Sir Paul Nurse

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 two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a scientist, a Nobel Prize winner knighted for his services to the study of cancer, and now at the head of Britain's most important cancer charity, he's climbed a long ladder to be where he is today. His love of the natural world was his inspiration when, as a working class boy, he made his way to school in North London. Later, as a research scientist, his decision to study yeast, which caused laughter among his colleagues, laid the foundations for his discoveries about how human cells multiply. His work has led to an understanding of the molecular structure of cancer. He discovered these things because he says he really wanted to know, and, as he adds, because of the beauty of it. He is Sir Paul Nurse. Is that Paul, the beauty of the biology itself, or the beauty of the discovery?

Sir Paul Nurse1:21

It's really both.

Sir Paul Nurse1:23

I think the discovery process in science and actually finding out something that is new that nobody else has ever even dreamt of before is one of the most amazing things that a human being can do. To sit there looking at a new land that nobody has ever seen is just it's like being an explorer in the Amazonian jungle or in the Antarctic. So it's absolutely amazing. But also that the process itself can be beautiful. You can do beautiful experiments. You can have beautiful thoughts on the way to a conclusion.

Presenter1:57

But you could also have long dark nights on the way where where there's no beauty at all,'cause you're just not getting anywhere, presumably.

Sir Paul Nurse2:03

I'm afraid there's much more of that than there is of the creative spark and also the the eureka moments. Science is tough, it's difficult. And keeping yourself going through those long hard nights when very little actually happens, when you have failure after failure, because if you're at the cutting edge of research, you will have lots of failures. If you really knew what was going to happen, then of course you'd have many successes, but that's not how really high quality work is pushed forward.

Presenter2:32

You use the word creative. Is it creative? I mean, people think of science well, we know, first of all, you stand on other scientists' shoulders, don't you? You use what they have discovered to move towards something else that you discover and so on. But where is the creativity?

Sir Paul Nurse2:46

Maybe if I use a painter as a sort of metaphor for this, because a painter has got to be technically skilled to be able to apply the paint on the canvas in the way that they want. But they also have to have a creative feel for what it is they're trying to present, how they're going to do it, how they're going to have impact on the observer. Science is very similar. We have to be technically able. We have to be able to apply the paint to the canvas, that is, shake the test tubes, know how to do the experiment. But we've also got to think about what it means, what it's going to tell us about nature itself.

Presenter3:19

So curiosity

Presenter3:21

Creativity, bit of doggedness and a lot of luck gets you the Nobel Prize.

Sir Paul Nurse3:26

It you certainly need luck to do that.

Presenter3:28

Where were you when the news came?

Sir Paul Nurse3:31

I was in a meeting actually, and I was sat there, and I had a message which told me I should switch on my mobile phone. You know, I'm over fifty, so I have a mobile phone, but keep it off all the time. And I left the meeting, switched it on, and there was this sort of rather distorted Swedish voice on the phone saying I thought that I'd won the Nobel Prize, but it's so extraordinary you can't believe it. So you run back and re-record it, re-record it, and gradually it sort of sunk home that maybe I had won it. And then I went back into this meeting and I said perhaps one of the more foolish things in my life, which was, I think I've won a Nobel Prize, so I have to go, and then rushed out.

Presenter4:11

Uh

Sir Paul Nurse4:11

Uh

Presenter4:11

So

Sir Paul Nurse4:11

Uh

Presenter4:11

Tell me about your first record.

Sir Paul Nurse4:13

Well, I thought if I'm sitting on a desert island I'm going to sometimes be a little bit miserable, and I'll want to be happy and get up and dance. And um the record that's going to make me do that is Bowie and Jagger Dancing in the Street.

Speaker 44:28

Laughing and singing and music swinging Dancing in the street, Philadelphia PA.

Speaker 44:39

Come on.

Speaker 44:46

Who is treated so personal?

Speaker 44:49

Back in the

Presenter4:55

David Bowie and Mick Jagger and Dancing in the Street. So, Paul Nurse, your route to this Nobel laureate, which happened, what, last autumn, didn't it? Last last year.

