Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is a summary of my scientific career, biased by my personal view of events and unashamedly concentrating on those aspects of some of the scientific developments to which I have contributed. A selective unbiased alternative has been written by Christensen-Dalsgaard and Thompson A selective overview. In: Thompson, M. I was born somewhat over a year into the Second World War. My mother had been evacuated from London to Worcester, and after my birth we went to Torquay in the south-west of England; then she returned with me to the East End of London to live with her parents.
My father had been conscripted into the army, sent to the south of Greece where he was captured and made to march to a stalag in Germany, thence to a POW camp just outside Graz where he remained for the rest of the war.
My mother knew that he must have been either captured or killed; it was a very long time before she was told that he was alive. After the war he was first taken to a rehabilitation centre before returning to England and being allowed a short visit home.
Thus, I was five years old when first we met. I remember not taking to him at first because he showed much more interest in my mother than in me; I preferred the soldier who had driven my father home, for, not knowing anybody in the family, he played games with me. Hoping that my father was a hero, I asked him how many enemy soldiers he had killed.
My mother loved me dearly, but she never understood how I think. Thus, Kenneth and I were each essentially only children; it was not until we were both adults that we communicated as equals. My earliest memories are of London: the most vivid is being terrified of the no doubt friendly people in horrendous-looking gas masks sitting opposite me in the local air-raid shelter during enemy attacks.
