My career has been built upon a strong experimental bench apprenticeship in organic chemistry. I did not retire from active personal experimental work until I was over 50. Throughout, I have supervised teams of graduate students leading to successful PhD completions of (currently) >60 students. Since 1980 I have been Director of the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC: now Cancer Research UK) Experimental Cancer Chemotherapy Research Group firstly at Aston University and then (since 1992) at the University of Nottingham. At the last count I have published >300 papers in refereed journals.