Speaker 45:03

It's deep, yes.

Presenter5:04

Began with yeast, this terribly simple, is it ordinary common garden yeast that we use to make bread?

Sir Paul Nurse5:10

It's the yeast that makes um bread and beer and wine, so it's quite useful, but it's also very useful for research because it it acts as a good model for understanding how processes work in more complicated living things like ourselves.

Presenter5:25

But you wouldn't have known that it was going to be a model for the for the human system, would you? I mean, that's the whole point.

Sir Paul Nurse5:31

When this w work started and I have to say it's quarter of a century ago, it's terrifying to think that although yeast was used as a model system, I don't think people fully realized how good it was as a model for human beings.

Presenter5:43

So there are very, very few genes in this simple bit of yeast as opposed to the many, many thousands in the human being.

Sir Paul Nurse5:49

It's one of the reasons we work on yeast. There's only five thousand genes in yeast. It's very easy to manipulate and grow. Whereas human beings have forty, fifty thousand genes, much more complicated.

Presenter6:00

What you discovered was the gene that causes cells to divide and create more cells. And of course, cancer is, as we know, that uncontrolled multiplication of cells. Did you realize when you began with yeast that you might in the end have an application to cancer and cancer therapy?

Sir Paul Nurse6:17

Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought this was possible, but I really thought that m that the work we were doing in yeast would be more of a metaphor rather than exactly the same sorts of molecules. I just thought it would help us think properly about the same problem in human beings.

Presenter6:32

How long then did it take you to show that the gene that you had isolated in yeast was in fact

Presenter6:39

pretty much the same in human beings,'cause that was the great leap, wasn't it?

Sir Paul Nurse6:43

It probably was, and I I think I first identified this gene in the mid seventies, and then my work and of course the work of many others, because science is truly a social activity, led to the physical isolation of the gene in the early 80s from yeasts, and then another five or six years before we made the link with humans, so quite a long time.

Presenter7:04

That must have been quite a moment when finally you realized that it was forgive me if I get it wrong but practically the same gene.

Sir Paul Nurse7:11

It's practically the same gene, despite the fact that it's been 1,000 million years, or maybe 1,500 million years, immense period of time, since yeast and human beings, since the origins diverged. It's quite extraordinary. And that moment was it is a Eureka moment. We don't have many of them in science. And I remember I was sat there with my colleagues in the lab, looking at the computer screen, waiting to see whether they were the same or not. And out it printed. I still see the letters in my mind. And we knew we'd got it. What'd you do?

Presenter7:42

Uh

Sir Paul Nurse7:43

I think I shouted. I think I ran round the lab. I think I ran into the next lab. I think I went quite wild.

Presenter7:49

We call number two.

Sir Paul Nurse7:51

I do like thinking.

Sir Paul Nurse7:53

And I like music that makes you feel more contemplative. And I think Beethoven is really the composer for me that makes you think that way. And so Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. twenty three, I think it's one of the most thoughtful pieces of music that I know.

Presenter9:08

Emile Guillel's playing part of the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata No. twenty three in F minor, the Appassionata. So, Paul, who was the boy who became the man who won the Nobel Prize? Not one with any family history of kind of academic learning by all accounts.

Sir Paul Nurse9:23

No, I came from a quite ordinary family in north west London.

Sir Paul Nurse9:27

My father worked in a factory, was a machine worker, and my mother was a mother, and I was the youngest of four by far the youngest of four. That was probably a mistake.

Sir Paul Nurse9:38

And spent quite a lot of time on my own.

Presenter9:40

And you were always fascinated by the natural world. How how did that manifest itself?

Sir Paul Nurse9:45

Really, as long as I can remember. We had a park on the way between my home and the school, and I just sort of noticed the natural history around me, the birds, the trees, the insects, nothing very sort of scientific, but became very curious as a consequence of that.

Presenter9:58

You kept Beetles in your pocket or some such, hm?

