Dr Steve Jones

Speaker 30:00

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 30:08

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

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist. The fact that his father was a chemist and his mother a bacteriologist doesn't mean, he says, that a talent for science was in his genes. More likely he was inspired by a good school teacher. It's a theory he can support better than most because genetics is his field. He's made a lifelong study of the evolution of the snail, the reproduction of the fruit fly and the sex life of the slug.

Presenter0:54

Eminent in his field now as head of genetics at University College London, he was invited a few months ago to give the Wreath Lectures, during which he confounded all theories of racial purity, told us most of the world was descended from ten Africans, and warned that, like mankind today, the dinosaur once believed himself to dominate the world. He is Dr. Steve Jones. Let's deal with your genes first, Steve. Surely you inherited an aptitude for science from your parents, even if they both proved themselves to be talented at the thing.

Dr Steve Jones1:26

Um I suppose I did, but I mean uh arguably I also inherited an aptitude for playing the piano, but I never learnt to play the piano, so I think a g a great deal depends on one's environment as much as one's genes, and I genuinely think it's usually impossible to separate the two effects.

Presenter1:41

But you don't deny, do you, that we inherit physical characteristics, like wide hips, or big noses, or red hair?

Dr Steve Jones1:47

Oh, I think I'll give you red hair.

Presenter1:49

Well, we don't inherit the others.

Dr Steve Jones1:51

A thing you don't often hear scientists say in public, although we say they say it in private all the time, is I've got no idea, and the answer is to those particular questions I don't think anybody knows.

Presenter1:59

But what about things like intelligence? I mean, on the whole, i two intelligent people tend to produce a fairly intelligent child, or people perhaps who can write, their children tend to be able to write. People who can play the piano, their children tend to be musical.

Dr Steve Jones2:14

Yes, that's again true. I mean if you believe that these things evolved it's hard to know for example how piano playing evolved and of course what's also true of two people who are intelligent is that they come from they live in an environment, they have a household with lots of books in it, they send their children to good schools and they care about their children's upbringing. So I really would say it's extremely difficult. In fact I'd go further and say it's probably impossible to disentangle the effects of nature from nurture in characteristics like that.

Presenter2:41

So it's your environment that creates you, not not your not what you inherit from your parents?

Dr Steve Jones2:43

It's a

Dr Steve Jones2:46

It's both.

Presenter2:47

It's very unromantic, that.

Dr Steve Jones2:49

Sad but true, most science is unromantic.

Presenter2:51

Does love of music run in your family?

Dr Steve Jones2:54

I wouldn't say particularly. Um my brother is extremely fond of heavy metal music, which I'm not, so what that tells us about genetics I don't know.

Presenter3:02

So what music have you chosen to take to your desert island?

Dr Steve Jones3:05

I thought if I was doomed to spend the rest of my life on the desert island I'd better take something that reminded me of my main interest in life.

Dr Steve Jones3:12

which is about, I'm sad to say, genetics and evolution. So most of the things I'm taking have that kind of theme behind them, some of them perhaps more obviously than others. The one I'd like to start with is actually has in its title the word which is anathema to all biologists, which is the creation. It's the creation by Haydn, but I like to think we're talking about the creation of the universe here, and I think we'd probably hear the Big Bang.

Speaker 23:52

Let's never be wise.

Speaker 23:58

Um

Speaker 24:18

Watch for the night.

Speaker 24:22

Was good.

Presenter4:35

Part of the opening scene of Haydn's Creation, sung by Anthony Rolfe Johnson with the chorus and orchestra of the Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Christopher Hogwood.

Presenter4:44

During one of your wreath lectures you encouraged us at one point to stick out our tongues and see if we could roll it into a a tube, which I've discovered I can do. Can you do it?

Dr Steve Jones4:54

I counted.

Presenter4:55

So what does that prove about us two?

Dr Steve Jones4:57

Well, it tells us we're different in that particular attribute. Of course, the listeners can't tell whether we're doing it or not, so there's no way of proving this.

