Professor Sir George Porter

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a scientist. Born sixty nine years ago, the son of a Yorkshire builder, he went via a scholarship to his local grammar school, to Leeds University, and wartime service in the Navy. Here, in the long watches of the night, he made up his mind that what he wanted to do with his life was pure scientific research.

Presenter0:48

That decision gave the world an important discovery, and its author great honor. In nineteen sixty seven he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of flash photolysis, the means of recording chemical changes in tiny fragments of time.

Presenter1:04

But far from being a remote boffin, this is a man who wants the world to share his love of science and its wonders. He is the President of the Royal Society, Professor Sir George Porter.

Presenter1:15

Sir George, is that a a a love and wonder which continues, which you go on experiencing, even after more than fifty years in the business, as it were?

Professor Sir George Porter1:23

Oh, certainly. It ha it hasn't diminished at all.

Presenter1:26

Your lectures have, I think, been renowned almost as much for their theatricality, the the flashes and the bangs, as for their learning. Patently you enjoy that side of your work.

Professor Sir George Porter1:36

I hope there's a little learning as well. Yes, I do. I of course I'm fortunate in that um I work at flashes and bangs. Chemistry is a marvellous subject from that point of view.

Professor Sir George Porter1:45

And it was the excitement and the flashes and the bangs and the rather dramatic experiments of chemistry which attracted me to it in the first place when I was very, very young.

Presenter1:54

Can you remember your first chemistry lesson?

Professor Sir George Porter1:56

Well, I was doing chemistry before I had a lesson.

Professor Sir George Porter2:00

I started doing chemistry as a lot of people do, just a a chemistry set. I can remember my first chemistry lesson, nevertheless, which was at the age of ten or so at my grammar school.

Professor Sir George Porter2:12

And it was an absolute inspiration. It's an example of how important.

Professor Sir George Porter2:19

The first teachers in a subject are

Professor Sir George Porter2:22

The teacher in this case was mister Moore. I remember him very well.

Professor Sir George Porter2:26

And he uh

Professor Sir George Porter2:28

without giving us any lectures or reading any books or anything else, started us on the first experiment. He gave us some beautiful blue crystals and told us

Professor Sir George Porter2:36

to find out all we could about them.

Professor Sir George Porter2:39

And it was very exciting indeed.

Presenter2:42

Well, depending, I suppose, on on the location of your desert island, and that's up to you, you you could get a ringside seat for a few spectacular storms, a few flashes and bangs, but that's probably the most that uh that we can offer. Otherwise, I suspect life might be a little uneventful for you.

Professor Sir George Porter2:52

Yeah.

Professor Sir George Porter2:57

Yeah.

Presenter2:57

I don't think so. I'm really looking forward to it.

Presenter3:01

So. But could you manage to look after yourself? One never knows with scientists. They divide themselves, it seems to me, into two distinct groups. They're they're either very practical or they just can't even make a cup of instant coffee.

Professor Sir George Porter3:09

Just

Professor Sir George Porter3:11

I shall have a little bit of difficulty. I'm not a very practical man. I'm a sort of

Professor Sir George Porter3:15

String and ceiling wreck sort of person.

Presenter3:18

However, you know a good dance tune when you hear it, as I see from your first record.

Professor Sir George Porter3:23

Yes. Well, uh we're talking about early days and uh I associate the thirties and and forties very much with

Professor Sir George Porter3:32

Dancing and the cinema, of course, and cinema if you were lucky.

Professor Sir George Porter3:36

You um heard the big bands at both of these, the big bands of Hollywood and if you're luckier still, you probably heard Gershwin. So my first choice is some

Professor Sir George Porter3:47

Foot tingling music of George Gershwin.

Presenter4:44

George Gershwin's Bidin' My Time, with Andrew Lytton and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. You're well known, I have discovered, Sir George, for your expertise on the dance floor to such numbers.

Professor Sir George Porter4:54

I learned about expertise. I never had a lesson in my life, but I used to enjoy it enormously. We all did.

Professor Sir George Porter5:01

In those days, the thirties and forties through the war and and into the fifties there were tea dances, there were village hops, there were uh dinner dances. You almost always had a little floor when you went out for dinner.

