll never work.

So I thought, okay, I'll just mark that one out.

And then they said, and by the way, you shouldn't assume you can get any data from the health service because you'll never be able to collect data.