Derek Gatherer learned his trade as a molecular biologist in Glasgow, London, Quito, Warwick and Cambridge, after which he was a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University from 1996-1999. He has been a lecturer in the Division of Biomedical & Life Sciences at Lancaster University since 2013 and a Fellow of its Institute for Social Futures since 2019. Between 1999 and 2013 he worked as a capitalist running dog in the pharmaceutical industry and then as a faceless bureaucrat for the UK Medical Research Council. Since his first undergraduate paper in the journal Human Genetics in 1986, he has published over 120 articles, 17 of which have been cited more than 100 times each, with an overall h-index of 40 by end-2022. Since 2014, he has also taken to the airwaves, giving over 300 TV and radio interviews for the BBC, Sky, LBC, CNN, PBS, Aljazeera, Deutsche Welle, TRT World and France24 among others.