Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
Scientist who won a Nobel Prize for revealing protein structure using crystallography, advancing the chemistry of life.
Eight records
Plácido Domingo, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Claudio Abbado
Well, I thought I'd like to uh play you an aria from the first opera my mother took me to in in in Vienna. And that was the barber of Seville. And their figure, the barber, uh thinks that everybody's after him, everybody wants him. And he talks faster and faster and faster. And I, as a little boy, I laughed and laughed and laughed because I'd never heard anybody talk, let alone sing so fast.
Francisco Araiza, Wiener Singverein, Wiener Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
I would should like to play a piece from Haydn's creation, the moment at the creation when God separates light from darkness and the chorus of the angry angels sings that there shall be light.
Fidelio (opening of the finale)
Tom Krause, Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Christoph von Dohnányi
Well, my third record is Don Fernando's aria, the minister's aria, in the finale of Fidelio, which follows the chorus of the prisoner and he sings, you know, now you will be free. Each brother looks for his brothers and Bruide Zuchtz and E Brude. And that to me is the most moving mo moment in the aria.
Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109 (third movement)Favourite
And I'm playing this because it has a wonderful consoling quality. Some years ago I contracted shingles and I was in agony, but the Beethoven sonatas calmed me down. They had a wonderfully consoling effect.
He's Got the Whole World in His Hands
Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Parsons
I chose this because hearing her at the festival hall was another one of my great musical experiences. You know, there there there was this tall, fulsome woman with an abundance of black hair standing off in all directions and which stood on the stage. She looked like the queen of all Africa, quite fantastic, and and her voice was just tremendous.
Piano Sonata in G major, D. 894 (second movement)
Again has significance for me because of the moment when I first heard it. A couple of years ago, Azar Berlin, the great philosopher, died, and there was a memorial meeting for him in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. And then, to my surprise, Alfred Brandelborg walked in and he had his piano just ten yards away from me and started playing this this wonderful sonata.
Sonata for Solo Violin in D major, Op. 115
And then to my surprise, at the end of this, as it were, to fill in the space, I found a solo violin sonata of his, and which is just wonderful.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Well, I thought I'd like to play you Doctor Panglas Aria from Voltaire's Condide. The Panglos Aria we live in the best of poss possible worlds, you know, in in in Condide. One disaster befalls the hero after the other. And then many times again Doctor Panglos says, but we live in the best of all possible worlds. And uh if you think about the past century, uh Voltaire's sarcastic comedies is very apt indeed.
The keepsakes
In conversation
Presenter asks
What made you the kind of person who wanted to [solve the secret of life]?
I think I was foolish and optimistic thinking that I could tackle this. But my uh fellow graduate students thought it was mad to uh try such an impossible problems. And in fact, uh most people thought that I was wasting my life on something with uh which I would never be able to solve. And at times I did become quite desperate myself and wondered if they weren't right. But then somehow I managed to continue.
Presenter asks
How did this lazy boy become this incredibly ambitious young man?
University turned me on for the first time. First of all, I discovered that that I liked work and I could do good work, and chemistry really interested me.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
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 1
The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My castaway this week is a scientist. The contribution he's made to our understanding of one of nature's greatest secrets, the structure of protein, is enormous. Indeed, he's won the Nobel Prize for it. He first came to Britain from Vienna as a young man in the 1930s, but his studies at Cambridge were interrupted by the war, when he was interned as an enemy alien. It was after that, in a unit that included Crick and Watson who discovered DNA, that he began work on protein crystallography, the science which helps us understand the very chemistry of life. A prolific writer and a passionate advocate of science and the pursuit of knowledge, he can say of himself at the age of eighty-six, I'm still very ambitious. I like to solve problems. He is Max Perutz, and not just ordinary problems. I think I'm right in saying, Max, that you set out at age 22 saying that you wanted to solve the secret of life.
Dr Max Perutz
That's right, yes.
