Sir Roy Calne

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

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a surgeon and a painter. Medicine and art meet in a man who's one of this country's pioneers of transplant surgery. His interest in the subject began in the 1950s when his beliefs kept him poor, often derided, but nonetheless determined. Forty years on, he can look back on a career that's included 1,500 kidney and 1,000 liver transplants. At the same time, he's drawn closer to his patients and his colleagues through his love of painting. His portraits of them have been the subject of several public exhibitions. I've found painting to have many similar features to surgery, he says, citing careful planning, intense effort and discipline as three of the things both need to be successful. He is Sir Roy Kahn.

Presenter1:14

There is, though, Sir Roy, as you've pointed out, an essential difference between the two, which is that uh if you don't like the painting you can throw it away.

Sir Roy Calne1:21

Yes, and that's a good thing to do with a bad painting, I think.

Presenter1:24

But how much are you still moved by the loss of a patient?

Sir Roy Calne1:29

I don't think that changes at all. I think from the very beginning as a medical student and throughout one's career, if a patient dies, it's always the tragedy. And one's always looking at oneself for mistakes one might have made or alternative treatments that might have been better.

Sir Roy Calne1:45

So one has a feeling of regret for the sadness of the loss of the patient, but also uh a self-inquisition as to what couldn't it have been done better.

Presenter1:54

You've gone further than that before. I mean, you've talked about ha having a sense of devastation every time it happens. I'm I'm just amazed that over the years you haven't sort of come to terms with it and

Sir Roy Calne2:04

I think the devastation is when a death occurs totally unexpected.

Sir Roy Calne2:09

I think somebody who is has a a fatal disease which goes to its conclusion, it's not quite the same. It's uh still a tragedy, but it's not the same as the unexpected, especially in a young person.

Presenter2:21

So it's always with you, is it? When you go go home at night, you go out to dinner or whatever, you are always thinking, I wonder how they're doing? Do you pause to ring up? Do you?

Sir Roy Calne2:29

It depends on the case and I'm always happy to speak to patients who've done well, especially many years after a transplant operation, but I can also easily bring back the image of patients who had hoped to do well and their relatives who trusted in me and where I had failed and I can see that as well and that that is a sadness.

Presenter2:50

I'm sure it must be the faces of the relatives of the deceased, presumably.

Sir Roy Calne2:54

And the child that says, you know, please do your best, Doctor, and if you fail.

Sir Roy Calne3:01

So I I do I think it is a personal thing and I I think this is something that's shared by all doctors.

Presenter3:06

So so it's an emotional business, which is really one of the reasons, isn't it, that you've taken to painting your patients because it helps you perhaps it's therapeutic for you, come to terms with that kind of

Sir Roy Calne3:17

A lot of people have said it's therapeutic to me, and it may be. I started to paint my work and my patients when I had contact and a friendship established with John Bellany, who's a very distinguished painter, who

Sir Roy Calne3:31

was a patient of ours in Addenbrookes, and after his transplant operations he did sixty paintings of himself mainly, often in the guise of a hero, particularly a a tortured hero. Many of his paintings look like Saint Sebastian He and the doctors the torturers firing their darts into him.

Sir Roy Calne3:50

and he gave me some lessons, and one of the lessons was to paint him.

Sir Roy Calne3:54

And I painted him I saw him as an extremely sick man just able to sit in a chair and hold a glass of milk, which wasn't a Saint Sebastian representation at all. And it struck me that the difference in the way one looks at an image uh depends very much from where you're sitting. And uh it also occurred to me that although I am not a professional painter, I did have a new subject nobody'd ever painted.

Sir Roy Calne4:18

transplantation before'cause it didn't it didn't exist. So it has opened up a new world for me in terms of my painting.

Presenter4:25

Tell me about your first record.

Sir Roy Calne4:27

Well the first record is the pathetic uh sonata of Beethoven and that was one of the first pieces of classical music that I heard played by a master at school when I was about seven or eight. And uh it got me interested in music, uh listening to it for the sake of listening and uh it is a very uh well known piece of music but that doesn't in any way detract from it as far as I'm concerned.

