In 1976, Beale was awarded a Royal Society Visiting Professorship to spend six months at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, lecturing on his Edinburgh work on the genetics of malaria parasites. During this visit he began a collaborative research programme on malaria parasites with some interested Thai scientists, including Professor Sodsri Thaithong. Beale would visit Bangkok annually for the following 20 years to assist with the work, which involved making collections of Plasmodium falciparum from different malarial endemic areas of Thailand and characterising the cultured parasites in various ways, including enzyme typing and drug resistance testing. Ultimately, over 1000 separate isolates were obtained and preserved in liquid nitrogen. Beale also developed a new technique for preparing pure clones of malaria parasites by micromanipulation (Beale and Thaithing, 1991). The malaria work led to a great deal of collaboration between the two research groups in Edinburgh and Thailand, and in 1992 Beale and Thaithong published a book summarising their work. Beale received an honorary doctorate from Chulalongkorn University in 1996.