Presenter5:03

They have to believe it. But there's also the business of clasping your hands, you said, and which thumb you put over which one as you clasp your hands.

Dr Steve Jones5:10

I mean if people, what these are, these are two perhaps rather silly examples, but surprising examples possibly, of the way in which any two randomly chosen people differ from each other in literally millions of inherited attributes. The tongue rolling is one. If you clasp your hands together, about half the population puts the left thumb on top of the right, and the other half, roughly, puts the right thumb on top of the left. If you try it the other way round, it feels very uncomfortable.

Presenter5:35

Does that mean that the people who do it the same way have the same gene?

Dr Steve Jones5:39

Well, like many of these continuous characters, as we call them, the genetics isn't absolutely straightforward, but it certainly has some inherited component. It certainly runs in families. It reflects some hidden genetic diversity.

Presenter5:51

But we all have, each of us, we are unique, we all have a a unique genetic plan, don't we?

Dr Steve Jones5:57

With the exception of the famous identical twins, who we have to keep apolog keep apologising about. I oughtn't to actually, as my mother's one of an identic pair of identical twins. Not only do we all, the people living in the world today, have unique genetic attributes, unlike anybody else, but we're, each one of us, uniquely different from anybody who ever has lived or ever will live, which is quite an astonishing statistic.

Presenter6:19

So every time new life is created it's like a a pack of cards that's been reshuffled and has come out in a different pack.

Dr Steve Jones6:25

It's like a pack of cards which has got three thousand million cards in it, which is a big pack of cards.

Presenter6:30

But all the cards have been used before somewhere along the line. It's just the pattern is different each time.

Dr Steve Jones6:35

Roughly speaking, yes, of course life is never pure and rarely simple. What happens to some extent is that unlike a pack of cards, to pursue this rather tortured analogy, each generation some of the numbers on some of the cards change by mutation. And it's these mutations, these genetic accidents, which are the raw material of evolution. Evolution picks them up and acts on them and leads to the change which we've seen from our fossil ancestors to ourselves.

Presenter7:02

But h how do you know, um and because you said this in your wreath lecture, how do you know that we are all born of a handful of people from Africa?

Dr Steve Jones7:11

That seems to be the most likely pattern. There are various bits of evidence which suggests that's true. The strongest evidence that we all came from Africa, I think, has to be in fossils, because the fossils are the absolute proof that there were humans living there before they were anywhere else. So that's the strongest evidence. But the you know, geography is about

Dr Steve Jones7:29

maps, the fossil record is basically about gaps. There aren't many fossils. So we can build on the dead fossils with ourselves as the fossil genes, which have descended from our predecessors. We can look at we can make a family tree of who's related to whom. And when you draw those lines of descent, they all seem to point back to Africa. And also, more important perhaps, if you look at the amount of genetic variation that there is among the peoples of the world, the most variable by far are the Africans, which suggests that perhaps they were the ancestors and we're just a small sample of our African great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers.

Presenter8:06

So just just to simplify that a bit, because I'm not entirely sure I'm with you. We are more similar to Africans. The rest of the world is more similar to Africans than Africans are to each other.

Dr Steve Jones8:18

Within Africa, different African peoples are as different one from the other as, shall we say, the population of Alaska is from the population of South America, suggesting that the within Africa, as we also know from fossils, people have been sitting there and evolving and accumulating genetic diversity for far longer than they have been in the rest of the world.

Presenter8:38

Record number two.

Dr Steve Jones8:40

Well record number two is kind of, oddly enough, a kind of African record, and maybe I'll explain why after it's played. It's a record I think all of us know and love, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles.

Speaker 28:51

A girl with colitis go by

Speaker 29:05

Ringo Blue Hat

Speaker 29:10

The roof of the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone.

Speaker 29:17

Looking in the sky with diagonal.

Presenter9:22

The Beatles and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Now why is that an African song?