Presenter
But how did you know what the secret of life was?
Dr Max Perutz
the work of the living cell, all the chemistry of the living cell depends on proteins. But um in the nineteen thirties very little was known about them. The basic chemistry was known, but no ad people had no idea about the structure. They had no idea how they work.
Presenter
But how would you, why would you, a young man of twenty two,
Dr Max Perutz
How
Presenter
Set your sights on such an enormous problem. What what what made you the kind of person who wanted to do that thing?
Dr Max Perutz
I think I was foolish and optimistic thinking that I could tackle this. But my uh fellow graduate students thought it was mad to uh try such an impossible problems. And in fact, uh most people thought that I was wasting my life on something with uh which I would never be able to solve. And at times I did become quite desperate myself and wondered if they weren't right. But then somehow I managed to continue.
Speaker 1
Mm.
Presenter
But something drove you on, because I think I'm also right in saying that as a very young man you also talked about winning the Nobel Prize, didn't you?
Dr Max Perutz
I didn't talk. You see, I had an I was in Vienna, but when I was seventeen and eighteen, I had an English girlfriend. She then left, went back to England, but we corresponded and we often wrote letters tongue in cheek. Now, my father was a textile manufacturer, and I was supposed to, you know, go into that firm. But um she actually sent my letters back recently and there I found that in my second
Dr Max Perutz
A year of chemistry, I wrote to her, I'm turning over and over in my mind how I could avoid um giving up chemistry and becoming a textile manufacturer in a Czech village. Surely the loss to mankind would be incalculable if I didn't win the Nobel Prize.
Presenter
So there you are. The seed within you. And yet, by your own admission, because you've written about it, which is how I know, you were quite lazy at school. You'd sort of drop off to sleep.
Dr Max Perutz
The scene
Dr Max Perutz
Thank you.
Dr Max Perutz
That's right, that that that's right. I wasn't really interested. I had no ambition at all. I mean, what whatever for should I exert myself? It didn't really matter whether I got mediocre notes or top notes. I didn't
Presenter
So how did this lazy boy become this incredibly ambitious young man?
Dr Max Perutz
University turned me on for the first time. First of all, I discovered that that I liked work and I could do good work, and chemistry really interested me.
Dr Max Perutz
Uh
Presenter
So how would you sum up what it takes? What what are the qualities of a scientist who is going to tackle a a seemingly insoluble problem? He's going to sit at his bench month on month, year in, year out, doing very repetitive, often tedious work, I think.
Dr Max Perutz
Yes. I find this hard to answer because I would have to tell you what what a marvelous chap I am.
Presenter
Well, that's what we're here for.
Dr Max Perutz
Well that's what we're here for.
Presenter
Yeah. Uh
Dr Max Perutz
Yeah.
Presenter
But what you mean is you have to be dedicated, you have to be determined.
Dr Max Perutz
Yeah.
Presenter
But you have to be very, very single-minded.
Dr Max Perutz
But you have to be
Dr Max Perutz
Yes, that's it that that that's that's right.
Presenter
Uh
Presenter
Some people would also call that being bloody minded.
Dr Max Perutz
Yes, yes, right. Bit of that too, huh? Well, maybe maybe, I don't know.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
You have to be really passionately interested to do this.
Presenter
Passionately interested we are in sending you to a desert island. Tell me about the first record you'll play there.
Dr Max Perutz
Well, I thought I'd like to uh play you an aria from the first opera my mother took me to in in in Vienna. And that was the barber of Seville. And their figure, the barber, uh thinks that everybody's after him, everybody wants him. And he talks faster and faster and faster. And I, as a little boy, I laughed and laughed and laughed because I'd never heard anybody talk, let alone sing so fast.
Speaker 4
Get it up.
Speaker 4
Take me more, you know?
Speaker 4
Figurative, figured, figured, figurative, figured, figurative, figured, figurative. I'm mad, I'm aiming up.
