David John Anstee A Tribute We will miss you Dave, as will hundreds of others in the field of Blood Sciences. We recall you starting work in the South West Regional Blood Transfusion Service with your fashionably long hair, your “hippy” attire ( No collar or tie – monstrous) and your relaxed timekeeping. Geoffrey Tovey our Director had appointed you as a bright young scientist straight from Bristol University capable of enhancing the reputation for the Bristol centre. The other graduates in the team at that time were Bob Cotton working on the Technicon Blood Grouping machine and Jill Cann working on the potent anti A found in the snail albumen gland. The field of typing reagent production was the first task which you took on. The former biochemistry lab of Gordon Andrews was soon home to cultures of Fomes fomentarius, buckets of horse stomachs, sheep cyst fluids, fish eggs, coffee beans, Dolichos biflorus extract and any number of other liquids which might force red cells to clump together. The only scientific equipment to hand was a chemical balance, an old microscope, a bunsen burner and an industrial autoclave capable of sterilising 400 one pint bottles at a time. But the skill with the hand drawn glass pipette and the rubber teat, the small test tubes and microscope slides was more than enough to cut through the crudity of the available equipment. The labs were staffed mainly by young lab technicians ( now known as Biomedical Scientists) they were convivial places to work and the scientific staff shared the fun and the ambience of the Common Room. Dave joined in with all the activities and not many would know that in his early 20's during the incubation period of the Director of the International Blood Group Reference Laboratory Dave was a first class darts player, he also played a solid game of bridge and led the group with Steve Parsons solving the day's Guardian cryptic crossword. Outdoors Dave loved to play cricket but sadly whilst fielding he slipped, much to our amusement but sadly dislocated his shoulder – he loved cricket for the rest of his life and was an avid watcher of Test Cricket and the limited-overs game. He also encouraged Sarah his daughter with her tennis and would often be seen playing together on the Southmead Hospital courts. Dave's scientific record will stand for itself and will be better summarised by those who knew and worked with him in the prime of his career. We are proud to be listed among Dave and Maggs' personal friends, they trusted us sufficiently to leave Sarah with us when they went to the Isle of Wight festival featuring the great Bob Dylan in August 1969. Dave and Maggs were an ideal couple Maggs supportive of Dave's work and in return Dave encouraged Maggs in her artwork. They bought a property in Caporciano, near Aquilla in Abruzzo where Maggs found a room with a beautiful view aiming to use it as a studio when they were on holiday, sadly the Aquilla earthquake damaged the property and the repair took several years as the authorities rebuilt the locals' housing first. When Dave developed renal failure then Maggs undertook the home dialysis duties but she herself became seriously unwell and passed away. We have shared good times together and the sad times. When Bar and I retired we kept in touch with what was happening in the wide world of blood science through meeting Dave and Maggs for lunch every couple of months, and when Maggs died we carried on arranging a lunch with Dave every 6 weeks or so. He missed Maggs desperately but had no self pity, he was always thinking about his work and the plight of others who may be suffering with blood disorders. His work on the aetiology of sickle cell disease and the possible filtration of the patients' blood was exciting him to the very end. In all, a remarkable career from an individual with the most incredible intelligence and memory for the literature and for the consequences of those findings. But it may not have been so! Dave recently confided in us that when he visited Geoffrey Tovey shortly before Tovey's death he told Dave that the scruffy individual they had just interviewed - just would not do! Terry and Barbara Ray Thornbury, South Glos.