Dr Steve Jones9:27

Well, most people perhaps have heard of perhaps the most famous human fossil of all, who's Lucy. And Lucy is an Australopithecine fossil from Ethiopia. And it's an almost complete skeleton of a female child, very important in the theory of human evolution. She's called Lucy because Don Johansson, who collected the fossil in the early 1970s, was playing just that record on his Sonny Walkman while he was digging.

Presenter9:51

Good a reason as any. Let's go back to our all being descended from Africa. How many genes are involved in the difference in skin color between the darkest black and the whitest white?

Dr Steve Jones10:04

Again, I can't be completely confident of the answer, because the genetics, surprisingly enough, I've never managed to find a really good genetical study of that, but a good guess would be less than ten, not very many.

Presenter10:15

So any black person uh could have white ancestors, and vice versa.

Dr Steve Jones10:20

In principle, yes. I mean that's of course less likely to be true within Africa, but certainly without without Africa, outside Africa, there's uh good evidence that that's true. And if you look at uh black Americans, you find that on the average about a third of their genes come from white ancestors, from matings probably early in the days of slavery. So that's the sort of thing which genetics can tell you, which perhaps history won't.

Presenter10:42

all of which makes a nonsense of racism of any form.

Dr Steve Jones10:45

Well, I I would certainly agree with you very strongly. I would, however, go one step further and say that the issue of racism to me, and I've always believed this, uh before I became a geneticist even, has nothing to do with biology. I mean it that's a political and social issue. And to me, the question of how genetically similar or different we are from each other is irrelevant to the question of racism.

Presenter11:06

How much do you feel um the weight of the disreputable past of your science of genetics, the the Hitlerian past of it? Do you do you feel does that worry you?

Dr Steve Jones11:19

I think it does in some senses. What I find a bit refreshing is the is the blissful ignorance of all genetics undergraduates about the fact that genetics does have a past. I think it's finally lived lived through its past. It took a long time, and it was a very murky past indeed.

Dr Steve Jones11:34

As is often the case in science, people are most confident about what they say when they know least. And genetics has been no exception to that. When we look back at what the early human geneticists said in the 1920s, when we were basically absolutely ignorant, we were in the pre-Galileo phase of human genetics. Geneticists who were professional geneticists were making shocking statements about the undesirability of different races marrying, the necessity to sterilise criminals and the like, which we now regard as n nonsensical and arrogant. And I think with knowledge has come humility, and I hope with more knowledge will come yet more.

Presenter12:10

But the founder of the laboratory where you work at University College was in fact part of that murky past, wasn't he, Sir Francis Galton?

Dr Steve Jones12:16

Well, I'm ashamed to say that oh, he's he's I walk past his statue every day, and I avert my eyes several times a day from it. He was the founder of it. He uh

Presenter12:24

Didn't he try to make a beauty map of England?

Dr Steve Jones12:27

That was one of his many eccentric things. He founded human genetics. He wrote a book called Hereditary Genius, where he tried to establish whether families of genius, which he defined in a slightly odd way, whether individuals in those families tended to be more likely to be geniuses than individuals in other families. And the answer was, not surprisingly, yes. That's what he's most remembered for.

Dr Steve Jones12:49

He wrote some very other some other very odd scientific papers. The Beauty Map is is uh a strange one. He went around Britain with a little brass counting device, which we still got.

Dr Steve Jones12:59

Which he clicked off the score of the beauty of females on the score from one to five.

Presenter13:02

Totally subjective judgment then.

Dr Steve Jones13:04

Oh, absolutely. The low point, by the way, was in Aberdeen, for those who might be listening up there. I'm sure everything has changed since the end of the day.

Presenter13:09

Where was the high point?

Dr Steve Jones13:11

My point I think was in London.

Dr Steve Jones13:13

So, I mean no, that's obvious clearly true.

Presenter13:15

But it was his work, wasn't it, which became the basis for the Nazis' race hygiene programme in the thirties.