Speaker 4
Pericarika, Pericarika, Ura la voilta, Uray la voilta, Uraila voilta, Perkarika.
Speaker 4
Really gotta
Dr Max Perutz
I had a tremendous capacity for laughter and my mother loved to take me to communists where I would nearly roll off the seat with la laughing.
Presenter
That was Placido Domingo as Figaro in his opening aria from Rossini's Barber of Seville, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Claudio Abardo.
Presenter
So, Max Perutz, the secret of life that you solve, protein structure, explain to me what is it?
Dr Max Perutz
D
Dr Max Perutz
Proteins are the workhorses of the living cell. All the chemistry of life depends on protein molecules which work together in a beautifully ordered way. But when I started in the 1930s, this was realized. But people had no idea what they looked like. You see, there we are, they are these vital molecules, and they were just black boxes. And it w we realized that if you don't actually see what they look like, we'll never understand how they worked.
Presenter
But how How do you begin to try to see something that is almost literally a black hole, then?
Dr Max Perutz
Yes. Uh well there was one method and that was X-ray crystallography, the rather forbidding name, with which uh people had solved the s uh arrangement of the atoms in crystals in three dimensions at the time.
Presenter
So they they'd looked at salt crystals.
Dr Max Perutz
Well, I mean the first one to s to be solved was that of common salt and finding the positions of the atoms of a chlorine and and sodium in them. But when I I started in Cambridge, nobody had actually solved the structure of such a simple
Dr Max Perutz
chemical compound is ordinary sugar. But there was I.
Dr Max Perutz
ambitious to solve the structure of these enormously complex molecules because it was known already that they contained thousands of atoms.
Presenter
How did you know what it might even begin to look like?
Dr Max Perutz
I had no idea.
Dr Max Perutz
But I knew there was this method which was potentially.
Presenter
Uh
Dr Max Perutz
uh capable of solving.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
D.
Presenter
But but can you give it can you give us an image? Because it it would be rather like holding something up to the light, wouldn't it? To try to see.
Dr Max Perutz
You give it.
Dr Max Perutz
This is
Dr Max Perutz
Um using using the X-ray diffraction is rather like you get a you put a crystal in front of an X-ray beam and put a photographic film behind it and uh when you expose the crystal you get a pattern of spots on the film. The the analogy is if you take your handkerchief and look through it at a distant street light, you get a pattern of spots, each spot being again a little image of the street light. But with with X-rays and crystals um you get a pattern in three dimensions.
Presenter
Um
Presenter
Exactly, because obviously holding up your handkerchief is is is two dimensional. You you have to know what goes on behind, behind, as it were, and beyond.
Dr Max Perutz
But
Dr Max Perutz
is two dimensional.
Dr Max Perutz
As it were, under your. That's right. So, if you like, each of these spots is produced by a wave. And if you could trace the wave back to the crystal, to one particular atom in the crystal, that wave would have either a crest or a trough or some intermediate position at that atom.
Presenter
But you could never know, impossible to guess.
Dr Max Perutz
But but there was no way, apparently, no way of knowing. And without knowing that for each of the thousand spots the structure couldn't be solved.
Presenter
So did you
Dr Max Perutz
And that that that was the conundrum that faced me.
Presenter
So day upon day you went to your bench and you measured spots.
Dr Max Perutz
That that's right. Yes, thousands of them.
Presenter
Tell me about your second record.
Dr Max Perutz
I would should like to play a piece from Haydn's creation, the moment at the creation when God separates light from darkness and the chorus of the angry angels sings that there shall be light.
Speaker 4
God's other
Speaker 1
Ah
Presenter
Francisco Arezza as Uriel with the Vienna Singferein performing the opening of Haydn's creation with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karrion.
Presenter
So Max, when and how did the breakthrough come? When did this black box suddenly begin to reveal itself?
