Sixth Boyd Orr Memorial Lecture. Reprinted from Proceedings of the Nutrition Society Volume 40 (2), 195–207, 1981

the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, there were only two professors of Nutrition in England -I am not sure about Scotland -my chair and that of John Yudkin at Queen Elizabeth College (now part of King's).Moreover, we were the only school of Public Health in Europe that had a department of Nutrition.Now, as shown by the Group of Professors of Nutrition, the original number has multiplied almost 10-fold.My plan, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was to build up a department which stood on four legsmetabolism; clinical nutrition; public health nutrition; and nutrition policy.Now these subdivisions have tended, quite naturally, to become separate, indicating the multidisciplinary nature of nutrition.The Giessen Declaration 1 has reminded us that environmental science should be included in nutrition's field of interest.This diversity was implicitly recognised by Alan Jackson