Presenter5:50

Part of Beethoven's piano sonata number eight, the Patatik, played by Walter Gieserking.

Presenter5:55

Do you play music, Siroi, when you're operating?

Sir Roy Calne5:58

I do. Not always, but uh I started because we had a theatre sister who used to shout, and that upset me when I was operating. I couldn't concentrate on what I was doing. And I brought in some m music, mainly chamber music, and uh she seemed to like it and everybody else did.

Presenter6:13

And she shut up.

Sir Roy Calne6:14

And what's really dating this one?

Presenter6:17

But what about your patients? I mean, do you think they worry about your listening to music, perhaps not totally concentrating on them?

Sir Roy Calne6:18

But

Sir Roy Calne6:23

It does produce an an air of calm and particularly stops people uh getting uh tense and and uh with jangled nerves, which can happen and is always to the detriment of the patient.

Presenter6:34

And in any case the patient has no idea what's going on anyway.

Sir Roy Calne6:37

Well, there was one uh case where the patient did know what was uh going on to the extent of identifying the music, although not hav suffering from any memory of pain or or trauma, but

Sir Roy Calne6:49

She had a liver transplant and uh I did uh have a a record I brought in, which was the Baleo's Requiem, with uh tremendous dramatic uh chords and choruses.

Sir Roy Calne7:00

And uh the next day when she had recovered sufficiently, uh asked her how she felt and she said she was doing quite well, still had a bit of pain in the tummy, and she said she couldn't get out of her head the music of the Belio's Requiem, which she uh correctly identified, and I knew exactly why she had uh identified it.

Speaker 47:20

She'd take it.

Sir Roy Calne7:20

And she'd taken it in and it was there. And it seemed to me that I'd made rather an

Speaker 37:21

Uh

Sir Roy Calne7:26

Inappropriate choice of a Requiem for somebody having a huge operation.

Presenter7:30

I want to ask you a bit more about your paintings, because particularly your paintings of children, I notice, your your your child patients, and you always put the their names and the operation on, did you? That's so you can identify them, that's

Sir Roy Calne7:42

Well, uh no, to to make them ra I show the paintings to the p the patients of course and sometimes give them copies uh and uh too I think acknowledge the fact that they are very special people and they have been very courageous in going through the procedure. Maybe they had no choice but still it is a tough thing to go through a huge operation like that and children are little children about five to seven or eight.

Sir Roy Calne8:06

are terrified of hospitals. They've often had chronic disease. They've been in and out of hospitals since they can remember. The hospital visit is usually associated with

Sir Roy Calne8:15

painful injections, painful procedures, even operations and unpleasant medicines. And whenever they see a doctor, they cringe and they look so frightened and introverted.

Sir Roy Calne8:25

And I've found uh that if I do bring pencil and paper and sit down, they change almost dramatically because they know what this is about and they can do it too, and then we can become friends.

Presenter8:37

But you seem to capture that that fear, that that angst, that their eyes in your pictures, their eyes always look very big. Is that how you see them?

Sir Roy Calne8:43

Is that how you see them? When the child has been chronically ill, their eyelashes grow for reasons that are not very well understood. And and they they do look very beautiful, the eyelashes and the big eyes and the staring, but they do often also look very frightened.

Presenter9:01

But the drawing of them overcomes the fear and gives them greater confidence for conversation.

Sir Roy Calne9:04

When you sit down with them and I mean I don't draw all my patients by any means because I just don't have the time, but uh when I do sit down with a patient, uh it's a marvellous uh way of getting to know them.

Presenter9:17

Record number two.

Sir Roy Calne9:18

Well, the record number two is Joss White, singing I Gave My Love a Cherry. Joss White uh was a negro singer who suffered grievously when he was young. He was attacked by a racist who broke all the bones in his fingers and he lived above this terrible handicap and became a wonderful guitarist and singer.

Sir Roy Calne9:41

And uh I used to sing his songs to my children and one they uh used to like very much was I gave my love a cherry because the last bit is there's a child with no crying.

Speaker 49:51

I gave my love a cherry

Speaker 49:56

That had no stone.

Speaker 410:03

I gave my love a chicken.

Speaker 410:06

That had no bones.