Dr Max Perutz
In 1953, sixteen years after I had started, I had discovered the way of solving that problem, finding out which of these spots had a crest and which had a trough at the right moment. And I knew that this ought to produce slight changes in the relative darkness of these spots, you see. And so I was in the dark room. I developed my picture with my heart in my throat. And then I compared the diffraction pattern of these hemoglobin crystals to which I had attached a heavy atom mercury with those of the metal free. And when I saw these differences, I realized the problem was now solved. So I rushed up three flights of stairs to my Professor Bragg and asked him to come down. And we both looked at this and we realized that now the way was clear. It was a moving moment, but I also admired my Professor W. L. Bragg for it afterwards, because he had thought about this problem for years and years. And there was I, a younger man, who had now solved it. And he didn't seem to resent this for one moment, but went around saying that I had opened the gold mine.
Presenter
Um
Speaker 1
Yeah, no.
Presenter
Indeed you had, but of course it wasn't quite as open as you thought it was, was it?
Dr Max Perutz
No. Well, there are still dreadful technical difficulties. I thought, you know, now I could really get to the structure. But in fact, it took me another six years of messing around. But then then then it really worked.
Presenter
But then it really worked in 1959,
Dr Max Perutz
In September 1959, one morning a series of maps, contour maps, like the sort of contour maps of a landscape, emerged from the computer. And for the first time, I could actually see what this molecule looked like. And so quickly I bought some plasticine and a rolling pin and a board. And I rolled out sheets of plasticine on which I cut out the shapes of the peaks which I saw on these maps and then stuck them together. And then suddenly there was before me this molecule in three dimensions, this thing that nobody had ever seen. And you know, it was fantastic. It was sort of like discovering a new continent.
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
Uh
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
Tell me about your third record.
Dr Max Perutz
Well, my third record is Don Fernando's aria, the minister's aria, in the finale of Fidelio, which follows the chorus of the prisoner and he sings, you know, now you will be free. Each brother looks for his brothers and Bruide Zuchtz and E Brude. And that to me is the most moving mo moment in the aria.
Presenter
Robert.
Speaker 1
Mm.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 4
That's the thing.
Speaker 4
Elisht Maknietnavis.
Speaker 4
Oh man, it's to run.
Presenter
Tom Krause as Don Fernando with the Vienna State Opera Chorus in the opening of the finale of Beethoven's Fidelio, with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Christophe von Dochnani.
Presenter
Why do you find that so moving, Max? What is it?
Dr Max Perutz
It reminds me of the opening of the German concentration camps at the end of the Second World War. A cousin of my wife's now lives in Cologne, is married to a man who survived Buchenwald, and he described to me the moment of liberation. So the SS guards fled, but at first they were still terrified, scared to move. And then one morning looking out of the window, you saw a sight, an unbelievable sight, one of the prisoners with a rifle over his shoulder hurrying to the parade ground. And then a voice came from the loudspeaker there, not the orders of the SS bellowed there, but a voice from that man saying, Comrades, and that that was a tremendous moment.
Speaker 1
Of the S S b.
Presenter
You, of course, were over here and and therefore escaped the Nazi threat, as it were, because you came over here in'36. You also got your parents out in'thirty-nine, didn't you?'
Dr Max Perutz
That's right.
Presenter
Yes.
Dr Max Perutz
Uh
Presenter
But how did they manage? Because they obviously, as you say, you the family was in textiles, obviously very wealthy, had lived you know a very comfortable life in in Vienna. How did they fare over here? Things must have been very different.
Dr Max Perutz
Yeah.
Presenter
Uh
Dr Max Perutz
Um well it was very hard for them because th they were poor of course, you know.
Presenter
Um
Presenter
They couldn't they didn't bring anything out with them at all, nothing.
