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7 November 1925 to 9 May 2022

DSc, MD, PhD, MB ChB, FRCA ( Hon), FGS, FRCS(Hon), FANZCA (Hon), FCAI(Hon)

Dr John Francis Nunn died after an acute episode of respiratory failure. He had spent the last four years of his life in residential care due to progressive vascular dementia.

John read medicine at Birmingham University, during which period he developed passions for climbing and geology. On graduation he went to Svalbard on a geological expedition as medical officer and ‘rock carrier’.

He returned to Birmingham to undertake his house jobs and, having married in 1949, went to Penang in lieu of conventional national service. There he became an anaesthetist, learning the art by hands-on experience and the science by correspondence with seniors back home.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is the latest iteration freely available on the internet. Trained using transformer architecture, it generates human-like text by sifting through terabytes of data and billions of written works from internet sources¹ – many from familiar authors – to create human-like answers to prompts or questions.

As an experiment, I prompted ChatGPT to write this article, and it produced a not-terrible piece of work – although Reader, you will be reassured to know that this publication is man-made.

For your enjoyment, here is an example of a prompt related to anaesthesia: