I travelled overseas once during each year of my period as Director, usually in response to an overseas invitation which covered my expenses. The timing and reasons for the trips are set out below.
The primary purpose of this trip was to make enquiries in England and the United States about possible candidates for the Chair of Microbiology: none were found. I also attended a small working party on Smallpox, sponsored by the USA-Japan Cooperative Medical Science Program and held in Honolulu.
Financed by the US National Institutes of Health, this trip was to attend two conferences, one in Princeton, New Jersey, on ‘Influenza Virus Genetics and Vaccines’ and the other, in London, on ‘Microbiological Standardization of Rubella Vaccines’. At their request, I made a four-page summary of the latter conference for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories.
In retrospect, this was one of the most important trips that I made, for it was my introduction to the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program of the World Health Organization. What was called 'The WHO Informal Conference on Monkeypox' was held in Moscow and brought together for the first time a number of poxvirus experts. Their role at this meeting was to decide whether human monkeypox, recently discovered in West Africa, might indicate that there was an animal reservoir of smallpox virus, which would have made eradication impossible. I was rapporteur for the conference, which concluded that monkeypox and variola viruses were different species of orthopoxviruses.
I then went to England, where I made enquiries in London, Oxford and Leeds connected with vacant chairs and new developments in the John Curtin School and, at the request of David Catcheside, the Research School of Biological Sciences. In the United States, I gave a lecture on Conditional Lethal Mutants of Animal Viruses at the National Institutes of Health, and then went to the University of California at Davis for two weeks, as Life Sciences Lecturer. Besides visiting laboratories and giving seminars to graduate students, I gave two public lectures: 'Evolutionary Changes in an Infectious Disease' and 'Civilization and Infectious Diseases: the Effect of Social Organization on Human Infections'.
The main purpose of this trip was to give the Lilly Lecture of the Royal College of Physicians, on Genetic Aspects of Virus Diseases. It was first given as the concluding item of a conference on Virology for General Physicians held at the College headquarters in London and repeated a week later in Sheffield.
On 9, 10 and 11 September, 1970, I gave the CIBA Lectures at Rutgers University and three lectures on different aspects of the genetics of animal viruses. I then went on to spend about a month as Scholar-in-Residence at the State University of New York, spending four or five days at each of its campuses: Stony Brook, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Binghamton and Downstate.
The main purpose of this trip was to attend the Second International Congress for Virology in Budapest. Much of my time was taken up with meetings of the International Committee on the Nomenclature of Viruses, of which I was then President. I also visited and gave seminars at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, the Max Planck Institut für Virusforschung in Tübingen, in Germany, the Institute for Microbiology and Epidemiology in Prague and the Institute of Virology in Bratislava.
This was the first stage of a 12-month long Fogarty Fellowship of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This was a prestigious award, with all expenses paid, an allowance of $US30,000 per annum and a medal. I was not able to take it for the full 12 months, but arranged with the authorities to take in three sessions. For this first session I lived in Stone House, the original residence on the property that became the campus of the NIH. Other Scholars in residence at the time included an old friend from my Rockefeller Institute days, Rollin Hotchkiss, and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit, of Sweden. I spent almost all of my time there working on the second edition of The Biology of Animal Viruses, but gave the luncheon address at the Eighth Gustav Stern Symposium in New York and seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Cold Spring Harbor and the National Institutes of Health. I also gave the opening address at a symposium in Israel and three seminars at the Hadassah Medical School, and then attended the fifth meeting of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) in London.