We are nearing the end of the first week of the researchers’ migration into the CCI where we join our colleagues in the Clinical Trials Unit who have been in occupation for a few weeks already. The upstairs offices are full of blue crates waiting to be unpacked. Many people will be returning from the Easter break on Monday to a new home and in the meantime, I see small oases of quiet industry among the islands of packing cases as those students and postdocs who have set up their working space already enjoy some relative peace and quiet.
Group leaders are installed in their penthouse apartments and some have sought counselling to help them adjust to the uncluttered, rarefied environment they find themselves in. Others have already written a grant. For many of us it has been an opportunity to declutter and to shed decades of accumulated paper. This has been refreshing, although I am having second thoughts about chucking out all my old reprints…..realising that in all likelihood I have now expunged all record of some of my best work like that cutting edge 1991 review of MHC biology published in Acta Biologica Hungarica…..
Next week will be busy as we move the labs over, and it would not surprise me if we see the first pipette-wielding by this time next week.
We are doing something new and invigorating here, and among our teams I see deep knowledge, burning curiosity and hard work come together in a passion for cancer immunology research and the promise it brings to the fight against cancer. Long may it last.
Professor Tim Elliott, Director of the Centre for Cancer Immunology