Dr Steve Jones13:20

Yes, f more directly, I think, than many people would like to uh would like to accept. Um there is a fairly direct link. Um I've always been struck by the fact that the title of Hitler's biography, Mein Kampf, My Struggle, is a direct translation of the Darwinian phrase Darwin, Galton's cousin, the struggle for existence. So there is a direct linear relationship between that idea that there are genes for higher or lower races and the terrible political um disasters which happened in the nineteen thirties. And I think we really should not be allowed to forget that.

Presenter13:53

Record number three.

Dr Steve Jones13:55

On record number three, um again I thought it'd be nice to get away from something which is quite so politically charged and get back to the fossils. And we'll have a piece of fossil music which is by Saint-Sange from the Carnival of the Animals of the Fossils.

Presenter15:07

The fossils from Saint-Saar's The Carnival of the Animals with Katja and Mariella Labec and the Israel Philhomonic conducted by Zubin Mehta.

Dr Steve Jones15:15

It's a nice nice piece of music, I think particularly nice, because there's a couple of fossil tunes in there. I certainly picked up Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and I know there's at least two more.

Presenter15:24

And the bones were rattling there nicely.

Dr Steve Jones15:25

The bones are nice.

Presenter15:26

Let let's go back to your origin, Steve Jones, the the Jones family of Aberystwyth. Presumably there were quite a few of them.

Dr Steve Jones15:32

I think there are large numbers of us. I mean, if you get the Eberrest With phone book, it's a very, very boring book.

Presenter15:37

But if you weren't genetically predestined to become a a scientist, who or what nurtured your interest environmentally in science?

Dr Steve Jones15:45

Well I think as is the case with many people's professions, maybe scientists more than anybody. Um I can trace my particular interest in science, and in biology in particular, in fact, back to one good schoolteacher. I mean it's the standard thing, the most important social class in any society, which is often forgotten without question as schoolteachers. Uh my schoolteacher, who I've never seen hide nor hair nor since, was a mister Simpson, who when I was thirteen or fourteen taught me biology in a really inspired way, and made me think seriously at that age that I wanted to be a biologist, and I stuck with it.

Presenter16:13

How do you teach biology in an inspiring way? I think a lot of biology teachers might like to know.

Dr Steve Jones16:17

Well, I do it by waving my arms around and cracking lots of bad jokes, and I think he probably did the same thing.

Presenter16:22

But were you in any case quite academic? Were you a a bookish chap?

Dr Steve Jones16:26

Yes, I was always being severely criticised my by my parents for not going and not going out and playing football and breaking into cars and doing all the things you're supposed to do. I used to go to the library a lot.

Presenter16:35

I read that you consumed the works of Dickens before the age of fourteen. Can this be true?

Dr Steve Jones16:39

Yeah, it's a terrible admission, but I'm afraid it is.

Presenter16:42

It's somehow nevertheless warming to read that you failed to get into several universities before Edinburgh accepted you.

Dr Steve Jones16:48

Yes, all the Welsh universities turned me down. Um before the days of computerized admission to university, which there now is, thank heavens, um the only reason I managed to scrape under the net was that the University of Edinburgh had a closing date seven days later than anybody else, and I managed to get it in the post just in time.

Dr Steve Jones17:04

I think it's the best the most important letter I ever posted.

Presenter17:07

And you went there to read zoology?

Presenter17:10

With genetics as a subset, yes.

Dr Steve Jones17:11

Exactly, yeah.

Presenter17:12

And once again you found a teacher who inspired you?

Dr Steve Jones17:15

Um, yes, I hope he's not listening to this programme. Yes, my uh I s got an interest in snails, which I still have, from uh a chap who's now professor at Nottingham, Brian Clark.

Dr Steve Jones17:24

Um

Dr Steve Jones17:25

And like many scientists, again, what you do is you're given an essay to write in your first or your second year, and you never finish it. And I'm still writing that essay, twenty-five years later, on the genetics of snails.

Presenter17:36

Next record.

Dr Steve Jones17:37

Well the next record is actually it's rather s I think it's the only snaily record I can think of. It's the theme from the Magic Roundabout, and I think you'll notice that the snail, most people will know, is called Brian Snail. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.