Presenter5:16

Well, now I tried to uh sum up in my introduction the research which eventually brought you the Nobel Prize in nineteen sixty seven. Flash photolysis, it's called. Can you explain, Sir George, how it works?

Professor Sir George Porter5:29

Well, there are many, many uh chemical changes which occur very rapidly indeed. And uh when I began doing chemical research so rapidly that there was no hope of uh following them at all and uh knowing that they were there and that includes the the substances that are taking part.

Presenter5:49

What a millionth of a second.

Professor Sir George Porter5:51

We started with a thousandth and then a millionth of a second, but one of the great things uh that's kept me going uh through the years has been the pushing of that barrier of time uh to smaller and smaller times. With the invention of the laser, it was possible to go from a millionth of a second to a billionth of a second, which is called a nanosecond.

Professor Sir George Porter6:12

and then to a trillionth of a second, which is called a picosecond and then to a thousandth of that. Now we are down to the absolute limit of time as far as chemistry is concerned, a femtosecond, which is a millionth of a millionth of a second.

Presenter6:28

And what are we talking about changes in, in in in anything, in a growing thing, or in a crystal?

Professor Sir George Porter6:35

If you hit any substance with light of the right wavelength, something will happen. It'll be excited, as we say, or it'll be split into parts. And then you go away and come back a a millionth of a second later, and the second half of the flash is used as a probe to see what has happened.

Presenter6:55

So that if you did this to a leaf you could see what happened as light hit it and how it changed and how it grew.

Professor Sir George Porter7:01

That's right. Almost everything i that that is photochemistry

Professor Sir George Porter7:07

Happens in a billionth of a second after the sun has hit the leaf. So it's all very fast. If you want to know how.

Professor Sir George Porter7:13

Photosynthesis works you've got to look at these very short times.

Presenter7:16

But now how did you come across this flash photolysis? I mean, was there a moment when you might have looked up and shouted Eureka?

Professor Sir George Porter7:24

Yes, in a way there was. I'd been a radar officer in the navy.

Professor Sir George Porter7:29

Radar is pulses a millionth of a second long of radio waves, and I knew all the techniques that were available for handling those pulses. Then I came back and I was given the problem of looking at these very short lived chemical substances by traditional methods.

Professor Sir George Porter7:46

And it just clicked.

Presenter7:48

Can you remember where you were when you were

Professor Sir George Porter7:49

Yes, I was in the railway station hotel in Preston.

Professor Sir George Porter7:54

I'd gone up to pick up some powerful lamps that I was using in ordinary photochemistry, and I went round Siemens' Lamp Works, and they showed me the flash lamps, you see. I went back to my hotel, and believe me, there's nothing else to do but sit and think in the railway station hotel in Preston, or there was in only that in those days, and um it all clicked.

Professor Sir George Porter8:17

Let's have your second record then.

Professor Sir George Porter8:19

My second record is the first one that I ever bought. And I could afford a record. I had a wind-up grammar phone.

Professor Sir George Porter8:28

And I bought some s a set of seventy eights of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, and it I bought it partly because when I was a student some of the first concerts I went to were by Moisevich and this particular recording, a very old one, now, which I played on the quarter deck every day of uh when I was in the navy is of Beethoven's uh fifth concerto by Moisevich.

Presenter9:53

Benno Moisevich playing part of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. five with the London Philharmonic conducted by Georg Sell. That recording was made in nineteen forty.

Presenter10:03

I said, Sir George, that you went to the village school. Um this was in in Stainforth, in in Yorkshire.

Professor Sir George Porter10:09

That's right.

Presenter10:09

What was it like your first school?

Professor Sir George Porter10:12

It was um called the Tin Lizzy. Uh it was not a very grand school at all. It was uh in a mining village.

Professor Sir George Porter10:22

We had a large stove, iron stove, in the middle, which kept us all warm. But it was a tin hut, was it? It was a tin hut, yes. It was a big, large tin hut. And you won a scholarship from there? Yes.

Professor Sir George Porter10:35

to the grammar school. I was uh because of my birthday I was rather young, so I was the I was the youngest boy and the smallest for that matter in the grammar school when I went. Your parents must have been very proud.