Dr Max Perutz
No, they my my father w had been a businessman. He you know, he a businessman without capital, he can't do anything. He couldn't find a job at first. So uh they spent the rest of their lives living in r lodgings. He just did furnish lodgings, which was hard for my mother because she was a beautiful woman. Everything she had used to b around there used to be beautiful. But um my father
Dr Max Perutz
who had never done any work with his hands, got himself apprenticed uh as a laser operator at a sort of school in Ledgeworth and bravely continued this work until the end of the war, which was a blessing not only then, but that it qualified him for a pension.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
But of course what happened to both you and he was you were interned at the outbreak.
Dr Max Perutz
Yes, that's right. Well, in uh in May nineteen forty I was interned and and then I was deported to Canada with hundreds of others as a sort of and left there as a prisoner of prisoner of war, which I found terribly distressing because I felt that, you know, having been
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
rejected by my native Austria as a Jew. I was now rejected by the English as an Austrian, as an enemy alien. And but I didn't know that really all my my my English friends stood by me and they did get me released after six months. So they they were really marvelous to me and I got released at Liverpool and took the train to London, arrived there late one evening and turned up at the house of a girlfriend of mine and she and her parents were absolutely sweet.
Speaker 4
That this
Presenter
Shall we pause there for your next piece of music?
Dr Max Perutz
Yes. So, um
Dr Max Perutz
Uh my next piece is Vladimir Shkenase playing the third movement of Beetrum's piano sonata in E major.
Dr Max Perutz
And I'm playing this because it has a wonderful consoling quality. Some years ago I contracted shingles and I was in agony, but the Beethoven sonatas calmed me down. They had a wonderfully consoling effect.
Speaker 1
Uh
Speaker 1
It was
Presenter
Vladimir Ashkenazi playing part of the third movement of Beethoven's piano sonata No. thirty in E major.
Presenter
Tell me about you and the war effort, Max, because you seem to have got involved in a completely crazy project.
Dr Max Perutz
That's right. So I got released from internment in January 41 and I was very keen to do something to help in the war against Hitler, but as an Austrian nobody wanted me and I just continued to work in the physics lab at Cambridge on Himerby until I got a phone call. Would I visit a one Geoffrey Pike at the Albany in Piccadilly. So I went there and he told me that he wanted my help for one of the most secret projects of the war. I mean he would like me to tell me what it was, a man in whom he really had confidence, but he he mustn't because if it leaked out then all these fools who were against it would tell Churchill and that he didn't want. So he told me that my job was to find a way of making ICE stronger. Now
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
He took me on supposedly as an expert on ice, because in the summer of 1938 I had taken part in a glacier research expedition in Switzerland that spent three months at 11,000 feet trying to find out how the tiny snow crystals which fall on the glacier are transformed into the large ice crystals that you find in the glacier tongue. So I was sent to combined operations headquarters and given a cold store on Smithfield Market, five floors underground, in a meat store. And for many months I worked on this without knowing what it was for. But then gradually it leaked out. The idea was to build a huge aircraft carrier of ice. At that stage of the war the range of aircraft was not long enough to fly from America to Britain. So all the warplanes, bombers, fighting planes bought from America had to be shipped across the Atlantic and many were lost in the U-boat war. And Pike argued that if a base could be, a staging post could be established in mid-Atlantic, then these aircraft would fly across.
Presenter
But the The whole thing was never going to work. What f Finally did
Dr Max Perutz
At the Quebec conference in September 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the project should be transferred to America, where greater resources would be available. And so the entire team went across to Washington. In due course, they decided that freezing this quantity of ice would require as much steel as it would take to build the entire aircraft carrier out of steel. And I'm afraid that was the end of our project.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah.
Presenter
Tell me about record number five.
Dr Max Perutz
My next record is um
Dr Max Perutz
Jesse Norman.
Dr Max Perutz
singing He's got the whole world in his hands. I chose this because hearing her at the festival hall was another one of my great musical experiences. You know, there there there was this tall, fulsome woman with an abundance of black hair standing off in all directions and which stood on the stage. She looked like the queen of all Africa, quite fantastic, and and her voice was just tremendous. She could have shattered the glass with her voice in the furthest corner of the festival hall.
