I am currently about to retire from my position as a genetic metabolic physician at Sydney Children’s Hospital, in Australia. This is a specialty involving many rare inherited metabolic disorders, which is expanding rapidly along with the expansion of genomic medicine. I first worked in Edinburgh, and subsequently at the Hammersmith Hospital and Postgraduate Medical School. Then I married an Australian physician and worked until the birth of our first child and later we went to Sydney. I only worked in locum GP practice over the 11 years during which I had four children. This would never happen nowadays. I was lucky to get a job within the health department in Sydney, running the newly established newborn screening service. We expanded newborn screening from the disorder Phenylketonuria (PKU) only, initially starting with hypothyroidism in 1976 and then cystic fibrosis (CF) in 1981. CF screening was highly controversial, both locally and internationally, but within two years we had shown a sharp, incontrovertible drop in morbidity and improvements in growth, which we reported in the Lancet. Our work greatly influenced the spread of CF screening throughout the world.