Presenter10:45

Your parents must have been very proud of you.

Professor Sir George Porter10:47

Uh yes, my father particularly. Neither of them were um educated beyond the normal thirteen or so of leaving school. But my father recognised the importance of education very much, and he tried terribly hard to help me uh as long as he could with uh my swatting for exams exams.

Presenter11:06

What did he do?

Professor Sir George Porter11:08

He bought a bus, an old bus, which he put in in the garden and he rigged out with a chemical bench and so forth. So I had a laboratory and a bus.

Presenter11:20

Now your father was a a very religious man, wasn't he?

Professor Sir George Porter11:22

Yes. He was Methodist, Wesleyan Methodist, and he was a lay preacher.

Presenter11:27

So you were brought up a a good chapel going lad?

Professor Sir George Porter11:31

Ah, yes. Well, the chapel going mad.

Presenter11:34

Is there room now for God in your world?

Professor Sir George Porter11:36

No, no.

Professor Sir George Porter11:39

The transition was again rather abrupt, at the age of about fourteen.

Professor Sir George Porter11:43

I'd been brought up so much in this world, but I'd begun to think that it it was almost like giving up smoking or something. One had to make a decision there and then that you you do believe or you don't, because there are no half measures about the the belief in the of the Meth Wesleyan Methodists. So I I made this decision. I remember actually standing

Professor Sir George Porter12:06

In front of a window and saying, God, I

Professor Sir George Porter12:12

I'm finding it very hard to believe that you're there. Please give me some sign that you are otherwise I shall have to sue your knot. And I got no sign.

Presenter12:23

And have you never had second thoughts about that since?

Professor Sir George Porter12:25

No.

Presenter12:27

And has perhaps your your scientific training and and your discovery that there is quite often a logical explanation?

Presenter12:35

For certain things that we don't always understand. Has that um

Presenter12:38

helped you cast God out, as it were.

Professor Sir George Porter12:40

Well, yes, I suppose uh the two are connected, but uh just because there isn't a scientific explanation doesn't cause me to believe uh in a religion which doesn't give me an explanation either. And I I I don't know any case

Professor Sir George Porter12:57

aware a problem that at the moment can't be solved by science I think most problems will be solved by science eventually I don't know any case where such a problem is solved by a religious belief either because if you can't understand the creation, which we certainly can't in full

Professor Sir George Porter13:14

To say that uh God did it doesn't help in the least, because then you have to ask who created God. It's just as primitive as that.

Presenter13:22

Would you then agree that that your religion is science?

Professor Sir George Porter13:26

Yes, insofar as a religion is a set of beliefs by which you live.

Professor Sir George Porter13:32

I do believe very much in the pursuit of knowledge by.

Professor Sir George Porter13:39

scientific or by any method

Professor Sir George Porter13:41

but a a logical one. I I I do not believe in supernatural phenomena.

Presenter13:48

Your next record, please.

Professor Sir George Porter13:51

Yes, well, uh we meant you mentioned uh that I was in the navy and uh I really rather enjoyed

Professor Sir George Porter13:58

In my early training at uh Pompey Barracks in Portsmouth, uh, having first put my uniform on, marching to those marvellous uh Royal Marine bands up and down the square, square bashing, so I would like to hear the band of the Royal Marines at Portsmouth playing Trafalgar.

Presenter15:06

The band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines, Portsmouth, directed by Captain LT Lambert, playing Trafalgar. You you spent the war, Sir George, um, following your degree from Leeds, chasing U boats, I think.

Professor Sir George Porter15:18

As in uh convoy escort vessels, sloops and uh frigates and destroyers, yes.

Presenter15:24

Was it terrifying?

Professor Sir George Porter15:25

It's enjoyable in many ways. Well, I terrible thing to say about war, I suppose, but I I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Professor Sir George Porter15:32

I suppose I was lucky I never got my feet wet. If I had been uh blown up once or twice I might have uh been less enthusiastic about it.

Professor Sir George Porter15:41

The great thing I got out of the Navy was a chance to sort myself out.

