Brief biography of Professor Tom Robin Caine BOYDE:

Born at Charing Cross, London, on 31st August 1932, one of five children. My father, Dr Harry Caine Boyde, had been serving in the London hospitals but then took up general practice at 85 Freemasons Road, West Ham, near the Royal Docks. The house, the surgery and my first school have all gone and the docks don’t have ships any more: all that’s left of West Ham is a railway station and a football club. But, though he died in 1952, my father is still remembered by some of the older people round about, “Oh, ‘e was a good doctor, ‘e was”.

My schooling too was mucked up by Hitler, though maybe for the best. My father stayed on in London under the bombs, but we lived in Essex throughout the war and I attended schools in Felsted and Braintree, then from 1947 the City of London School and University College, London, to study medicine, qualifiying M.B.,B.S. in 1955. Service in the Royal Air Force saw me enter pathology as a specialty and included a period in Cyprus. After that I specialised further, in Chemical Pathology, studied chemistry at King’s College, Newcastle, and in 1963 took up a lectureship at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A move to the Royal College of Surgeons was quickly followed by appointment as Professor of Biochemistry at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda from 1969 - 1973 and when Idi Amin spoiled things there to the corresponding post at the University of Hong Kong.

Which tells you very little about what was really going on   –   mostly research, teaching (see those pages), and bringing up two departments of Biochemistry in far-off places from near nothing to respectable, without the benefit of research grants (which didn’t exist even in Hong Kong until the end of my time there). So other tasks were setting up the first dedicated grant-giver in Hong Kong, the Shirley Boyde Trust, named after my first wife and funded from charitable donations received after her death, raising a family, founding the HK Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, running the Commonwealth Scholarships Committee and the Senate Library Committee, and introducing rowing as a sport to the HK universities.

From 1993, I have been back in London, heavily engaged in both medical practice and research, the second funded out of the first. They are described on other pages.

 Degrees and qualifications:

 Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, University of London, 1955

 Bachelor of Science (1st Class Honours) University of Durham, 1962.

 Doctor of Medicine, University of London (research on enzymes in disease), 1967

 Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, 1998 (by published research)

 Registered as a medical practitioner in both Britain (since 1955) and Hong Kong