An interview with Richard Gardner

Richard Gardner began his career as a PhD student with Bob Edwards and ran his own lab, focusing on patterning of the early mammalian embryo, at the University of Oxford from 1973 until his retirement in 2008. A Fellow of the Royal Society since 1979, he was knighted for services to Biological Sciences in 2005 and received an Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University in 2012. This year he was awarded the British Society of Developmental Biology (BSDB) Waddington Medal for major contributions to developmental biology in the UK. We caught up with him at the society's Spring Meeting in Warwick and discussed how a book of birds set him on a path to science, how his research was complemented by decades of advising government on scientific policy and why picking the right mentor in research is so important.