Professor Sir George Porter15:47

I was able to well, I did a lot of reading that I hadn't been able to do. I read a lot of poetry, which I hadn't done much of before, a lot of philosophy, religious books, and so forth, to sort myself out finally on on that problem. Throughout the course of all this, I was able to come to a very clear conclusion that the pursuit of knowledge is the main thing that matters. We we really don't know why we are here. We don't know what it's all about. And there's only one way of dealing with this, and that's to do a research and try and find out.

Presenter16:25

But now you've criticised government and industry in recent years for not putting enough money into that kind of research. They all want quick results, don't they?

Speaker 316:33

They all want

Presenter16:35

want to put their money into applied science because that's where you get the results.

Speaker 116:38

Hmm.

Speaker 316:38

Yeah.

Presenter16:39

You said in a lecture not very long ago that Britain has downgraded the pursuit of knowledge in deference to the pursuit of affluence.

Professor Sir George Porter16:47

That's right. I I believe knowledge will lead to affluence. But we do tend to go for the affluence uh before we have the knowledge either to invent something new or indeed to control what we have invented. I think sometimes we market things before we really understand everything about them that we need to know from the point of view of safety or the environment.

Presenter17:10

Can you give me an example of it?

Professor Sir George Porter17:12

Well, uh CFCs would be a good example. Chlorofluorocarbons, you know, the one the the things we have in aerosol sprays which get into the into the ozone layer and have now been proved and found to decompose in the stratosphere to give chlorine and destroy the ozone.

Professor Sir George Porter17:30

But we would not have discovered that uh without basic research and uh without the science base. The the ClO which is uh created there in the stratosphere and which destroys the ozone was researched forty years ago. In fact, uh it was I who in that case uh discovered the molecule as one of the first things that I did with flash photolysis. And uh it was great fun and it was a lovely molecule. They had a marvellous picture of a spectrum of it, but quite useless knowledge.

Presenter18:06

At least that's what you thought then.

Professor Sir George Porter18:08

That's what I thought then. Uh but it turned out to be what uh has since been called the smoking gun. It it i it w it is the molecule which uh is there in the

Professor Sir George Porter18:19

Antarctic and correlates extremely accurately with the destruction of the ozone there in the spring.

Presenter18:28

Some more music.

Professor Sir George Porter18:30

In Cambridge I used to sing.

Professor Sir George Porter18:32

with the Cambridge University Musical Society. One thing we sang, which I would like to hear, was great joy. Uh we sang it in King's College Chapel, which itself is an acoustical miracle, and it's Beethoven's ninth, the choral.

Presenter19:44

The Ode to Joy, Beethoven's ninth symphony with the Vienna singers and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

Presenter19:51

You were twenty years at the Royal Institution, Sir George, as its director, where you you lived above the shop, I think.

Professor Sir George Porter19:57

Yes, uh it's a magnificent flat. The building was built by Count Bumford in seventeen ninety nine, and he uh very uh kindly built a beautiful flat on the second floor for the director.

Presenter20:11

But it was at the Royal Institution, wasn't it, where this this theatricality of yours, this sense of fun to do with the flashes and bangs of chemistry, came into play. You enjoyed entertaining school children. Oh, very much.

Professor Sir George Porter20:21

Oh, very much. Yes, yes. I felt it was worth doing too. And and adults. The discourses there on Friday nights are rather grand occasions.

Professor Sir George Porter20:33

People dress up and put on dinner jackets and so on, and uh d some used to say, Well, this is rather silly. I mean, this is a scientific lecture, why are we putting on black tie or even white tie for a scientific lecture? And I used to say, You're doing honour to science in the same way as uh an orchestra or even the audience at Covent Garden might be doing honour to music.

Presenter20:55

You've made television programmes, you've been

Professor Sir George Porter20:57

Yeah.

Presenter20:57

an inspiration behind the Young Scientist of the Year competition, and so on. So you always trying to popularize science in all these various forms. And yet and you've said it yourself quite recently, may I quote you most of the population are ignorant of science, and many have that extreme form of fear, ignorance.

Presenter21:17

And why do you think that is? Why does it go on being so?

Professor Sir George Porter21:20

I think the simple answer is our educational system. At the age of about fourteen.

Professor Sir George Porter21:26

A boy or girl has to make a decision.

