Professor Mike Gale FRS retired from the John Innes Centre, Norwich, U.K., on 25 August, 2003, after a long and distinguished 35-year career in cereal genetics. Mike joined the former Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge in 1968 after completing a B.Sc. at the University of Birmingham and a Ph.D. at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. His original interest at the Plant Breeding Institute was in the genetic control of secondary metabolites, however, he soon began a program of research into genetic dwarfism in wheat, producing the first genetic maps for the Norin 10 semidwarfing loci in the late 1970s. This period also saw the development of global collaborations with the cereal research community, which have been a continuous theme of Mike's career. He was a founding member of the International Symposium on Preharvest Sprouting in Cereals, the very successful Plant and Animal Genome conferences in San Diego, and the International Grass Genome Initiative. In addition, Mike holds consultancies and board memberships too numerous to mention.

Mike's outstanding contribution to cereal genetics grew from his early recognition of the need for improved genetic marker technologies. Following early success with isoenzymes, he greatly expanded marker technologies in wheat with the first applications of RFLPs in the late 1980s. The subsequent geometric growth in the scale and precision of the genetic map of wheat was largely driven by Mike's group. The wheat RFLP maps rapidly revealed unexpected synteny, effectively providing a single linkage map for each chromosome, triplicated across the homoeologous A, B, and D genomes. This research was quickly followed by the discovery that the same linkage groups could be used to construct the RFLP map of rye via a limited number of simple translocations and inversions. Extension of the technology to barley and millet, together with collaborations with cereal-mapping groups worldwide, founded the new science of comparative genomics. Together with Graham Moore and Katrien Devos, Mike was coauthor of the 'crop circle' model for chromosome evolution in the grasses. His immediate legacy is, thus, the genetic alignment of all cereals with rice, the model monocot genome sequence.

Mike also has pursued an active administrative career in parallel with his scientific contributions. He became the first Head of the Department of Cereals Research at the then Institute of Plant Science Research in 1988 following the privatization of the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, and then Head of the Cambridge Laboratory at the John Innes Centre in 1992 after the Department was transferred to Norwich. Mike was subsequently Associate Director of Research of the John Innes Centre and also Director in 1999. His prolific output includes more than 200 refereed papers and book chapters. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1996, a Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (1998), and a Professorial Fellow of the University of East Anglia (1999). He has been awarded the Royal Agricultural Society Research Medal (1994), the Rank Nutrition Prize (1997), and the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1998). Happily, Mike continues with us at the John Innes Centre as an Emeritus Research Fellow and can still be found in his office or traveling, making distinguished contributions to the administration of international agricultural research, when, of course, not on the golf course.