Speaker 410:10

I don't

Speaker 410:12

Told my love a story that had no end.

Speaker 410:19

Uh

Presenter10:19

Hikie.

Presenter10:21

Josh White, I gave my love a cherry. Going back to your boyhood, Roy Kahn, was there ever a dilemma as to whether you'd be a painter or a doctor?

Sir Roy Calne10:29

No, I don't think so. I I did love painting ever since my earliest school days, and and I was very lucky I had very good teachers at school, particularly Francis Russell Flynt, the son of uh William Russell Flint.

Sir Roy Calne10:41

But I always wanted to be a a doctor, particularly a surgeon. I wanted to be a surgeon before I knew what surgery was.

Presenter10:46

And how soon did you want to be a transplant surgeon?

Sir Roy Calne10:50

I had the idea of a transplantation when I was a medical student.

Sir Roy Calne10:54

And I didn't realize that there had already been some experimental work done in this, but it wasn't established at all. There was no transplantation for patients, except the beginning of identical twins in America. But I asked our chief physician whose firm I was on if one of my patients, who was about my age, who was dying of kidney disease, could have a grafted kidney, and he said no.

Sir Roy Calne11:17

And I asked why not, and I was told, It can't be done.

Sir Roy Calne11:20

And I was nudged by one of my friends not to ask any more questions if I wanted to get a house job at Guy, so I didn't ask any more questions.

Presenter11:28

Yeah.

Sir Roy Calne11:28

But that was the beginning.

Presenter11:28

That was the mm.

Sir Roy Calne11:29

of the idea.

Presenter11:30

You say he was your age, which was sixteen, wasn't it?

Sir Roy Calne11:33

Well, I was more than sixteen then'cause I was a clinical student, so I would have been about twenty.

Presenter11:37

But when you began at Guy's, you were sixteen, that seemed incredibly precocious, very young, wasn't it?

Sir Roy Calne11:38

And so 69

Sir Roy Calne11:42

It was difficult because there were only few of us from school direct. Most of the uh class were ex service the average age was twenty six and so the few of us who'd come straight from school uh were very much treated as children and looked upon as children by the others.

Presenter11:58

But y you mentioned that sort of dismissive attitude, this sort of professional discouragement for any idea of transplant surgery. That went on for a long time.

Sir Roy Calne12:06

Oh, it still goes on.

Presenter12:07

Is it Jesse?

Sir Roy Calne12:09

I think anything that's new uh in medicine is resisted by the profession.

Sir Roy Calne12:14

Anything that's new is unsettling.

Presenter12:17

But why back then? I mean, I think you were even discouraged by the Nobel Prize winner, Sir Peter Medewa, weren't you? You were told, No, you know, immunology cannot help with transplant surgery. When he was aware of that,

Sir Roy Calne12:26

Uh well he yes, it wasn't quite like that. He gave a lecture and he had done the most wonderful experimental work on showing that if you transplanted uh skin, for instance, or feathers in in chickens that had been joined as embryos, so their bloods mingled as embryos, that they would be accepted and that was a way of overcoming rejection.

Sir Roy Calne12:47

and at the end of the lecture which he gave in Oxford,

Sir Roy Calne12:50

One of the students asked him if there was any practical application for treatment of patients, and he paused for a moment and then said two words absolutely none. But this struck me as very strange, because he had shown that there was a way, although it wasn't one that was immediately practicable.

Sir Roy Calne13:05

And I went to see my boss then in Oxford, who was a friend of Meadow's, and said I'd like to work with him when I finished. He said Meadow was a very busy man. He said, You go and learn how to do hernias and don't waste his time. So there wasn't very much encouragement, but I think lack of encouragement sometimes stimulates one.

Presenter13:18

Yeah.

Presenter13:20

But why not? Why do you think then if you're saying that generally speaking the medical profession is a bit blinkered about progress? Why is that?

Sir Roy Calne13:28

I think it's not only the medical profession, I think it's uh human nature. If you're used to something and it works and it's not too bad as far as you're concerned, you don't want anybody rocking the boat. People who rock the boat are usually regarded as dangerous. Uh they may in fact be dangerous and it's best to suppress them.