Professor Sir George Porter21:29

To do science, or not to do science, which is ridiculous, of course. He doesn't he hard he hasn't had a lot of science anyway to know what it is.

Professor Sir George Porter21:38

and to give up everything for science.

Professor Sir George Porter21:42

is as crazy as to give up all science for s for for something else. So I believe very strongly in a much m broader syllabus

Professor Sir George Porter21:54

Of the type that used to be called matriculation, I think the entry to a university should be five subjects.

Professor Sir George Porter22:00

This has been said by committee after committee. But you must have.

Presenter22:04

I said it too to say

Professor Sir George Porter22:07

Over and over again, yes.

Presenter22:08

Why hasn't it happened?

Professor Sir George Porter22:09

Well

Professor Sir George Porter22:10

The thing is there have been so many upheavals recently that the poor teachers are a bit stretched. And Kenneth Baker's uh answer when we talked about this was yes, it's

Professor Sir George Porter22:23

It would be a good thing, but we can't do any more change at the moment because of the teachers who are already overstretched. And you see, this is the vicious circle.

Professor Sir George Porter22:33

If children are not taking sons, not enough children are taking and that is that is certainly the case, the profession which suffers first is teaching.

Professor Sir George Porter22:43

People go to do research or or into i well paid industry and so forth, if they can, before they go into teaching, I'm afraid. And there's no doubt about it. We're going to be terribly short of chemistry and physics and mathematics teachers in the next few years.

Presenter22:59

But I wonder if there isn't a a broader bias against the sciences anyway, that uh a broader bias in favor of the arts. Perhaps because it's easier for people to manage their ignorance i in the world of the arts as opposed to science. Uh the one is a matter of opinion, the other is a matter of fact.

Professor Sir George Porter23:04

Uh

Speaker 123:04

Yeah.

Professor Sir George Porter23:15

Yes, you're right. The science is having a rough ride at the moment.

Professor Sir George Porter23:19

Chemistry, you see beautiful subject of chemistry. Chemistry is about crystals and molecules and atoms and colours and so forth. But in most people's minds it's pollution and and those own lairs and uh stinks and so forth.

Professor Sir George Porter23:38

It's not surprising that it's gi becoming a little more difficult to attract people into the sciences.

Professor Sir George Porter23:44

But that can easily be cured by good teaching.

Presenter23:47

Record number five.

Professor Sir George Porter23:49

Well, another thing I used to we used to sing at Cambridge, rather fun, much very amateurish business. In my college we used to have uh uh a little group called Emmanuel Singers. Every term we put on a little concert and uh we did a lot of Gilbert and Sulliburn. It was a an all-male college in those days, and I took some extraordinary parts like Buttercup and Patience and so forth, being the nearest thing to a soprano that a tenor could be. What I've chosen is uh from the gondoliers, Dancer Cachucha Fandango Bellero, because it's rather an exciting bit of music, and I remember that was the finale of our concert.

Speaker 324:55

Go fight with this person of the land!

Presenter25:19

Dancer Cachucha Fandango Bolero from Gilbert and Sullivan's Gondoliers, sung by the Doyle Cart Opera Company, directed by Dame Bridget Doyley Cart. So you're you're a dancer, a singer, and a sailor, I believe, Sir George.

Professor Sir George Porter25:32

Yes, uh I have a thirty two footer uh sloop at the moment.

Presenter25:36

With a very special name.

Professor Sir George Porter25:38

Annabelle.

Presenter25:39

Why is she called Annabelle?

Professor Sir George Porter25:41

Well I don't tell many people this, and I'm not sure I should. Uh the origin of the boat was that I hadn't been able to afford a a large cruising boat.

Professor Sir George Porter25:52

until I got the Nobel Prize.

Professor Sir George Porter25:55

And uh

Professor Sir George Porter25:57

I was asked on arrival in Stockholm what I was going to do with it, and on the spur of the moment I said I think I'll buy myself a boat.

Professor Sir George Porter26:06

From that moment I was uh besieged by Swedish boat builders and so forth. I didn't buy a Swedish one.

Professor Sir George Porter26:14

But I so I I used uh a little some of the well, in fact quite a bit of the uh of the prize money.