Presenter18:18

The original theme tune from the Magic Roundabout. So you began to study snails rather perhaps as as Darwin studied giant tortoises, or is that too grand an analogy for you?

Dr Steve Jones18:28

Um, it's fairly grand. I guess they they're both sluggish, they have that in common. Um they're my snails. The beauty of snails is you don't have to run very fast when you pick them up.

Presenter18:35

But it's all to do with counting the lines on the backs, isn't it?

Dr Steve Jones18:37

Yes, the uh the the the the main reason for studying snails is that they they carry their genes on their shells, as it were. Um you can actually tell a lot about what genes they carry from the patterns on their shells.

Presenter18:47

So what have you discovered through studying snails for so many years?

Dr Steve Jones18:51

Unfortunately, you've only got a 40-minute programme. I'll ask you to give me 12 one hours. Well, what I've discovered, I'm sure, is of complete lack of interest to everybody in the world, apart from about ten people. It has to do with the fact that the patterns of genetic change in snails have a lot to do with the way in which they behave when they're exposed to the sun. So that's what draw why snails in different places look different.

Presenter19:14

And then came fruit flies next, and a research fellowship at the University of Chicago. Now, why did you change from snails to fruit flies?

Dr Steve Jones19:22

Well, I thought I felt I was becoming too much of an aerospecialist. And also, I mean, fruit flies have more of a buzz about them, so to speak. If you're going to work on genetics, in those days, you really had to work on fruit flies Drosophila, um, because they were the classic organisms for doing genetics on. Strangely enough, since then, in the last twenty years, there's a new species which has become much more popular and much more useful, which is ourselves, and that's a complete reversal, because twenty years ago we knew almost nothing about human genetics, but that's altered.

Dr Steve Jones19:48

But twenty years ago everybody was working on fruit flyers so I felt I should join on the bandwagon and on it I jumped.

Presenter19:53

But how can you study a fly? I mean, you can't you can't mark it like a bird, you can't tag it, you can't follow it around because they all look the same. What do you do?

Dr Steve Jones20:01

Well, you do terrible things to them in bottles, Beta a lot. Um I did lots of breeding experiments in the lab. But I did, in fact, spend several years trying to chase fruit flies around the deserts of California. I was interested in how far they migrated, how much the genes moved every generation.

Dr Steve Jones20:16

And I've also done quite a lot of work on the mating behavior of fruit flies, because a lot of genetics is just that. It's the scientific study of sex. Fruit flies mate by making by buzzing at each other, and they turn out to be mutations, genetic changes, which alter the shape and the sounds of those buzzes, and that's very, very important in their evolution.

Presenter20:34

But how do you discover all of that when you're chasing these flies?

Dr Steve Jones20:37

Um the answer is with difficulty. We uh we mark them by putting fluorescent dusts on them and chasing them round the desert with an ultraviolet lamp, which is a very peculiar thing to do, and I was shot at a number of times, but fortunately people missed every time.

Presenter20:50

Shot up by well people who thought you were plainly mad, I should think.

Dr Steve Jones20:54

Uh mad or bad, certainly dangerous to know.

Presenter20:56

Beckle number five.

Dr Steve Jones20:58

Well this too is a an evolutionary one.

Dr Steve Jones21:02

It's uh about Orpheus going down to the underworld to find himself a mate, and appropriately enough, at some time during his rather unlikely adventures, he and his mate find themselves turned into two flies who make an interesting courtship song.

Speaker 221:16

Fantastic

Presenter22:16

Richard Angus and Lillian Watson singing part of the Fly Duet from Act Three of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld with the English National Opera Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder.

Presenter22:25

We've talked, Steve Jones, about your work and our understanding of of genetics and how it affects moral and really rather sinister issues such as racism and the creation of a master race. But there's another moral issue, isn't there? And that that's foreknowledge, the ability to predict the future of a fetus, the ability to predict death.

