Born and raised in Nottingham, England, Gerry Shaw was always interested in biology. His mother's dream was that he become "a priest or a doctor." After receiving what Gerry calls his "Phony Doctor" (PhD), Gerry began a career in biochemistry. In 1999 he founded Encor BioTechnology, which develops antibodies to help identify specific proteins in order to study them. "I never know what I'm doing," says Gerry, "I just blunder into things."

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:24

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:41

This morning I have our guest Gerry Shaw from Encor BioTechnology. And as you'll soon discover from hearing Jerry talk, Jerry is not from here. Welcome Jerry.

Gerry Shaw: 0:51

Thank you very much.

Richard Miles: 0:51

So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from, sort of, what were you like as a kid, all the great things that happened to you before you became an inventor?

Gerry Shaw: 0:59

Well, uh, I was born in Nottingham, England, so I'm British obviously, and that explains my Downton Abbey accident and um...

Richard Miles: 1:08

Which by the way, as you well learned all Americans think Brits are smarter than they are based on their accent, right?

Gerry Shaw: 1:14

Yes. I never really understood that, but that's certainly people seem to think that for some reason, I don't know why. Anyway, so, uh, as a kid I was very interested in zoology and I'd go off into the woods and onto the palms and I catch little animals and put them in jam jars and look at them and study them. So when I got to be a bit older I decided that I wanted to study living things. So I had a degree in zoology in one of the London universities and then I moved to another London University. So Originally University College London and King's College London. My second degree was a PhD, so I did that in a zoology department. But as it turns out it was the same department where the DNA work was done. It was the biophysics department where Rosalind Franklin, if you know the story, actually made the picture that became the basis of Watson and Crick's elucidation of the 3D structure of DNA, which was probably the most important finding that anybody ever made in biology because the structure immediately told you basically how DNA works. Uh, that was happening about the time I was born. And I went to this lab about 20 years later and some of the people there knew this whole story, some of the original equipment was there, you know, sort of an interesting place to be a young scientist.

Richard Miles: 2:29

Did this run in the family? I mean, what did your parents do? Were they scientists or any of your siblings? Did they also pursue science?

Gerry Shaw: 2:37

No... A bit of entrepreneurialship in the family. I guess my brother runs a internet company. Uh, my father was a surgical appliance maker, which meant we had a good occupation during the war because a lot of people needed a new plastic legs and arms and things. And My mother was a nurse so she works in a ho