Carl Djerassi

Speaker 40:00

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.

Presenter0:21

My Castaway this week is a scientist. Half a century ago, as an ambitious young chemist and refugee from Nazi Austria, he made a discovery which was to bring about a fundamental change in our society. He invented the pill.

Presenter0:34

He was paid only one dollar for the patent, but his company's stock options meant that the boy, who turned up penniless in the United States, became a multimillionaire.

Presenter0:44

He became a distinguished academic, too, and then in his sixties he began a new career as a writer, using novels and plays to explore scientific dilemmas. Now in his eightieth year, and as energetic as ever, he says, I want to be the first working professor aged one hundred. I've got a chance. My father didn't die until he was ninety six, and that was an accident. He is Carl Jurassi. You're no stranger then, Carl, to uh ambition and uh determination. You've certainly led life at high speed. Drive is second nature to you, isn't it?

Carl Djerassi1:17

Yes, that's both good and bad. That sort of ambition is both the nourishment that makes this sort of work possible, and I think it's also the poison. This desire for name recognition, for approval by your peers, the fact that you think you never have enough time for all the things that you want to do makes you impatient and at times not very prodient.

Presenter1:37

But to that extent it's not surprising really that you were only, what, twenty-eight, I think, when you made this life-changing discovery. I mean, you'd raced through your education, you were ahead of everybody because your Viennese education had been so good. But the f most fascinating thing I think about it is that you were going to use it for other things, not for consciousness.

Carl Djerassi1:56

Oh indeed. Well progesterone, the natural hormone, which then was isolated and synthesized by chemists in the 1930s, was used in medicine quite widely for the treatment of menstrual disorders, for the treatment of infertility. In other words, to really help women maintain a pregnancy, because you need progesterone also for the maintenance of the proper environment in the uterus. Progesterone for these uses had to be done by injection. We want to see whether we can make a synthetic compound that does not exist in nature, which however would have the same biological properties as the natural hormone, but be active by mouth. And that is what we accomplished.

Presenter2:33

Did you look at it and think millions of women around the world

Carl Djerassi2:33

Uh

Presenter2:36

Really need and want

Carl Djerassi2:38

No, it would be nice to romanticize this, but I would say no. And what we did is we then sent this material to many different biologists all over the world, including one named Gregory Pincus, who worked in Massachusetts, whose interest at that time was to try and work on the contraceptive applications of progestational compounds. So he was very interested in the compound that we sent him. So he trialled it. He tried it, and it was one of the two most active compounds. And that's where it started. But then other people also became interested in this.

Presenter3:08

So the sensational thing really, perhaps, is the speed with which it was taken up. It was women who told the chemists who told you.

Carl Djerassi3:13

Women

Carl Djerassi3:14

No, absolutely. And I really do believe very strongly that there was a window of opportunity for about 15 years between roughly 1950 and 1965 when oral contraceptives could have been developed. If we had done this 15 years later, I do not believe that you would have a pill right now.

Presenter3:31

Why not?

Carl Djerassi3:31

This was a time of really uncontrolled optimism that there would be a technological fix for every not only medical but even social problem. Now that climate has changed. It has changed very much since the late nineteen sixties for understandable reasons.

Presenter3:47

However, women, I'm sure, around the world, when they meet you and know who you are, fall at your feet, don't they?

Carl Djerassi3:54

Uh not all of them, but most of them do. They don't follow my feet. I rather like uh I don't know, a peck on my cheek or something like that. Well yes.

Presenter4:02

Tell me about your first record.

Carl Djerassi4:04

The first record is Boris Kristoff singing one of the Musovsky songs, in this case called The Leaves Were Sadly Rustling, but the important thing was for me to hear this Bulgarian bustle, this wonderful singer of really the 1930s and 40s and 50s singing. It's a Bulgarian connection that interests me, and these are among the loveliest songs that I know.

Speaker 44:29

Christianshole.

Speaker 44:43

Oh, the Lord, the Lord.

Speaker 45:05

Oh boy.

Speaker 45:10

Yeah.

Speaker 45:24

Uh

Presenter5:27

Zorgsky's setting of The Leaves Were Sadly Rustling, sung by Boris Christophe with the French National Radio Orchestra conducted by Georges Cypine. Christophe, of course, a Bulgarian, as was your father, Karl Jarasi, and your mother was Austrian. Both of them were doctors. If, you know, life had an early plan for you, was it to become a doctor too?

Carl Djerassi5:45

Yes, absolutely.

Presenter5:47

But Hitler intervened.