Dr Steve Jones22:45

Yes, I think that's really the one issue of genetics which people until recently haven't begun to come to terms with, is just that. It does tell you a great deal about perhaps what your own fate might be. It's quite clear now that there are certain unfortunate individuals who inherit particular genes which if they learn about it they know they they're likely to suffer from quite severe and distressing diseases, perhaps early in life, perhaps later in life. That's becoming more and more true. For example, many, many different cancers, heart disease, many of the illnesses which plague modern life turn out to have a strong genetic component.

Presenter23:21

So scientifically it's possible to say

Presenter23:24

This by testing this fetus will develop cancer of the colon age twenty five.

Dr Steve Jones23:30

That's putting it perhaps a bit too strongly. This the this feta this the ch this child is more likely than average to develop cancer of the colon would be a better way of putting it, because we can never be absolutely sure. That's rather a good example, in fact, because a colleague of mine in my own laboratory just a few months ago carried out the first test of that kind on a fetus and it showed that there was some in that particular individual actually, fortunately, the child wasn't carrying the appropriate gene.

Presenter23:55

But tell me what else give me a few more examples of w what you might what we might ultimately be able to predict about a fetus.

Dr Steve Jones24:03

I think my g I'm rather plucking figures out of the air, but my guess is that up to half

Dr Steve Jones24:10

of all people born, one could have a fairly good chance of what their most likely cause of death is, and that's rather a guess, the figure, from studying their genes sooner or later.

Presenter24:20

Good heavens, that they would have a weak heart.

Dr Steve Jones24:20

That they were

Dr Steve Jones24:22

But there's a positive way of looking at it. I mean, I think the most important thing is to be positive about it. What happens with these various genes is that it it they make you susceptible to particular environmental agents. For example, there's a classic one which if you have this particular gene, which is rather rare, I'm glad to say, and you smoke, which is a terminally stupid thing to do anyway, irrespective of genetics, then you are not just likely, but almost certain, to die of emphysema, which is a very painful breathing disease, when you're young. Now it would be it's feasible, it would be feasible perhaps to tell people you are at particularly high risk if you smoke, and then hence to advise them not to smoke.

Presenter25:00

But I wonder how acceptable it is. I mean, we've already accepted, haven't we, that we can foretell the sex of a fetus with an amniocentesis test. We also now, I think, accept that that the prediction that that child could suffer from Downs syndrome or cerebral palsy. And again, prospective parents can decide whether they want to terminate that pregnancy.

Presenter25:22

Nah.

Presenter25:23

I wonder what happens when you are faced with the choice of if you give birth to this child, it is likely to die of heart disease aged thirty.

Dr Steve Jones25:32

Well, that's a difficult choice. And in some ways, I think a geneticist I mean, particularly a non-medical geneticist like myself, as I must always say, I'm not a physician and I don't know in detail.

Dr Steve Jones25:41

Genesis are the last people to answer those questions because they're questions which should be answered by society and the question of whether I think it's true to say that the question of whether parents should be

Dr Steve Jones25:50

allowed should decide whether to continue with the pregnancy or not, should absolutely be made by the parents themselves.

Presenter25:56

Of course. But it becomes a form of genetic engineering, doesn't it, if if through genetics we are being told things and therefore asked to make a practical decision. I mean, in a sense you must have a view as to whether you think the knowledge ought to be used.

Dr Steve Jones26:11

I think it's a good general view in science and in life, which is that ignorance is bad. And that generally has worked. There's a bumper sticker, an excellent one. If you think education is i is expensive, try ignorance. And I think the best that scientists can do, biologists can do, is to inform people of what choices are available to them. And the experience has been that when people are informed of these choices, they do make what seem to be very intelligent decisions, in genetic disease, for example.

Presenter26:39

Next piece of music.

Dr Steve Jones26:41

Again, I thought perhaps to lighten the mood a bit, we'd get back to the evolutionary um the evolutionary theme, in fact to human evolution, a very important document in the history of the theory of human evolution, which is Tommy Steele with the cavemen.