Sir Paul Nurse10:00

Well, I did later collect Beetles. It's a bit non P C to do that sort of thing then, but this was the sort of early sixties, and it does make you interested in in in what you see.

Presenter10:09

But it was Sputnik two that turned you on.

Sir Paul Nurse10:13

Sputnik Two was really important for me, which um it was the late fifties. I could have only been eight or nine and I read in the newspaper that Sputnik Two could be seen from London about seven or eight o'clock in the evening, and I badgered my mum to allow me to stay up.

Presenter10:29

This is the one with the dog in it, wasn't it?

Sir Paul Nurse10:31

Yes, this is the one with Leica. And of course the English were very interested in it because they were all worried about the dog and what would happen to the dog, which of course died on re entry. Anyway, I read about this and thought, well, this can be seen, I can see it. And so I waited up at my front door and I looked up and there was this bright star moving across the sky. It was truly amazing. And I got so excited. I remember running down the street, my mum calling after me, and telling everybody I was in my pajamas and I didn't have any shoes or socks on telling everybody I saw, just look at that, look up that, there's a satellite, it's Sputnik too. They obviously thought I was balmy.

Presenter11:08

And obviously you were you were very bright and you got on well at school and you had some good teachers and so on, but apparently you had trouble in the end getting into university. I did actually.

Sir Paul Nurse11:17

I did well at school, but I didn't like exams and I found languages particularly difficult. And at the time, to get into a university, you needed to have a basic qualification in a foreign language. So we sat French at school, and I sat it and sat it, and I failed it, and I failed it. And at the end of my time in school, I'd failed it four times, and I couldn't get into a university, so I had to go and work. I worked for a year as a technician. So how did you get there in the end? Well, I sat it twice more and continued to fail it, so that I ended up with six failures. And then, curiously, one of my universities I applied to, which is the University of Birmingham, the professor of genetics there, Professor Jinks, looked through the applications and noticed that I had actually pretty good A-level grades, but had failed on this problem with O-level French, asked me to come and see him, so I got on my motorbike, went up the M1, spent the afternoon with this famous professor, and at the end of it he said, Well, I'll get a special dispensation and you can come. But the sting in the tale was that the University Senate, I think it was, insisted I studied French for one year at my first year at university.

Speaker 312:26

Did you pass it?

Sir Paul Nurse12:28

Well, I had a very good tutor. He he sat me down on day one, and he said,'Look, you don't want to be here, and I don't want to be here. We'll do a deal.

Sir Paul Nurse12:36

I'll give you one examination, three hundred words of French to translate into English you can bring any book you like into the exam, including a dictionary and I promise you, if you simply put all the words in the right order, I'll pass you at the end. I don't think I need see you again.

Sir Paul Nurse12:52

It was absolutely a dumb-do.

Presenter12:54

And now, don't tell me, but you attend seminars in France and understand every word, what?

Sir Paul Nurse12:58

Well, I've chaired things in France. I know in French it's utterly absurd, isn't it?

Presenter13:00

In French.

Presenter13:04

Record number three.

Sir Paul Nurse13:06

Well, I'm a sixties child, and I think that archetypal track I Got You Babe sums it all up.

Speaker 413:16

Say your hair's blown, cause I don't care with you, I am the wrong.

Speaker 413:24

Then put your little hand in mine.

Speaker 413:28

There ain't no hill or mountain into we can't fly

Speaker 413:34

Me

Speaker 413:37

I got you, baby.

Speaker 413:40

Uh

Presenter13:40

I got you.

Speaker 413:41

Uh

Presenter13:43

Sally and Cher, and I got you, babe. Okay, um, Paul Nurse, let's talk in more detail about that, about the science here then. You spent ten years, we say, moving around various research laboratories from Edinburgh to Sussex working with yeast. Just tell me the science of how you set about trying to identify that gene which brings about the division of the cell.