Professor Sir George Porter26:21

to buy a boat and uh the prize was given. I was very grateful for this boat to

Professor Sir George Porter26:27

Alfred Nobel

Professor Sir George Porter26:29

A Nobel

Presenter26:30

Annabelle, Annabelle. Uh you sound rather guilty about it. Are you supposed to spend the prize money on m more test tubes or something?

Professor Sir George Porter26:38

No, no, it isn't that. It's just that uh I uh

Professor Sir George Porter26:42

Don't want to explain to people who don't know that I've got the Nobel Prize why I w why the name of my boat is Annabelle. I see.

Presenter26:49

I see.

Presenter26:50

Now, I said again in the introduction that you're President of the Royal Society. It wouldn't sound like a very good advert for it, really. It's an unpaid, it's an honorary post, and yet it is enormously time consuming.

Professor Sir George Porter27:00

Yes, I it it has become more and more so. It takes three days a week at least and sometimes more.

Presenter27:08

What do you have to do? What is the job?

Professor Sir George Porter27:10

We have agreements with forty-seven other countries. So the international side of it is quite quite a big thing.

Professor Sir George Porter27:16

And almost every bill in Parliament or in the House of Lords, or every question that they discuss which has any scientific content.

Professor Sir George Porter27:26

The Royal Society has asked for its opinion.

Presenter27:28

Do you also advise politicians advise the Prime Minister?

Professor Sir George Porter27:32

Yes, very frequently. We've been very much involved recently in the human embryo business. We are.

Professor Sir George Porter27:39

very concerned that um if human embryo research is stopped by the bill which is being considered with a free vote in parliament, a great deal of of medical advance will be stopped as well, and we are trying to explain this to people.

Presenter27:57

So in that sense it's a terribly powerful job.

Professor Sir George Porter27:59

It's becoming much more so than it was, I think, in the last five or ten years. I'm happy to say that the Government uh do take quite a lot of notice of what the Royal Society says. After all, you see, we have a thousand fellows, and they are, I think, give or take a few mistakes, the uh most experienced thousand scientists we have in in Britain. And therefore their advice must be useful.

Presenter28:22

I shan't ask you who the mistakes are. I shall ask you

Professor Sir George Porter28:25

Some more music instead. All right. Um, Verdi, there is one duet from Traviata that I think is absolutely wonderful, and the duet is Parigio Cara.

Presenter28:25

Simple.

Presenter28:26

Yeah.

Presenter29:29

The duet Parigi Ocara from Verdi's La Traviata, sung by Renata Tibaldi and Gianni Poggi, with the Orchestra of St. Cecilia, Rome, conducted by Francesco Molinari Pradelli.

Presenter29:42

How much research do you manage to do these days, then, Sir George? Do you manage any?

Professor Sir George Porter29:46

Yes, but not enough. When I moved from the Royal Institution I took my little group to Imperial College where I was invited. They kindly invited me to be uh a professor. And in fact I've got a very nice laboratory there. I have ten research people, students and and postdoctoral fellows.

Presenter30:06

And what are they working on? What's the project?

Professor Sir George Porter30:08

I mentioned uh earlier the pulses of light, the flashes of light getting shorter and shorter, and we are now in the femtosecond region, these incredibly short uh pulses, uh from lasers still.

Professor Sir George Porter30:22

which are needed for the study that we're doing, which is of the very first thing that happens in the leaf when light hits it.

Presenter30:31

So what what is the application of th that knowledge? What could you do with it once you understood?

Professor Sir George Porter30:35

Well, uh, you're not going to be able to do.

Professor Sir George Porter30:40

Genetic engineering of plants, for example.

Professor Sir George Porter30:44

unless you understand what the genes do. But uh

Professor Sir George Porter30:48

As I've said before, at the moment it it's basic research. It is, after all, photosynthesis is is one of the uh prime uh phenomena on earth. It's the one that by which we all live, and therefore just understanding it is interesting and important.