Presenter13:45

You've been regarded as dangerous in your time, have you?

Sir Roy Calne13:47

Oh yes, I think probably still so.

Presenter13:51

More music.

Sir Roy Calne13:52

Well, the next is part of the clarinet quintet of Brahms. The singing and beauty of the clarinet is, I think, one of the most wonderful passages in the music repertoire that I've heard.

Presenter15:05

Part of Brahm's clarinet quintet in B minor, opus one hundred and fifteen, played by Thea King with the Gabrielli string quartet.

Presenter15:13

Who was it then, Sir Roy, who gave you your first big break in the field of transplantation, and when?

Sir Roy Calne15:18

It was in 1958 I had a job at the Royal Free Hospital and the urologist there, John Hopewell, he introduced me to the man who ran the experimental institute of the College of Surgeons, David Sloan. And he was unlike most of the people that I'd come across in that he was very enthusiastic that work of this type, even though we didn't understand very much about immunology, should start and we should make some efforts in this direction. And he borrowed a hundred pounds from his accounts in his department, which enabled me to get started with research in kidney transplantation.

Sir Roy Calne15:58

And it was extraordinary that nearly forty years later he paid back I think it was twelve hundred pounds, which is what he reckoned was the hundred pounds plus interest. Why,'cause he felt guilty. Because he felt guilty about this,'cause it was unauthorized by the College of Surgeons.

Presenter16:08

Yeah.

Sir Roy Calne16:13

I was extremely lucky in that after one set of experiments using the approved technique of stopping rejection, which was ir irradiation at that time, I used an anti-leukemia drug, and it's one that's still used or its derivative is imuran, in stopping rejection. And this was the first time that uh it was possible to prevent rejection of organs using a chemical.

Presenter16:35

But it was a dog called Lollipop who was the great turning point in all of this feeling.

Sir Roy Calne16:39

I think that when I had done the first part of the work, I braved the busy man Medaware and asked if I could get an interview with him. And his secretary put me straight through to him. I said, no, no, don't do that. He's a very busy man. And she said, no, he'd like to speak to you. He was talking about your work. And he was absolutely charming and full of encouragement. And he kindly helped me get a Heartless Fellowship to go to Harvard Medical School and work at the Peterbent Brigham, where the identical twin transplants had been done some five or six years before. They gave me wonderful facilities. And we did have a beautiful collie dog called Lollipop, who was a very long survivor with a kidney transplant, and she was presented at the big auditorium at the Brigham as if she was a patient with a kidney graft. And everybody's a bit astounded, because they didn't know that there were any patients with kidney grafts that had done well just with treatment with chemicals. And then the resident who'd presented the case opened the door and Lollipop bounded into the auditorium and licked all the eminent professors in the front row.

Sir Roy Calne17:39

And this was fairly dramatic demonstration that it worked, although it wasn't a patient.

Presenter17:44

And this was sometime after she'd had the transplant.

Sir Roy Calne17:47

This was about six months or more after years.

Presenter17:49

And and really the whole thing started to move quite quickly after that, through the sixties. Did you did you have the impression you were in a race? Did you feel as if you were you know, you had rivals across the globe, as it were?

Sir Roy Calne18:00

Not quite in that way. I mean, uh there certainly was a feeling that there that there were a few people who believed that this would work.

Sir Roy Calne18:08

And there were a lot of people who believed it wouldn't, and so there was a great stimulus to prove that the doubters were wrong.

Presenter18:14

Record number four.

Sir Roy Calne18:16

Well necro number four is the Diesiri from Verdi's Requiem and it was a work that I sang in the chorus at uh Lansing where as a where as a pupil.

Sir Roy Calne18:27

and in the beautiful Lansing Chapel for the performance the Royal Marine

Sir Roy Calne18:33

The trumpeters were up in the triforium in the gallery there. It was such a magnificent setting and such a wonderful sound that uh I'd like to hear that.

Presenter19:42

Part of the Die Sierra from Verdi's Requiem played by the Vienna Philharmonica conducted by Herbert von Karian.

Presenter19:48

You hold no great brief, I think, Soroy Khan, for current methods of running the health service providers and purchasers. How much damage do you think it's done?