Sir Paul Nurse14:02

Well, all yeast cells grow and divide from one to two to four to eight. And I was interested in what controlled that process. And the way you go about that is to use genetics. That is, you look for mutants, that is, genetically defective yeast strains, yeast cells, that can't divide properly. The point being, if they can't divide properly, they must be defective in a gene that's important for cell division. So I initially just collected those genes by this approach. But then I asked the question, okay, that tells us what's required, but if I want to ask a more subtle and more important question, what controls it? I need to take a different approach. I need to find those genetic mutants which control the rate at which cells divide, not whether they divide or not, but the rate. And so then I looked for mutants which actually divided faster than normal. And that's very simple. I just looked for mutants that divided at half the size, because they were dividing faster than they could grow. And that was a really important moment when I first saw those under the microscope.

Presenter15:09

If you know what it is that causes cells to divide, and we know that cancer is the uncontrolled division of cells, why can't you, and why haven't we already, arrived at a drug that can simply zap those defective cells?

Sir Paul Nurse15:22

Well the problem is that cell division isn't simply important for cancer, but it's important for nearly every other growth process in the body. We were all once a single cell when we were an egg in our mother's body. You and I were once single cells. But to produce us we had to go through many, many divisions. And when we damage our cells, cut our hand, we have to get cell division to repair that. Now we could easily stop that with a drug against the genes that I or many other people have identified, but we wouldn't simply kill the cancer, we'd kill all the dividing cells as well. So the real key for cancer is actually

Speaker 415:55

Mm.

Sir Paul Nurse15:58

To try and identify something that's specifically different about the cancer cell compared to the normal cell.

Presenter16:06

So the real trick is to stop the cancer growing in the first place, is essentially what you're saying, not cancer therapy for those defective cells. Is that where your knowledge is leading? I mean, can we expect to discover exactly what that is quite soon?

Sir Paul Nurse16:21

I think where the sort of work I and my colleagues have done has more closely identified cancer of what we call a genetic instability disease. That is that when the cell division goes wrong, then cells are made which are damaged genetically, and that promotes cancer. And what this is doing is identifying those specific targets that are different in a cancer cell from a normal cell. And with this knowledge, we'll be able to develop drugs which will just zap the cancerous cell and not the normal cell. And this should have far fewer side effects.

Presenter16:53

Our grandparents yours and mine as it were, we the over fifties saw cures for infectious diseases. Do you think we in our lifetime are going to see a cure for cancer?

Sir Paul Nurse17:04

We'll never see a cure for cancer because there's just too many different types of cancers out there. But I really confidently predict that we're going to see a major attack on many of those cancers in the coming generation.

Presenter17:16

Record number four.

Sir Paul Nurse17:18

I was introduced to classical music when I was at university, and the very first classical record that I had was one given to me on my, I think, nineteenth birthday by a friend of mine in my hall of residence, and that is Brahm's double concerto for violin and cello.

Presenter18:36

The opening of the third movement of Brahm's Double, his concerto for violin and cello in A minor, played by David Oystrach and Pierre Fournier with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. You became in the mid-nineties, Paul, director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Britain's biggest cancer charity then, which is unusual actually for a dedicated scientist because it means that you probably have had to spend as much time fundraising as in the lab, I suspect. What made you want to take such a job?

Sir Paul Nurse19:05

Well, it was quite a difficult decision. I talked about this with the trustees and said that I really wanted to continue my research. They were very sympathetic to that, and they allowed me to carry on fifty per cent of my time running my own lab, which I still do, and fifty per cent running the organization, including fundraising.

Presenter19:24

What are the bare facts? What proportion of money for cancer research in this country is provided by government and what comes from private donors?

Sir Paul Nurse19:32

Two thirds of all cancer research in this country is funded by the charities, with by far the biggest being the Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, about just having come, the Cancer Research UK, and about one third from government sources.

Presenter19:48

Do you think that's right?

Sir Paul Nurse19:50

Well, the British public are very generous. They they give to us, and I suspect that the government thinks, well, if it's going to be looked after by direct contributions, it's less of a priority.

