Aileen I met Aileen in 1981 in Canada, when she started her PhD at the Cancer Research Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. We hit it off immediately - she was a good-looking, lively, feisty, independent woman, full of confidence. She had a lot of life experience already. Her own mother had died of breast cancer when Aileen was only 13, so she had grown up quickly. She had done a degree at University of Toronto, and to pay her way through college she worked as a barmaid in the rowdy New Windsor tavern in Toronto where a lot of bands played live, and she loved the action and the music. Then she worked as a technician at McMaster University in Hamilton, - and this is for the scientists here - she had worked in the early days of tyrosine kinase research and she told us hair-raising stories of the amounts of 32P orthophosphate they had used to label cells to study phosphorylated proteins. She picked up a lot of life skills and lab skills along the way. And she was full of life. She would bounce into a room, full of energy and spark, and light up the place. She became the nucleus of a wonderful group of friends at Western and we worked hard and played hard together. Aileen was a person you could always depend on to be there for you, to pitch in and help you out. She had this fearless, Canadian pioneer spirit of self-reliance: if something needed doing she'd roll up her sleeves and do it. When I met her she drove a huge old Chevy BelAir with a giant 6-litre V8 engine, that had been a company car for CN, the Canadian rail company, and which was still in its bright orange livery. She called it the Pumpkin. Everybody at the university knew Aileen and the Pumpkin. Remember - this was before the days of mobile phones, so if you broke down, you'd have to sort yourself out, and I recall Aileen nonchalantly telling us how she had had a flat tire and changed it, by herself, at night in the dark, on this 2-ton-plus car. She was a strong person, physically and mentally. In the lab she was incredibly green fingered at getting complex techniques to work, and so she became a fount of knowledge and experience, helping people throughout the building. She and I worked together as friends and colleagues for well over a year, but in time we fell in love and we became a couple - in fact we started living together 32 years ago today, December 23rd 1982. Later, we got married in Toronto, in a snowstorm, and everyone had to wear snowboots to the wedding, and for our honeymoon in Quebec City we drove there, in the Pumpkin, almost getting us both killed in a blizzard. It was a memorable time. Aileen did well in her PhD working on viral DNA replication in mouse cells, but she wanted to change fields and work in developmental biology so she won a postdoc job in Oxford. We had no spare money, but these were the days of 100% mortgages, so we bought our first house - a little cottage in a village north of Oxford, which Aileen loved. She fell in love with England - its houses, gardens, its churches and history. And again she nucleated a fantastic group of friends. In Oxford she worked on fly developmental genetics but then moved again to work on mouse embryology. She became expert in both fields, all the time working with world leaders and winning their respect and affection. She relished the challenges involved in learning these new disciplines, and in being a fantastic team player. After we moved back to Canada, to Calgary, Aileen became a mother and realised a new ambition. She was an excellent scientist, but I know Aileen would say that her best two experiments were our children Lucy and Michael. She was utterly devoted to them. But Aileen hungered for England: she loved it here, and she, more than me, was the driving force for us to come back to the UK when the opportunity arose. The decision came after we had spent a sabbatical in Oxford, and she told me not so long ago that those 6 months with the 2 unruly children, who were 4 and 2 at the time and a real handful - this was one of the best times of her life. So we came to Norwich and settled. Aileen loved it here - our house, the city, the neighbourhood, our wonderful neighbours Neil and Angela. She loved everything about being in England, the faster pace of life, the telly, the Guardian quiz, the sense of humour and the daily banter. She was delighted when she got her British passport (even though the Home Office lost our marriage certificate in the process). She revelled in history. Many are the times I sat in the car entertaining the children while she went off to explore a church she had spotted while we were driving somewhere. Aileen switched from being a researcher herself to being an administrator on big projects. And though she said the job was ridiculously easy (no offence David and Sharon) - for her the best part was the people that she worked with. So for about 5 years she commuted every weekday to Cambridge and back, because she loved being a part of those super teams. She loved the action, and the cameraderie, and helping to deliver world-leading science. She came to enjoy the commute with her train buddies - especially Train Buddy Liz - and she loved the East Anglian landscape as the seasons changed. And then there is her cancer. She hated having cancer. Most of you here didn't know she was so ill, but that's because she was determined not to dwell on it, and she wanted for it not to be the focus of anyone else's attention either. She just wanted to get on with life as if it wasn't there. She fought it with her customary Canadian grittiness. We will all miss you Aileen - a wonderful scientist, wife, friend, and mother. But we thank you for the joy and the special memories you have given so many people.