Sir Roy Calne19:59

I think it's wasted a hell of a lot of money because there's some very high highly qualified accountants.

Sir Roy Calne20:05

on both the purchasers and the provider's side, and they have a happy game of monopoly discussing what the best price and bargain they can produce. It doesn't do any good, the money's not real. And I think that it has demoralized to a great extent the workers in the health service who feel that this is irrelevant.

Sir Roy Calne20:25

Um, that I think the health service in

Sir Roy Calne20:28

The UK and in every country in the world has great troubles reconciling to the new very expensive high-tech medicine and surgery, including the work that I do myself.

Presenter20:39

That's the problem, really, isn't it, that there is so much more medicine available to be paid for.

Sir Roy Calne20:43

That's right. And I don't think even if we got rid of this present system, wasteful system, I think we would still have this dilemma.

Presenter20:53

What you get at the moment uh I suppose it always has been, but nevertheless we hear um a lot of um complaints about long waiting lists. Is there any th do you suffer how much as a surgeon do you suffer for

Sir Roy Calne21:03

Very much. Because of the costs involved and the facilities that are inadequate, we frequently have either no intensive care beds for major surgery,

Sir Roy Calne21:14

or a lack of ordinary beds, or a lack of operating facilities in the operating theatres, or not enough anaesthetists to anaesthetize the patient, very seldom are there not enough surgeons to do the operations.

Presenter21:27

So you can get the patient in all geared up to to to to be operated on for a major operation and you've talked to him and everybody's poised for it and then he's he's cancelled.

Sir Roy Calne21:36

And this is a terrible thing. I mean, apart from the fact that they've got a a possibly a potentially lethal disease and they're terribly worried and their families are extremely keyed up, to go and tell a patient, Well, I'm sorry, we're not going to do the operation today. There's no intensive care bed because it's been filled by some other case.

Presenter21:52

What's the solution to that dilemma?

Sir Roy Calne21:54

One of the troubles is that there is, I believe, too much specialization in intensive care and it would be better if nurses had multidisciplinary training in critical care so that they could look after children and adults, head injuries and heart cases, patients who've had just an operation and are recovering but still need critical care. Of course, and then you could move the nurses around.

Presenter22:14

Of course.

Presenter22:16

It's partly the surgeon's fault that that hasn't happened.

Sir Roy Calne22:18

I think it is mainly mainly the mainly my profession and also to some extent the nursing profession that feel that we are the super specialists and we will only do this and we don't want any child coming into an adult high intensive care ward or vice versa.

Presenter22:32

And you've got your own little empires and your own nurses and

Sir Roy Calne22:33

And this is uh very much a territorial thing and a vested interest, and I think it'll have to change.

Presenter22:40

No music.

Sir Roy Calne22:42

Well, uh the next i is the Borjac's uh Symphony from the New World, and uh this has a special memory for me and and uh my wife because

Sir Roy Calne22:52

When I was in the army in Hong Kong,

Sir Roy Calne22:55

Working as a doctor in a Gurkha regiment, my wife who I'd known when she was a nurse at Guy's joined the army as a nurse and she arrived in a plane in the beautiful surroundings of Hong Kong like a princess from the sky and the two of us were walking up the hill and we heard the Warjack New World Symphony coming from an open window. It was a very beautiful and still is a beautiful memory.

Presenter24:20

Part of Vorjak's Symphony No. Nine in E minor, From the New World, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.

Presenter24:28

You hit the headlines eighteen months ago, Sir Roy Carn, because you published a book called Too Many People, in which you suggest suggested, among other things, that people should have a license to have children, much as you do to drive a car.

Presenter24:40

It was very controversial and it attracted a lot of critical coverage. I wonder why I think this is the interesting question why would a man so eminent in his field plunge head first into somebody else's in that way? Why did you do it?

Sir Roy Calne24:52

Um yes, the license bit was was one paragraph, I think, in two hundred pages. And I said that we are quite strict in in safety regulations for who drives a potentially lethal weapon, namely a car, and uh perhaps we should also have a similar serious attitude to having children and

Sir Roy Calne25:11

Uh that didn't seem to me to be so unreasonable, but the idea of of writing a book about this started uh when I was in Bombay.