Presenter20:00

Yeah.

Sir Paul Nurse20:01

Well, you understand where they're coming from, because, you know, they're they're well pressed for money, but it can't be said to be right.

Presenter20:07

But i in the meantime, the government this government hasn't, as it advertised in its manifesto of ninety seven, banned s cigarette advertising. Wasn't in the Queen's speech this last time around. That makes you pretty sick, doesn't it?

Sir Paul Nurse20:18

This is an utter disgrace. We are killing a hundred thousand people a year due to tobacco.

Sir Paul Nurse20:25

And the tobacco industry has been almost evil in w how it's dealt with this in the past by covering up what they knew before.

Sir Paul Nurse20:32

That we know that a ban on advertising will have a huge effect.

Sir Paul Nurse20:38

It would save many, many lives.

Sir Paul Nurse20:42

And it's a disgrace this continues.

Presenter20:43

And why do you think it continues?

Sir Paul Nurse20:45

Do you know, I really don't understand it. They have no answer. The advisers know that it's right. They're embarrassed. I just think it's turned out to be politically too difficult.

Presenter20:55

Have you asked a politician, a a high-level politician, straight, face-to-face?

Sir Paul Nurse21:00

Frankly, they're mostly embarrassed when you bring this up. They can't justify it themselves.

Presenter21:04

But how do you explain it to yourself then? You have to become cynical, I suppose, don't you?

Sir Paul Nurse21:08

Well

Sir Paul Nurse21:10

All I can say is that we just need to keep bashing on that door and point it out time again, time again, until they're so embarrassed this changes.

Presenter21:18

But the tobacco lobby is also knocking on the door, I suppose.

Sir Paul Nurse21:21

And they have lots of money, lots and lots of money, and we have to fight that.

Presenter21:26

and the income from tobacco for the Treasury is very high.

Sir Paul Nurse21:30

I'm afraid it is, and um of course there are cynical interpretations of this. The tobacco companies can stoop quite low in the defence of their position, and do so.

Presenter21:40

Record number five.

Sir Paul Nurse21:42

Well

Sir Paul Nurse21:43

I didn't really learn how to play an instrument when I was at school.

Sir Paul Nurse21:48

And I felt this was a lack in my twenties, and so my wife and myself and a friend, my wife Anne, decided we'd learn the recorder, the simplest instrument. So we went to the local teacher and found ourselves in a class, which included some nine, ten and eleven year olds, learning how to play the recorder. But I always remember the end of term concerts where we were like cuckoos in the nest at the back of all the eleven year olds in front of their parents playing away on the recorder.

Presenter23:15

The second movement of Handel's recorder sonata number eleven in F major, played by Marion Februggen, accompanied by Tone Copeman.

Presenter23:24

But you can't do it like that, can you?

Sir Paul Nurse23:25

I certainly can't.

Presenter23:27

The other funding issue that's regarded as scandalous in your circles, and not only in your circles, it has to be said, is the business of private industry attempting to patent important key genes as they get identified. Can you describe to me the wrongs of this in relation to your work?

Sir Paul Nurse23:42

Well, this is a complicated issue.

Sir Paul Nurse23:45

What has to be recognised is that there's a lot of public money going into basic research to understand disease, and that's going to be useful for mankind. And sometimes in this process, patenting is absolutely necessary and indeed can promote, with proper controls, bringing new treatments and cures for cancer to the patient quicker.

Sir Paul Nurse24:07

What I think particularly bothers me and many others is when we see unscrupulous behaviour on the part of certain companies. If, for example, there's lots of public work which is leading to the cloning, the discovery of a particular gene, then what you can see is often huge amounts of public money which narrow the problem down to just a small part of a chromosome.

Presenter24:29

And when you say this is public work, you mean all of this information is in the public domain, that's the point.

Sir Paul Nurse24:33

All absolutely in the public domain. And then if a company comes along at the last moment and puts one hundred people working on this problem, just to move that last one or two per cent to get the gene.

Presenter24:44

Which they couldn't do if they hadn't got all of your public work.