Speaker 226:54

The old time cave dweller lived in a cave This is what he did when he wanted to rave He took a stick and he drew on the wall Man out of her had himself heard for Lock with a caveman

Speaker 227:08

Roll with the caveman

Speaker 227:10

Shake with the caveman Baby make with the caveman Oh boy Break with the caveman

Speaker 227:18

Style tight, style of mid. I hold your baby very tight. His way with women was rather neat.

Presenter27:24

Tommy Steele singing Rock with the Caveman.

Dr Steve Jones27:27

You know, there's a new theory uh about the origin of human language when in our history language first appeared, and the new theory is that song came before speech. Listening to that record makes me doubt the theory very much.

Presenter27:38

What are you going to do on the desert island, Steve Jones? I I suppose in many ways it could be business as usual for you.

Dr Steve Jones27:43

Oh yes, somebody I can't think of a better place to be. Um because for an evolutionist uh an island is a natural laboratory where evolution can take place more rapidly than anywhere else.

Dr Steve Jones27:53

And our great our great hero Charles Darwin, of course, as everybody knows, went to the Galapagos. People tend to think he thought of the idea of natural selection there. He actually didn't. But he was certainly very much impressed by the biology of islands. And that led him to the theme that different species of animals could change one into the other. So I wouldn't have a dull moment on my desert island.

Presenter28:13

What you couldn't do, of course, on your own on a desert island, is breed, which again, according to your lectures, is is the healthiest thing genetically the human race can do.

Dr Steve Jones28:23

Well you certainly if if you look at people on islands and of course there are people who live on different kinds of islands there are islands surrounded by water your desert islands but there are sort of intellectual desert islands in the sense that there are religious strict religious isolates for example where we have people who refuse to mate or marry with others outside the group what happens is they become inbred and what that leads to is a certain danger of particular genes which are usually rare becoming more and more common by chance. And some of the island peoples of the world are living natural genetic laboratories for human genetics. They are under Tristan da Cunha for example is one. The religious isolate the island, the intellectual island in North America who are the Amish are another one. These have a number of otherwise very rare genes which happen to have risen in frequency and are hence very very important in human genetics.

Presenter29:14

But are they genes for the good or genes for the bad?

Dr Steve Jones29:17

Well in these particular cases they become noticed because they cause inborn errors of different kinds. So in these cases they're genes for the bad.

Presenter29:24

But to go back to what we ought to be doing as far as geneticists are concerned, we should be what ideally travelling from continent to continent, breeding out with people from as far away from where we come from as possible.

Dr Steve Jones29:36

Well, ought, I don't think, is a word. You know, ought is a sort of eugenic term to what we don't like. What is happening is clearly that people are no longer marrying the girl or the boy next door. It is certainly happening, generally speaking, that there is much less inbreeding, much less marriage of relatives in human populations. The reason for that is obvious. It's increased transport. I think the most important ever eugenic device was probably the bicycle. People began to move from village to village. And it may be that because of that, because we're having less inbreeding, we're getting less like island populations. We're getting more like large continental outbred populations. So we may be going through a period of genetic health which will greatly

Dr Steve Jones30:17

outweigh anything which geneticists can do, this simple behavioral change will lead to a change in human evolution.

Presenter30:23

And what about you as an individual, are you, playing your part in this?

Dr Steve Jones30:27

My I'm afraid to say my Darwinian fitness, my genetic value is exactly zero as I have no children.

Presenter30:33

But you have a partner from another continent, eh?

Dr Steve Jones30:35

From the United States, indeed, yes.

Presenter30:37

Record number seven.

Dr Steve Jones30:38

Yes, I thought I'd like to say a bit more of a genetical record, in fact a eugenic record. Eugenic comes from the word eugene, eugene well born, and my next record is from Tchaikovsky's Eugene on Yegin.