Carl Djerassi5:48

Right. And that is when I then went to Bulgaria from Vienna after the Angelos. My parents were divorced at age four without my knowing this. I only learned that at age thirteen, strange enough.

Presenter6:00

But you've said that your father apparently made his money from syphilitic patients.

Carl Djerassi6:05

That was specialty of veneural disease. And at that time, treatment in the prepenicillin days meant he was your patient for about three years and you could almost count your income accordingly, yes.

Presenter6:15

Just tell me about before that time. I presume uh you know, you were an only child living with your mother, who'd become a dentist by then, hadn't she? It w it was very happy, you went to school, you had lots of friends, you

Speaker 26:24

Yeah.

Presenter6:26

Played sport, you remember the Boy Scouts, life was good, huh? When did it begin to become bad? Do you remember? Do you?

Speaker 26:30

Yeah.

Carl Djerassi6:30

Good.

Carl Djerassi6:34

Well, of course I remember. I remember the Anchlus exactly. I still remember sitting on the balcony of our house and seeing the brown shirts marching across the bridge where we lived. They walked basically into a district that was predominantly Jewish. And then the separation school started instantaneously.

Presenter6:35

Cool.

Presenter6:54

But had you suffered from anti-Semitism, or did you just see it in the world?

Carl Djerassi6:57

The sort of anti-Semitism that once suffered was a anti-Semitism was which was indigenous, Central European one. It was not of a life-threatening variety. It was of the the type of social insulting one, which you have here too. You have it in many countries.

Presenter7:13

Yeah.

Presenter7:15

Yes, but there in the ni in Vienna in the nineteen thirty there were h terrible posters, weren't there?

Carl Djerassi7:17

Yeah.

Carl Djerassi7:19

There were terrible posters. But that was of course the period between March, April and the rest of the time. It became much, much worse, of course, uh by the end of that year when fortunately I was already in Bulgaria. But I only came to the United States after the war had broken out. But Italy was not yet in the war, so I was able to leave Italy with my mother.

Speaker 27:27

The

Presenter7:34

Covered

Presenter7:38

Tell me about your second record.

Carl Djerassi7:40

My second record is Berlioz's Neu d'Été. As a teenager and still a virgin, I read the first Arthur Kustler book called Spartacus, in which a courtesan walked into Spartacus' tent and started to make love to him, the macho man, and while they had intercourse started singing and sang more and more. At that time I was dreaming of the woman that I one day sleep with who would actually sing to me during sexual intercourse. Needless to say, in my long life I have not met her yet. And then I went once to the opera many years later and saw Satyana Toriano singing in a scene where she literally made love. I thought, my God, there's a woman who could do this. And then I met her. And the question was, would I actually ask her, do you sing when you make love? I was actually too embarrassed to do it, but I wrote a story about this.

Speaker 28:21

And then I

Speaker 48:39

Tourne pusi mobo que meke wa.

Speaker 48:47

So please with all the shit.

Speaker 48:52

Four to matur Lous Ivans Écourtes Maver, Lous Ivans etc, suspended.

Speaker 49:06

But I thought it was

Speaker 49:10

Lord is an open year It was the sudden ocean Three slaves were a boarding way

Speaker 49:23

Oh, he made no such an order.

Presenter9:28

Villanelle, the first of Bellio's Nui d'Eté Nights of Summer, sung by Marie-Nicole Lemieux, accompanied by Daniel Blumenthal. So you and your mother, Carl Jerasi, went to the States in December thirty-nine. You obviously, although you didn't have very much at all, spotted very quickly that education was the key to success and to your future. You wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt for help, didn't you?

Carl Djerassi9:50

Yes, charmingly naïve. I thought she would be the queen of America to whom everything would be possible. And said, dear Mrs. Roosevelt, I need a room world intuitions fellowship in uh college. And uh lo and behold, three months after I wrote, uh I got a postcard, not from her, but her secretary, saying you've got one in a small college in Missouri. And that was in a way the ticket to an express train because I managed to skip a couple of uh years of high school. So I really was able to enter college at age 16 rather than eighteen. So I finished college, got my bachelor's degree in about eighteen and a half.

Speaker 210:16

And because

Presenter10:29

And somewhere around that time, you were actually involved in the discovery of antihistamine. Well, then I needed more.

Carl Djerassi10:33

Well then I needed money. I needed money and I got a job at American branch of SIBA, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, and that was the first publication, first patent I had, which was one of the first antihistamines, purabenzamine. Yeah, it was Helipsta stuff. So by 19.5 I then decided I was growing up. I got married that absurdly time of 19.5. It only lasted for about six years.