Sir Paul Nurse24:47

Solutely

Presenter24:48

Yeah.

Sir Paul Nurse24:49

then they end up controlling that, and then all that public work they've simply taken over. Now that cannot be right. The patenting laws should not allow that, because what this will do and has done is turned this gene, instead of being immediately used at no cost,

Presenter24:49

Yeah.

Presenter24:51

Uh

Speaker 424:54

How did

Sir Paul Nurse25:05

It now costs thousands of dollars to use that, for example, in the United States. Yet it's built on this public money.

Presenter25:10

Yeah.

Presenter25:11

Now both President Clinton and Tony Blair made very public statements about this when the Human Genome Project came to fruition. They criticized that practice. How much impact has that very public criticism had? Any?

Sir Paul Nurse25:24

Well, that was a brave and important statement, but somehow it's not being translated into real change.

Presenter25:30

Why can't the law intervene? Why can't you make it impossible for this to happen?

Sir Paul Nurse25:34

My own view is that we have to have a a closer look at patenting. Patenting laws are often built on sort of outmoded ways of thinking, and particularly in this area, we've got to have another look at this to catch up with the way that science is now done. Record number six.

Sir Paul Nurse25:49

Well, I'm going to be lonely sometimes sitting on my island, and perhaps I want to be sentimental sometimes, as well as jumping round the fire, so Billy Joel singing just the way you are.

Speaker 426:02

Don't walk clever.

Speaker 426:05

Conversational

Speaker 426:09

Never want to work that hard

Speaker 426:15

I just want someone

Speaker 426:19

That I can talk to

Speaker 426:22

I want you just the way you are

Presenter26:28

Billy Joel singing Just the Way You Are, which is a sentimental song for a hard nosed campaigner. Um but I have the impression that there's a sort of dreamy side to it. You're a glider.

Sir Paul Nurse26:38

Yes, that's absolutely right. I own partially a glider with five of my friends and that's.

Presenter26:44

What does it do for you?

Sir Paul Nurse26:45

Being up there, looking down on the world, it's a glider, so you have to know about air currents, you're at one with nature, and everything else just melts away.

Presenter26:53

And you're an amateur astronomer as well. You've got all the gear, I think, and stare at the Oxford sky out of your back window.

Sir Paul Nurse27:00

I don't do it scientifically. I just think there are beautiful things up there.

Sir Paul Nurse27:04

Saturn's rings. You can just look at this star, it just looks like an ordinary star up there in the heavens, get your telescope on it, and there's this beautiful orb with a ring round it.

Presenter27:13

So is that quite the opposite of staring at your through your microscope at tiny cells on a slide, or is it actually quite similar, really?

Sir Paul Nurse27:20

There's some similarities. Using instruments, if you like, to expand your senses. The difference is when I'm looking at my cells, I'm going through lots of cerebral processes, lots of thinking. What does this mean? With the stars, I'm just saying, isn't that beautiful?

Presenter27:35

Hm. And what you're looking at at the moment through your microscope are the shape of cells. What it where's that leading?

Sir Paul Nurse27:41

Well, a very important feature of all living things is their shape, their form. You look at a tree, you look at a dog, you look at a human being, and we all have characteristic shapes. Well, that's seen in its simplest way at a cell, single cell.

Presenter27:57

We're back to East, are we?

Sir Paul Nurse27:58

We're back to yeast. I'm afraid we're back to yeast. And my um yeast cell is just like a little cylinder. But I can change its shape using mutants again. So they grow like bananas, they're curved or like a a ball, like a sphere, or T-shaped cells, because they have more than one growing size.

Presenter28:15

Yeah.

Sir Paul Nurse28:15

This have a

Presenter28:15

Link to can

Sir Paul Nurse28:16

I think it will. Cancer is really dangerous when it spreads throughout the body. And for cells to spread through the body, they have to change their shape and creep through the tissues to escape from where they are to go somewhere else. How this is controlled is just not understood, and I'm starting with that to see whether we can get some clue as to how it might work.

