International Journal of Celiac Disease, 2016, Vol. 4, No. 2, 34-37 Available online at http://pubs.sciepub.com/ijcd/4/2/4 © Science and Education Publishing DOI:10.12691/ijcd-4-2-4 A Dialogue with Professor Michael N. Marsh Gabriel Samasca 1,2,* 1 Editor in Chief, International Journal of Celiac Disease, Newark, United States 2 Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine anf Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania *Corresponding author: Gabriel.Samasca@umfcluj.ro Abstract In the accordance of readers, we are introducing a new chapter in Journal, which will consist in interview with one people. The chapter will appear as needed and the people will be select by editorial board. Professor Michael N. Marsh was invited for first interview and you can find a message from this interview here. Keywords: the first interview, journal questions, a great personality Cite This Article: Gabriel Samasca, “A Dialogue with Professor Michael N. Marsh.” International Journal of Celiac Disease, vol. 4, no. 2 (2016): 617-620. doi: 10.12691/ijcd-4-2-4. 1. Professor Marsh, thank you for aggreeing to be interviewed, and for your time in answering our questions. Journal readers are well familiar with your name within the field of coeliac disease research, so the usual introductory formalities, in your case, are unnecessary. But tell us, how did you first become interested in coeliac diease? Well, that's easy. I had already decided that I preferred the metabolic side of medicine, rather than cardio- respiratory pursuits. I qualified in December 1962 from Magdalen College, Oxford University, and then worked as a junior house physician in the famous Nuffield Department of Medicine at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. That pushed my interests towards the bowel and blood in working with Leslie Witts, Sidney Truelove, John Badenoch and Sheila Callender who were important names at that time: (Another of my interests was that my future wife was one of Prof. Witts' nursing sisters on Willis ward). But now, five plus years into my career, I applied to be registrar (senior intern) to Professor Sir Christopher Booth, who was Chief of Medicine at Hammersmith Hospital, otherwise known as the Royal Post-Graduate Medical School of London. Booth, who had previously demonstrated the ileal absorption of vitamin B 12 , was now interested in coeliac disease, especially as the biopsy technique had recently revealed its characteristic mucosal changes in the small bowel. That is what I became most familiar with, and after three years, I was then offered (competitively) a Medical Research Council (UK) Travelling Fellowship which I took up in Bob Donaldson's Gastrointestinal Unit at Boston City Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts in the Fall of 1970. There I worked with Jerry Trier who enjoyed worldwide expertise in mucosal anatomy. It was a fantastic place to be! There were about 40 departmental fellows from around the world who subsequently all went back to their origins in continuing GI work and setting up their own university departments. With Trier, I learned how to prepare specimens in Epoxy resin from which 1μm thin sections, cut with glass knives and stained with toluidine blue, could be examined with oil-immersion optics. That technique, which was like using transmission EM at low power (1-2,000 diameters), would play an important role in my subsequent work in the Faculty of Medicine at Manchester University, UK. That was important for my career, because when I left Hammersmith Hospital for Boston, two massive problems worried me. First, how to overcome the differences in morphology and thus apply valid, comparative morphometric measurements between normal and flat coeliac biopsies, and second, and perhaps most importantly (although its impact would only dawn on me some 20 years hence), was how the gluten-induced "infiltrated" lesions of dermatitis herpetiformis (described 1970) could possibly be linked – if at all - with the "classic" flat biopsy which had then been in play for over 20 years. All this would additionally involve the setting up of a computerised image-analysis system for precise mucosal measurement, and the realisation of a methodology through which I would be responsible in achieving those future aims. 2. What has been the most important finding in coeliac disease? That rather sounds to me like a leading question! I think, undoubtedly, the introduction of the biopsy technique allowing fresh tissue from the small intestine to be taken from unanaesthetised human subjects. That really did open up the field. Before he died, I managed to telephone William Crosby at his American home, for two reasons: I wanted a photograph because no-one knew what he looked like (he did reply to that by saying his wife did!)