Speaker 210:47

The s

Presenter10:48

That's all right.

Carl Djerassi10:56

But you are a young man.

Presenter10:56

But you're a young man in a hurry, obviously.

Carl Djerassi10:57

Sorry, I'll be able to do that.

Presenter11:01

The experience you you mentioned of that anti-Semitism in Vienna before obviously would have made a huge impression on you as a teenage boy. Did you in America ever feel wary? Were you still quite instinctively looking over your shoulder?

Carl Djerassi11:11

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I did uh all the time. I saw anti-Semitism in places where of course it didn't exist. This is a phobia, particularly I think of a refugee that you probably never uh forget.

Presenter11:24

I wonder if if in as you say, it it stays with you, d do you still feel that?

Carl Djerassi11:28

Well, it changed, but it changed really many years later. We were never religious. So that is both an important, I would say in a way an important negative thing, because those refugees, I'm talking about Jewish refugees, who were kicked out of the particularly it was true the German and Austrians, you know, who were more German than the Germans, the secular Jews, or more Aust more Viennese than the Viennese, had then nothing to fall back on to, whereas people who were also religious had, of course, their religion to fall back to. We didn't have that, I have to say it quite frankly, and I'm not a religious person, not at all. And so it had to be something else. And I think now I almost flaunt it. But that is perhaps the security of old age in a way old age. I don't really cons I take that back, mature age, old age, good God.

Presenter12:16

Record number three.

Carl Djerassi12:18

Well, the next one is Place de Domingo singing an aria from There is the Mass Ball. And that has a real play connection because my second play that I wrote together with a famous chemist Roald Hoffmann is called Oxygen. It's a play that deals with the Nobel Prize, but it also goes back to the 18th century, to the time of King Gustav III, and the Mass Ball. You want to remember I'm writing plays that have some scientific content. I want to use that to smuggle. You might say behavioral or other characteristics of this tribal culture scientist in an innocent theater going public.

Presenter12:56

Just slipping in a bit more understanding of science.

Carl Djerassi12:58

Yes, absolutely.

Presenter13:58

Placido Domingo, Josephine Bersto, and Leo Nucci at the end of Verdi's A Mask Ball played by the Vienna Philharmonica conducted by Herbert von Carrion.

Presenter14:08

One dollar, I said, Carl Durassi, you got for the patent on the pill, but you got stock options from the pharmaceutical company Syntex, and it went on to become a huge Wall Street success story. As a result, you were able to buy a ranch in California which you called SMIP, S M I P. What does it stand for?

Carl Djerassi14:27

MIP stands for a lot of things. Originally it was this very corny acronym, Syntax Made It Possible. I then changed it to steroids made it possible.

Presenter14:36

I thought that sexy man invents pill during the case.

Carl Djerassi14:38

And then I asked other people and said that was one sexy man in once people will see me in private or truly mankind is precious. You know, they're all there are innumerable combinations. SMIP is a wonderful acronym.

Presenter14:39

People said that was

Presenter14:43

Yeah.

Presenter14:45

Truly man.

Presenter14:51

Describe it to me, Smip. What's it like?

Carl Djerassi14:53

It's a spectacular beautiful ranch of about 1200 acres, very close to San Francisco, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There are very few places, I think, in the world where you can have this redwood forests and canyons and so on. And drives in wildlife. We have mountain lions, coyotes, of course, a lot of deer, bobcats and so on, within half an hour of millions of people. It's really quite spectacular.

Speaker 215:08

And wildlife is it

Speaker 215:09

We have mounted.

Presenter15:18

Not

Presenter15:19

And within half an hour of where you worked, because

Carl Djerassi15:21

Yes, I was a professor at Stanford University, which is south of San Francisco. It was about thirty minutes from there.

Presenter15:27

So were you an academic, but you also had your own lab, so you you know, from about sixty-five onwards you were doing both, really, weren't you? Both academic work and commercial work?

Carl Djerassi15:36

I was a bigamist virtually all my life. I mean a professional bigamist. I really started in the nineteen fifties being both a professor and an industrialist. And Syntex then moved from Mexico to the Stamford Industrial Park. So it was even it was even easier to to have two wives, so to speak.

Presenter15:52

So there you were with two hugely fulfilling jobs and a lovely family living in paradise. Things could not have been better, huh?

Carl Djerassi16:00

Mm, theoretically so. And then the gods were jealous. Mhm.

Presenter16:05

Which I want to talk to you about, of course, but tell me about it.

Carl Djerassi16:07

Well, the next song is a song I've never heard. Neil Young is our neighbor. He has a very large ranch adjacent to ours. