Blazing a golden trail of success, Vicky goes first to Cambridge, then to St Thomas' Hospital in London for her clinical medical training. She discovers the thrill of research - a consuming passion when, by now a junior doctor, she is offered a research fellowship at St Bartholomew's Hospital (London) and the opportunity to do original work. Married to the love of her life, fulfilled in her work and with many friends Vicky's enthusiastic personality makes her 'A rare experience' for her colleagues.

Vicky's years at Cambridge were even more dazzling. She achieved a double first and won all the prizes she entered for. She worked hard and she played hard. She had brains, money and an exotic image. She embarked on her new social life with great gusto. She met her best friend, Alison, on the day she went up for her entrance interview and Tim, her husband-to-be, in her first week as a Fresher. From then on they were inseparable and two years after coming down from Cambridge, while she was still studying for her medical qualifications and Tim was doing his legal articles, they married.

Her star quality earned her the pick of the London house officer jobs, enabling her to follow the so-called `golden trail' which culminated in October 1976 with the offer of a coveted post as rotating registrar in Medicine at Barts. The consultants for whom she worked during that period were impressed by her abilities. She gained a reputation for extraordinary thoroughness in taking notes and finding out all she could about her patients. She loved the close involvement with people and the feeling that she was helping them. Now she had passed her membership exams for the Royal College of Physicians she was all set to start her career proper in medicine.

Before the end of her year on the training programme, Vicky was offered a research fellowship. It was an offer too good to refuse and it was in an area of medicine that Vicky found very interesting. The department was just then at the beginning of researching into naturally occurring opioid peptides in the brain tissue - endorphins and enkephalins - which it was believed could be harnessed to act as pain relievers. They had recently developed an assay (measurement test) for one of them and now needed to do the same for another one called met-enkephalin. Her boss, Professor Besser, suggested that Vicky should have a go.

Without further ado she settled into the laboratory and, under the guidance of senior colleagues, worked phenomenally hard to produce an assay. Before the year was out her efforts had met with success; she devised the world's first specific assay for this compound. She then proceeded to study its mechanism as a pain reliever. Her research led her into contact and later collaboration with a Hong Kong neurologist called Dr Wen who had been investigating the effects of acupuncture on heroin addicts.

Three years after she had joined the department she was awarded a fellowship from the Medical Research Council and appointed an honorary lecturer with senior registrar status. In 1980 papers appeared in both The Lancet and Nature in which, as lead author, she described the research which led her to establish, among other things, that there was a physiological link between acupuncture and pain relief. A flurry of other papers written by her, together with other members of the department, and relating to various aspects of her work, appeared in a number of scientific journals at around the same time. They were followed up by invitations from various learned societies to give papers at several international congresses.

Such a brief summary of Vicky's achievements in those six action-packed years at Barts hardly does justice to the sheer volume of work that she put in, neither does it reflect the extraordinary energy and enthusiasm with which she addressed herself to every task. Her colleagues remember her with a mixture of awe and delight.

Vicky would arrive for work on her Honda two-stroke motor bike, a slight figure in an orange motor cycle jacket, rain-proof trousers and a white-peaked helmet which, when doffed, revealed a pretty young `girl' - she was then in her late twenties - who looked so different from the conventional medical stereotype no one at first could quite fathom who she was. She was always on the go, darting from laboratories to offices to wards in the sprawling Barts complex.

Professor Besser expected his registrars to combine their research with clinical medicine so that they could accrue the necessary accreditations to become consultants. In Vicky's case this meant that on top of a more than full-time research schedule which made very rigorous intellectual demands on her, she was also looking after patients, giving to them all the empathetic attention and care she had given them in her previous posts. Being Vicky, she put 100 per cent plus into everything she did. Persevering and painstakingly thorough to the point of obsession, she set herself extremely high standards of performance. Quite naturally, therefore, as it seemed to her, she expected the same pitch of perfection from her colleagues and others who worked for her. Her energy was inexhaustible.

Despite this daunting profile of excellence, Vicky was saved from being an insufferable prig by her sense of humour and her genuine caring concern for others, particularly patients. Her uninhibited enthusiasm was also very infectious. One of her colleagues recalls: `She would get very excited about the latest result and come and bang on my door and say, 'you must come and see this'. You couldn't resist her.'

Another describes her as `one of those rare experiences you have in life. She was exactly the sort of person you need to keep you on your mettle.' Vicky had found a cause: she had an opportunity to push forward the frontiers of science just a fraction and she wanted to share her excitement and her discoveries with anyone who was interested.

The future beckoned to her with glittering promises. And then it was all taken from her. Her life span had been reduced to three months…if she was lucky.