Speaker 4
Good job.
Speaker 4
What does a real sign is got woods and water is hand? It's got the star ring.
Presenter
Jesse Norman, accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons, singing He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. So after the war, Max Perrutz, your tiny unit was established in Cambridge, and it began to grow, and it began to grow.
Presenter
And two chaps came along, one called Crick, one called Watson. They became part of it. Wonderful creative atmosphere. Were you actually there? Do you remember the morning that they discovered the double helix of DNA?
Dr Max Perutz
One Monday morning they called me in and asked me to look.
Dr Max Perutz
Add the model of D and A which they'd built over the weekend.
Dr Max Perutz
I mean, it looked like nothing on earth, you know, this sort of Heath Robinson device made of red taut stand and brass rods and aluminium plates. But um to with a to a chemist's eye it was immediately clear that it it must be right.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
That of course happened in nineteen fifty three which was the year you had your breakthrough although as we've said you had to go on another six years after
Dr Max Perutz
You had your
Dr Max Perutz
Although as you've said, you have to go on another six years after.
Presenter
All happening there. And of course Everest was being conquered and the Queen was being crowned. It was a wonderful year. But do you think why do you think those kinds of discoveries were being made in your small unit? Was there something special about it? Was it total coincidence? Or what do you put it down to?
Dr Max Perutz
My whole
Dr Max Perutz
Call.
Dr Max Perutz
The Queen is getting crowned.
Dr Max Perutz
Go in
Presenter
Look.
Dr Max Perutz
The the one secret is to find talented people and give them a free hand and make sure that they need everything for their own research.
Presenter
Tell me about record number six.
Dr Max Perutz
This is um the Schubert's piano sonata in G major, which.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
Again has significance for me because of the moment when I first heard it. A couple of years ago, Azar Berlin, the great philosopher, died, and there was a memorial meeting for him in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. And then, to my surprise, Alfred Brandelborg walked in and he had his piano just ten yards away from me and started playing this this wonderful sonata.
Presenter
The end of the second movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in G D eight nine four, played by Alfred Brendel. You were forty eight, Max Brutz, when you received the Nobel Prize. You went along in the same year, of course, as Crick and Watson. You went together.
Speaker 4
Went together.
Presenter
What effect did having that prize have on you? Did it change you in any way or change your professional approach?
Dr Max Perutz
Uh not really. It enormously increased my self-confidence.
Dr Max Perutz
I worked you you see I was a chemist but I worked in the in the Cavendish laboratory in the department of physics on a biological problem and um there were all these clever physicists who knew much more mathematics than I did and um I always felt very small compared to them and um not not all that sure of myself. But somehow the Nobel Prize really sort of told me that I was probably quite good at research. Quite good. And that
Presenter
Quite good.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Max Perutz
Boost it.
Dr Max Perutz
It really boosted my determination to to carry on.
Presenter
And in the meantime, you have literary ambitions too. You've even won a literary prize, I think.
Dr Max Perutz
Well, that's right, you know. Um
Presenter
Is there no end to your talents, doctor Perrutz?
Dr Max Perutz
Well, I can only say long may it last.
Presenter
Well this is
Dr Max Perutz
Record number seven. And then to my surprise, at the end of this, as it were, to fill in the space, I found a solo violin sonata of his, and which is just wonderful.
Presenter
Dmitri Sitkovetsky playing part of Prokofiev's sonata for solo violin in D major. So, Max, how are you going to get on on this desert island? Uh there's a test of your creativity.
Dr Max Perutz
I don't know that I'll be able to write anything there because I always need company, other people to discuss things with. I mean Cambridge is a wonderful place because I've written on all many different subjects. And when I'm stuck, there's always the world authority on that particular one that you you I can go and talk to. So I'm afraid I'll be sterile on this island.