Sir Roy Calne25:18

And I saw some of the population there around the airport. There are about a million around the airport.

Sir Roy Calne25:25

uh living in terrible poverty and uh I went to the children's hospital and they told me that children are brought in dead every day from simple diseases at least diseases that are easily treated. And then I was just mulling in my own mind of the kind of work that I do, expensive high tech surgery for a few relatively privileged people.

Sir Roy Calne25:44

But if I was in charge of the World Health Organization, I would regard

Sir Roy Calne25:48

most high tech Western medicine is quite irrelevant because there's about one billion of the five billion in the world are living in poverty, close to starvation and in a state of

Sir Roy Calne26:00

really a terrible deprivation that uh the only thing that many of these people do is to procreate children. And so it became quite an interesting project to do for about two years of research in.

Presenter26:09

But do you really

Presenter26:14

But do you really believe that we have a a moral right to control other people's behaviour, to tell them how they should control their reproductive habits?

Sir Roy Calne26:23

If nothing is done, I suspect that we will destroy ourselves, or there will be, a major terrible incident which might clarify our minds.

Sir Roy Calne26:33

But I wrote this book hoping that the Man in the Street might read it and find it interesting, but o the only thing that the media were interested in is the idea that my maybe you needed a license to have children.

Presenter26:44

There's a double irony, though, here, isn't there? Not just that you spend your life saving lives, but also that you've got six children yourself.

Sir Roy Calne26:50

That's right, but that's before I knew about the world population troubles and the fact that the five billion is likely to become ten billion in the next twenty or thirty years.

Presenter26:58

Record number six.

Sir Roy Calne27:00

Well record number six is from Carmen, from BZX Carmen, in uh which Carmen uh mocks and taunts the young soldier, saying wouldn't you rather stay with me? and uh and he initially says yes, and then he hears the bugle, meaning that he's got to go back to the barracks and so he's torn between this dilemma of the beautiful girl or the army that's his career.

Speaker 427:49

Yet tomorrow or later.

Speaker 427:53

Et pour pour, situa, Le Me saba.

Sir Roy Calne28:14

Yeah.

Presenter28:22

Therese Berganza and Placito Domingo and Jevet Dancien Vautronneur from Bizet's Carmen with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abardo. You're sixty five now, Roy Carne. You've been Professor of Surgery at Adenbrookes in Cambridge for thirty years.

Sir Roy Calne28:36

Thirty years, yes.

Presenter28:37

How how long can a man go on performing surgery?

Sir Roy Calne28:41

I think uh it depends really on how lucky you are in terms of degeneration of your body and your mind.

Presenter28:46

Is your hand still steady?

Sir Roy Calne28:48

I think it is pretty steady, yes.

Presenter28:50

Puts it out and has a quick look. But is there a set age for retirement?

Sir Roy Calne28:54

Uh in Oxford and Cambridge professors retire at sixty seven, yes.

Presenter28:58

A fairly arbitrary figure, isn't it? Who says that at sixty seven you can't do it any more?

Sir Roy Calne29:02

Well, uh there that just happens to be a rule. Uh we're full of rules. In America they've challenged the rules and they have ageism, so you can't sack professors provided they pass a medical.

Presenter29:13

Mm-hmm.

Sir Roy Calne29:13

That wouldn't be a bad idea, actually.

Presenter29:14

How difficult will you find, actually, to give it up?

Sir Roy Calne29:18

I would find it very difficult to hope that I might be able to continue in some way or other, perhaps helping uh some of my ex-students in developing countries to get transplantation off the ground.

Sir Roy Calne29:30

But I would hate to have to give up surgery if I were still able to do it.

Presenter29:33

And in the middle of the mail with

Sir Roy Calne29:33

It's difficult to know whether you're still able to do it. Of course, other people often will tell you.

Presenter29:36

People often will die.

Sir Roy Calne29:46

Yes, I think that uh most of the surgeons in Adam Brooks paint in fact, doctors are very frequently painters and sculptors, but uh very few uh paint their work.

