INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM AND DISCOVERY
Q. How did that foundation of learning at Winchester then set you up for your future?
G: I think it meant that I had a need to succeed because I wanted to prove everyone right for their belief in me. For my future career in medicine, I had to do a lot of hard learning, but also it required a sense of balance as well. I had a sense that there was lots of other stuff out there that was fun and interesting and whilst I might need to do vast amounts of academic work, I would try and make sure that it was fun on the way through.
Q: How have the values of Winchester College shaped your approach to your profession and your contribution to the world?
G: I definitely have a feeling of a need for service and that I should leave this world a better place than it might have been but for my existence. I think that comes from school as much as it came from home.
I came out of Winchester College being able to talk to many different people and I don ' t know whether it’ s from Winchester, but I love making links between people. I love joining people up. I love introducing people and creating opportunities simply by introducing people who don ' t know each other professionally, socially or intellectually. I have a sort of excitement around creating opportunities and also a sense of trying to mentor people.
Q: Speaking today, how are you making a difference through your work at UCL and particularly through your work with glaucoma?
G: I often say to my juniors that every patient interaction conducted well makes a positive difference, even if it ' s just for the most trivial of things. Medically trivial is not necessarily so for the patient and people remember this.
What ' s mundane and routine for us is often a major life experience that they will remember for all time.
On a personal level, I think I ' ve tried to do research that is very deliberately and intentionally related to the patient. I dabbled with lab work in Oxford for a year before I went up to Cambridge and I found it intellectually fascinating, but too remote from my reality. When I started meeting patients three years after that in clinical work, I realised that actually I wanted to do clinical research that had some degree of immediacy of impact.
In my work I do a lot of randomised control trials. I ' m comparing two treatments to work out which ones are better. The big success I had in my life was a trial called the LiGHT, published in The Lancet in 2019. That trial changed how we treat glaucoma across the world and made glaucoma treatments incrementally better.
I looked after the Glaucoma Service through Covid and that made a big impact. With my colleague Dr Hari Jayaram and others, we were able to dismantle and rebuild the service. In a way, that has made it much safer, much more efficient with fewer delays for diagnosis and a much more robust service for patients.
Lastly, I have had the genuine privilege of taking uncertain junior trainees, as I once was, and building them up to have the confidence to make decisions, do surgery, believe in themselves and go out there and do the same thing again.
In the next decade, we ' ll see a tremendous shift in the ability to aggregate and use data to guide what we do. At the moment, we have research studies and research trials from which we draw inferences and conclusions, but I think we ' re going to be able to do that from
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