Sir George was born in 1936 in Hungary. In 1956, he attended Merton College, University of Oxford to study chemistry. His early work was concerned with the development and use of fluorescent probes for the study of structure and function of membranes and enzymes. He became interested in using spectroscopic methods including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to study complex biological material. In 1974, his research paper was the first to introduce the use of NMR to study tissue metabolites. In 1981, Sir George and his fellow colleagues published the first scientific report on the clinical application of his work. This resulted in the installation of a magnet large enough to accommodate the whole human body for NMR investigations in 1983 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Sir George received numerous prestigious awards and honours for his pioneering efforts in using spectroscopic techniques for metabolic studies. Sir George was awarded the CBE in June 1993 and knighted in June 2000. He is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and is the British Heart Foundation Professor of Molecular Cardiology. He has also been awarded many distinguished prizes throughout his scientific career. He is an Honorary Member of the American Heart Association and was awarded the Citation for International Achievement.

Since 1996, until his recent retirement, Sir George has been Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council in the UK.