Presenter31:51

Part of the Polonaires from Tchaikovsky's Eugene O'Negan, played by the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. I think one of the most daunting points that you made in your lectures was what a relatively small way down the road geneticists were. I think you drew the analogy of if you're going from Land's End to John O'Groats, you're sort of two miles from Land's End so far.

Dr Steve Jones32:13

Yes, I mean there is a programme which is hoped to be finished by the year 2015 to read off the genetic message in a single human being and that's a message which is three thousand million letters long. And it's rather hard to get a vision of how much that represents. The way I tried to illustrate it is by talking about the sequencing as being equivalent to walking from Lands End to Johnny Groats via London.

Dr Steve Jones32:37

And if you add up what's been done so far, we haven't yet gone to got to Penzance, so there's a long way to go yet.

Presenter32:42

But but you have been quoted as saying, and I find this very odd, anyone can be a scientist. What do you mean by that? That sounds ridiculously modest with respect.

Dr Steve Jones32:50

No, I I actually think it's a it's the real truth, which I think most scientists would i would uh acknowledge. Um

Dr Steve Jones32:57

It is absolutely not the case, it seems to me, that any one of us or anybody can be an ar a good artist or an artist of any kind.

Dr Steve Jones33:04

To take a trivial example, nobody would have written Eugene on Yegin if Tchaikovsky hadn't written it. Somebody would have discovered the structure of D N A if Francis and if Francis Crick had not done so.

Dr Steve Jones33:15

I once made a radio programme a long time ago about uh a field course we run in Spain, where we do things, we study the biology of uh various animals and look at genetics in the field, which is fun to do. And a friend of mine who's got a five-year-old child said, Well, that's all very well, but that's exactly the kind of thing my kid does in playgroup. And I said, Well, exactly, your child is doing science in playgroup. He's finding out things, discovering things. And all that science really is, is a big playgroup that's not really as much fun. And I have yet to find a five-year-old child who can't do something in a playgroup, and I think the same is true with an adult who could do who can't do something to help in the progress of science.

Presenter33:49

That sounds very convincing, but at the same time aren't you perhaps guilty of taking for granted something that you've been whether it's genetically or God given, and that is that you have an astounding clarity of thought. Well, delete the astounding. You have clarity of thought, and that is not something that everybody has.

Dr Steve Jones34:06

I find that statement very confusing.

Presenter34:09

All right. Let's you off record number eight.

Dr Steve Jones34:12

Number eight is the last record and having had the sixties in with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Dr Steve Jones34:17

I'd like to play something by what was without doubt the best band of the sixties, which just disappeared. It was called the Incredible String Band, and fortunately enough they came out with a great track called The Evolution Rag.

Speaker 234:30

Eat air croquettes, my children dear If you want to save yourself time and tears History picnic must follow me Evolution up the slopes of the sea

Speaker 334:32

Rest my children dear, if you want to save yourself.

Speaker 334:38

Yes, yeah.

Presenter34:38

Uh

Presenter34:39

Let us follow you.

Presenter34:42

Evolution up the slopes of the sea.

Speaker 234:48

Up the slopes of the sea

Presenter34:58

Evolution Rag from the Incredible String Band. So Steve Jones, which one of those eight records is the one you'd take if you could only take one?

Dr Steve Jones35:06

Well, I'm afraid it's predictable. It's got to be Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

Presenter35:10

The fossil record.

Dr Steve Jones35:11

Yeah.

Presenter35:11

And your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Dr Steve Jones35:14

There's a series of books I know I'm not allowed a a series but there's a series of books by Anthony Powell called A Dance to the Music of Time, which actually is a really lovely way of describing evolution. If I have to take just one of them, my favorite one is called The Valley of Bones.

Presenter35:27

And your luxury.

Dr Steve Jones35:29

Well, at University College London, where I work, we have we honour our founder, Jeremy Bentham, by keeping his stuffed body on the premises. I'd like to honour the present Minister of Education, Kenneth Clark, by taking his stuffed body to my desert island.

Presenter35:43

doctor Steve Jones, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 335:54

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.