Presenter29:57

It's not surprising, really, that surgeons like to paint. Is it really?

Sir Roy Calne30:00

No, it's similar. It is similar.

Presenter30:01

But also, I mean, artists always had to study the anatomy. I mean, there is a link, isn't there?

Sir Roy Calne30:06

I would agree with you entirely and I think that uh

Sir Roy Calne30:08

The closeness between certainly before photography, the closeness between art and and medicine, and particularly surgery where anatomy is so central, has been a close one over the years.

Presenter30:20

Record number seven.

Sir Roy Calne30:21

Record number seven is uh another love song where uh this time it's uh the man who who is seducing uh the rather innocent girl and it's Don Giovanni, uh another very beautiful song, but it shows uh how she succumbed to the smooth talk of the handsome Don.

Speaker 431:05

Yeah.

Speaker 431:11

I cross to each and every song.

Presenter31:33

Roger Soyer and Helen Donart singing the duet La Cidarem la Mano, from Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Presenter31:43

Sir Roy Kahn, a surgeon on a desert island. I have this image of a a man with a knife in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.

Presenter31:50

If you're not painting or dissecting the fauna, what will you be doing in your solitary confinement?

Sir Roy Calne31:54

I will be trying to get to know the animals and plants in the island, uh to study them and to perhaps make friends with some of them the animals that is.

Sir Roy Calne32:05

If they've got cormrants there, maybe they could do a bit of fishing for me. Or uh

Presenter32:09

And you can cook.

Sir Roy Calne32:10

I can cook fairly specialized dishes. Thai cooking I like doing, but I think I'd have to spread my uh d versatility to rather more simple things like gruel and uh baked fish.

Presenter32:23

Um let me ask you finally about death, because you're a man who's obviously seen a lot of it at at at close hand. Does it alter your attitude to death at all? Do you fear it, or do you feel comfortable with it?

Sir Roy Calne32:36

Well, I think uh uh it does I do fear it because it's totally unknown what happens uh afterwards, although one may have beliefs. Uh the evidence for any any afterlife is uh somewhat thin, but I think that with an idea of uh the way the human race is uh really a continuum of its DNA, in a way there is an immortality to

Sir Roy Calne33:01

uh the race of uh beings, not only our species but every species, if we don't destroy it.

Sir Roy Calne33:08

Perhaps the most important thing is that uh we don't destroy ourselves uh for our children's sake and our grandchildren's.

Sir Roy Calne33:15

But uh

Sir Roy Calne33:16

Death, if it comes quietly, can be friendly. Often it's very traumatic and horrible, particularly in patients who are kept alive too long by artificial means.

Presenter33:27

Last record.

Sir Roy Calne33:28

Well the last record actually happens to be uh a work that a neighbour of mine who played uh the cello he had a beautiful Maggini cello he said that this is for him the music he would like to hear uh whilst he was dying, presumably gently, uh and it is uh supremely beautiful.

Presenter34:49

Part of the second movement of Schubert's string quintet in C major, played by the Kozian Quartet with Daniel Weiss.

Presenter34:57

If you could only take one of those records, Sir Roy.

Sir Roy Calne34:59

I think it would be the Vorjak.

Presenter35:02

That's memories of climbing the mountain of your life.

Sir Roy Calne35:03

Yeah.

Presenter35:05

And and what about your book? You've got the Bible and you've got Shakespeare there already.

Sir Roy Calne35:08

Well, I knew what kind of a book I wanted, and I went into Heffers yesterday and uh had a discussion with the biology department uh manager and

Sir Roy Calne35:17

He suggested a book which looked a very nice one called Global Biodiversity, which would have information on plants and animals, which would be a starting point in trying to classify what was going on in the island in terms of animals and plants. I think that that would be something uh to work on as a beginning any rate.

Presenter35:34

And what about a luxury?

Sir Roy Calne35:36

A luxury would be uh would have to be paints and uh a canvas, I suppose. I think there's nothing else that I would need so much as that.

Sir Roy Calne35:44

to try and record what was going on.

Presenter35:47

Sir Roy Khan, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir Roy Calne35:50

Thank you.

Speaker 335:59

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