Presenter
And
Presenter
Oh, well, you can't be that, and you and you must survive. So what ideas have you got for your survival? Completely alone?
Dr Max Perutz
completely alone. I'm afraid I I don't know how I would keep myself happy on desert desert island because um
Presenter
Mm.
Dr Max Perutz
Whatever I do is a social activity. Science is a social activity. Is it? Oh, yes, yes. You a scientist no is not a s sort of man who toil toils away all secluded by himself trying to think.
Presenter
Is it?
Dr Max Perutz
The deep thoughts.
Presenter
So the one place you will be completely hopeless is on a desert island.
Dr Max Perutz
That that that
Presenter
Sra
Dr Max Perutz
Without a double.
Presenter
Without a doubt.
Dr Max Perutz
That's right.
Presenter
That's right. Tell me about your last record.
Dr Max Perutz
Well, I thought I'd like to play you Doctor Panglas Aria from Voltaire's Condide. The Panglos Aria we live in the best of poss possible worlds, you know, in in in Condide. One disaster befalls the hero after the other. And then many times again Doctor Panglos says, but we live in the best of all possible worlds. And uh if you think about the past century, uh Voltaire's sarcastic comedies is very apt indeed.
Speaker 1
And
Speaker 4
What a war!
Speaker 4
Though war may seem a bloody curse, It is a blessing in reverse, When cannon roar, both rich and poor, By danger are united, Till every dog is fighted. Philosophers make evident the point that I have cited,'Tis war makes equal, as it were, the noble and the commoner. Thus war improves relations. Now on to conjugations.
Presenter
I want to find out.
Presenter
Adolph Green as Doctor Pangloss, and Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Court Ullman, and Della Jones as his pupils, singing The Best of All Possible Worlds from Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein himself. Now, if you would only take one of those eight records, Max, which one would you take?
Dr Max Perutz
add the beat of the sonata
Presenter
And what about your book? What book would you like to take to a desert island?
Dr Max Perutz
Darwin's Origin of Species.
Dr Max Perutz
So really very grateful.
Presenter
And your luxury.
Dr Max Perutz
A pair of skis. You never know it might snow after all.
Presenter
Dr. Max Burritz, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Speaker 1
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.
What are the qualities of a scientist who is going to tackle a seemingly insoluble problem?
You have to be really passionately interested to do this.
Presenter asks
When and how did the breakthrough come? When did this black box suddenly begin to reveal itself?
In 1953, sixteen years after I had started, I had discovered the way of solving that problem, finding out which of these spots had a crest and which had a trough at the right moment... I developed my picture with my heart in my throat. And then I compared the diffraction pattern of these hemoglobin crystals to which I had attached a heavy atom mercury with those of the metal free. And when I saw these differences, I realized the problem was now solved.
Presenter asks
How did [your parents] fare over here [in England]? Things must have been very different.
Um well it was very hard for them because th they were poor of course, you know... They couldn't they didn't bring anything out with them at all, nothing... my father who had never done any work with his hands, got himself apprenticed uh as a laser operator at a sort of school in Ledgeworth and bravely continued this work until the end of the war
Presenter asks
What effect did having that [Nobel] prize have on you? Did it change you in any way or change your professional approach?
Uh not really. It enormously increased my self-confidence... I always felt very small compared to them and um not not all that sure of myself. But somehow the Nobel Prize really sort of told me that I was probably quite good at research... It really boosted my determination to to carry on.
“Surely the loss to mankind would be incalculable if I didn't win the Nobel Prize.”
“And then suddenly there was before me this molecule in three dimensions, this thing that nobody had ever seen. And you know, it was fantastic. It was sort of like discovering a new continent.”
“The the one secret is to find talented people and give them a free hand and make sure that they need everything for their own research.”
“Whatever I do is a social activity. Science is a social activity... a scientist no is not a s sort of man who toil toils away all secluded by himself trying to think.”