Doctor. Environmental Activist. Filmmaker. Storyteller. 

“Democracy depends upon the ability of individuals to make their voices heard above the clamour of vested interests” Letter from RRJ to the former editor of the Times, Harold Evans, April 1983 after HMG’s decision to introduce unleaded petrol was announced.

 

My career has been divided between medicine and public advocacy of health and environmental causes. I am also an author and a film producer.

I won a medical scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge at the age of 17, and qualified as a doctor, specialising in dermatology with a special interest in skin cancers. I am dual-qualified holding both FRCP and FRCPath.  I founded the Melanoma Unit at the Institute of Dermatology in 1996, and was also Director of the Skin Tumour Unit at the same Institution, providing a national referral service for patients with cutaneous lymphoma. We also provided a national service for patients requiring photopheresis, an immunomodulatory treatment used in cutaneous T-cell lymphoma/leukemia (Sezary’s Syndrome) as well as chronic Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD). I fulfilled these various roles on 5 NHS sessions per week. After retiring from the NHS, I continued my medical career seeing private patients at the Cromwell Hospital and Harley Street.

 

Second, I have an extensive academic CV with over 200 peer-reviewed publications in the scientific literature, including the first article to address the health effects of global warming (Published as a Lancet editorial in April 1989 under the title “Health in the Greenhouse”). 

 

However, my other area of expertise is public advocacy, and how to influence government policy through my long-standing interest in all things environmental. I was Chair of CLEAR, The Campaign for Lead Free Air from 1984-88. Not only did CLEAR force the introduction of lead-free petrol to the UK, (and the EU); we also advocated successfully for the fitting of catalytic convertors to petrol-driven vehicles. I also argued strongly against the use of diesel on grounds of carcinogenicity. Interestingly it wasn’t until 2012, 25 years later, that the IARC identified diesel exhaust as a Grade 1 carcinogen.

I also chaired the Pollution Advisory Committee at Friends of the Earth from 1984-89, which coincided with Jonathan Porritt’s term as Director. Successful campaigns included acid rain, the tightening of radiation standards and ozone depletion. During the eighties I organised three international conferences and co-edited the proceedings: Lead versus Health (1983) with Professor Sir Michael Rutter FRS, Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry; Radiation and Health (1987) with Professor Sir Richard Southwood FRS, Professor of Zoology at Oxford, Chair of the NRPB as well as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; and Ozone Depletion: Health and Environmental Consequence (1989), with Professor Tom Wigley who at that time was Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

In total I have had 91 articles and 360 letters published in national newspapers and medical journals on environmental issues, including Nature, the BMJ, Lancet, FT, Times, Guardian and the Independent. I have given written and/or oral testimony at 13 public inquiries, notably on air pollution and climate change. This was all self-funded. It was also highly effective and led to successful outcomes on fracking and the eventual banning of new diesel vehicles.

 

I have been an advocate for action to mitigate global warming for 37 years. The ozone depletion conference that I organised in November 1988 included a session on global warming chaired by Sir John Maddox, then editor of Nature. This was the first conference to discuss climate change in the UK that was open to members of the public.

Subsequently I made a film, funded by L’Oreal, comparing the difficulties of solving global warming in comparison with ozone depletion (shown on Channel 4; Open University Series 1999). In 2011, I founded an educational charity Help Rescue the Planet (hrtp.co.uk) dedicated to minimising air pollution and mitigating climate change.  In 2012, I organised a 5-day international conference on global warming at RIBA, and facilitated 3 climate change consultations at Windsor Castle. From 2017-21, I served as Scientific Advisor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Air Pollution. In 2021, I organised two further consultations at Windsor Castle, and in 2024, I was interviewed by the Director of St George’s House as part of their “In Conversation” series:

https://www.stgeorgeshouse.org/programme-5/st-georges-house-online-conversations/

 

In the run-up to COP 26 in Glasgow HRTP, I organised monthly virtual conferences on different aspects of mitigating climate change known as Mayday C4 Events, C4 standing for Climate Change Conference and Concert. I included music to remind attendees why humanity is worth saving. In September 2024, I organised two further C4 Events at the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Medicine. The executive summary from the two conferences was sent to CHOGM in Samoa in October, and then to Azerbaijan for COP 29 in November. Antonio Guterres tried to insert some of the proposals onto the COP 29 agenda, but was thwarted by the high-emitting nations.

 

Apart from co-editing 3 books in the eighties, I have since authored 3 more books:  “The Gilgamesh Gene” (2017); “The Gilgamesh Gene Revisited” (2021) and “Blueprint for Survival: An emergency plan to mitigate climate change” (2025).