The intestinal epithelial cell.

1 SHOULD first like to thank you for inviting me to be the Robert Campbell Orator on this occasion. For anyone in the field of medical science it is a great honour to give this lecture, for a Queen's graduate it is a very special honour, but for a Queen's graduate who is also an exile, it is not only an honour but a very welcome opportunity to come back again to this medical school. Although my visit is a short one, I have used my time well and have taken the opportunity to see some of the great changes which have taken place since I worked here. I have been particularly impressed by what I might call the magnificent hospital campus you have got, with a wide variety of buildings and activities all within easy reach of each other. You have obviously put a great deal of careful long-term planning into the various developments of your medical school, which is going to yield rich rewards in the days to come. By some standards Queen's is a relatively young medical school, but your well-planned broad acres for development must be the envy of some of the older medical schools whose traditions are far more extensive than their building space. The Robert Campbell Oration commemorates a great individual in Ulster medicine, but in the present context the commemoration might be extended to include not only Robert Campbell himself but others who bore his family name. I am very proud to be able to claim a fairly close contact with that name, for the late Mr. W. S. Campbell and I were exact contemporaries. We came up from school together to study medicine at Queen's. After the 2nd M.B. examination we both took time off for an honours B.Sc. in Physiology. We completed our medical course together and went to house posts at the Royal Victoria Hospital. We came back to Queen's again and spent three years as demonstrators, he in Anatomy, and I in Physiology. Knowing Bill Campbell at that time probably better than anyone else here, I should like to take a moment to pay a tribute to the brilliance of an undergraduate career, which I am sure has never been surpassed and probably never equalled. From the second year onwards he won every honour the medical school had to offer, every prize, medal and scholarship which was available. He did this with such a characteristic modesty, and with such an absence of any kind of consciousness of his own great abilities that we all entirely accepted him as first without any feeling of envy, and we were happy to compete amongst each other to be second to him. His undergraduate career was indeed worthy of the name which we are honouring this evening. I should like to talk to you about the intestinal epithelial cell, and in doing so I shall stress a particular approach to the problem of cellular function which I and my colleagues in Sheffield have been using and which we have called 'functional topography". Let me explain first what we mean by this term. When we think about how any part of the body works we are conditioned to think in terms of structure and function in that order. It starts from our earliest training, for most of us had our first introduction to medical studies in the dissecting room, and we