Professor Sir George Porter31:05

Another record, please. My wife is a ballet teacher and we go to a lot of ballet. And one of the ones I've seen a great deal and enjoy most is Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. I once saw this at Covent Garden one night and in the Bolshoi the following night in Moscow. And it so happened we'd booked to see it with Fontaine and Neureeff on the night that I learned that I got the Nobel Prize, which is a total surprise. But I didn't cancel this because it was too good to miss, of course. And the bit I'd like to hear is the fight between Romeo and Tybalt, when Tybalt is killed.

Presenter32:42

The fight scene between Tybalt and Romeo from the Kofiev's Romeo and Juliet, played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

Presenter32:51

So retirement, and with it more research, beckons, Sir George. Where's home now, that you no longer enjoy that Albemarle Street residence?

Professor Sir George Porter32:59

Well, we um have lived for some time in Kent, and it's near the coast, near Canterbury.

Professor Sir George Porter33:05

And my boat is there.

Presenter33:07

And you have any kind of laboratory in the house or in the garden?

Professor Sir George Porter33:07

Spin.

Professor Sir George Porter33:10

No. No bus in the garden. No, I I that's the laboratory is a little more complicated than they were when I was ten. No bus in the garden.

Presenter33:10

No. No bus in the garden.

Presenter33:19

Could you bear to be without one, though? I mean perhaps you should have it as your luxury on the island.

Professor Sir George Porter33:24

Yes. I don't know whether the supplies of uh liquid air and distilled water and sulphuric acid and so on would be uh very regular on on the desert island. It might be a bit complicated. I have other ideas as to what sort of uh research I would do on the desert island.

Presenter33:42

I wonder, and and you must have wondered it many times, what your father would have thought all those years ago when he sent you off to the tin shack of a village school, if you had told him that one day his son would be a Nobel Prize winner.

Professor Sir George Porter33:50

If you

Professor Sir George Porter33:54

Yeah.

Professor Sir George Porter33:55

I think it was Lyndon Johnson who was being given a an honour degree or a prize or something, and in his speech of acceptance he said

Professor Sir George Porter34:06

I wish my parents had been here to see this. My father would have been very proud, and my mother would have believed it.

Presenter34:16

Your last record.

Professor Sir George Porter34:17

Well, I've chosen Brahms Academic Fest Loverture. The reason is that I really my life has been with universities. I know their ivory towers and uh and there is a lot of stuffed dons around the place, but it it's largely a world a world of learning, a world of youth, of students and teachers, a search for knowledge, and uh this somehow is always associated for me with Gaudi Armosigitor.

Presenter35:39

The final part of Brahm's Academic Festival Overture, Opus eighty, played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter35:47

Now which of the eight records, Sir George, is the one you've chosen?

Professor Sir George Porter35:51

Oh, I think it must be Beethoven's Ninth, because if I really do uh get bored with the island.

Professor Sir George Porter35:57

This will lift me off it.

Presenter36:00

What about your luxury? You've hinted it's not a it's not a laboratory.

Professor Sir George Porter36:04

No.

Presenter36:04

What can I do?

Professor Sir George Porter36:05

Could I have a small yacht, please?

Professor Sir George Porter36:10

If I promise not to escape, I I would really like one just to sail around. I mean it'd be a pity to to have this wonderful island, the wonderful sea, and not be able to to sail on it. But if I'm not allowed that Uh it it's not so much a luxury as as an absolute necessity. I would hate to be without pencil and paper, or better still, a computer and word processor.

Presenter36:35

I don't think even though you're a man of honour and would not seek to escape in your yacht, I really don't think. I think it's the thin end of a wedge. I don't think I can allow a yacht. I think you'd better be happy with your computer and a bit of paper and pencil. Why not? Why not? And your book, what should that be?

Professor Sir George Porter36:49

Well, it's probably one that won't appeal to you very much. But I have these marvellous two books of poetry, one the Bible and the other Shakespeare.

Professor Sir George Porter37:01

That'll keep me going pretty well on that side for some time, all the music. But I must uh have something for the other half of the brain and

Professor Sir George Porter37:09

I would like uh Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, because it's a tough book and I've never had time to study it properly, and it's something that I am rather interested in working on a little bit myself.

Presenter37:23

To Sir George Brawl. Uh Thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert islanders.

Professor Sir George Porter37:27

Thank you.

Speaker 137:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.