Sir Paul Nurse28:37

PICKOD NUMBER SEVEN

Sir Paul Nurse28:38

I'm a fan of Shakespeare, and there's a very beautiful opera by Benjamin Britton.

Sir Paul Nurse28:46

I met Benjamin Britton once, when I was a graduate student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Sir Paul Nurse28:51

I was just beginning to learn more about classical music and I we had a a record lending library and I thought I would try this guy Benjamin Britton. So I got a record out and I was queuing up to take it out and I was looking at it and there was a picture of Britton on the back and the man next to me began to chat about it and I chatted a little bit and then I gradually looked at him and realized it was exactly the same man on the back of the record and it was Benjamin Britton. And the opera Midsummer's Night's Dream is one of my real favourites, especially the ending.

Speaker 429:37

Thanks to the whole business.

Speaker 429:43

Who is kindness with sweet green?

Speaker 429:51

And these are full grounds.

Speaker 430:04

Drip away, make mistakes meet me on brain.

Sir Paul Nurse30:17

I love that piece, The Fairies Led by Oberon, dancing round the palace.

Presenter30:22

Tripping in. You can hear them, can't you? Going round and round in circles. Wonderful. It's Alfred Della, Elizabeth Harwood, Richard Dakin, John Pryor, Ian Woodhouse, and Gordon Clark. That was the final scene of Britain's A Midsummer Night's Dream with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. Your organisation for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund has just merged with the Cancer Research Campaign, and now you're together, one big one called Cancer Research UK. You therefore get to share in the lead role. Is that going to give you more time in the lab and less on the stump? What's going to happen to you?

Sir Paul Nurse30:53

All mergers are complicated. And so just at this moment, we're all terribly busy. We're very excited about Cancer Research UK. It's absolutely the right decision. One single cancer research organization to make a big difference both in cancer research and also lobbying the government to make them do better as well.

Presenter31:12

Well, we're going to take you away from it all anyway. We're taking you to a desert island. You can sit there and have all the ideas in the world. You can do all the thinking or none of the thinking. Do you think can you come to conclusions in abstract like that? Can you sit there and close your eyes?

Sir Paul Nurse31:25

I can, actually. I can imagine I quite like the idea of being on a desert island, I have to say, sitting there thinking, looking up at the stars, looking at the world around me. I I'm very sociable, so I am a bit worried about being alone. I mean, that bothers me, but I'm going to sit on the beach and contemplate.

Presenter31:42

Tell me about your last record.

Sir Paul Nurse31:44

Although I think I'm going to like being on my desert island, eventually I want to be rescued. And uh there is this nice trio in Cozy Fantuti where everybody is waving goodbye as they sail away on the sea. And I shall be playing that Cozy Fantuti piece as I'm rescued and sail away into the sunset.

Speaker 432:32

Pray this call for you.

Speaker 432:57

Love stream.

Presenter33:03

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, and Walter Berry singing the trio suave silvento from Act one of Mozart's Cousifantute with the Philharmonial Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Carl Burm. Now, what about if you could only take one of those eight records, just one alone?

Sir Paul Nurse33:18

I think it's going to be dancing in the street so that I don't get depressed.

Presenter33:22

I see. You're worried about going under mentally, are you?

Sir Paul Nurse33:25

I'm a bit worried about that.

Presenter33:27

Only on your island, it should be said.

Sir Paul Nurse33:29

Yeah.

Presenter33:29

Um what about your book? You've got the Bible and you've got your Shakespeare.

Sir Paul Nurse33:33

I think I'm going to choose The Ascent of Man by Bronofsky, because this was such an important book for my own intellectual development, and it's so beautifully written I shall want to dip in it constantly.

Presenter33:43

And your luxury.

Sir Paul Nurse33:45

A telescope. I can look at the stars at night, I can look at the birds, um during the day and I can look for the ship that's going to rescue me.

Presenter33:55

Sir Paul Nurse, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 334:05

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.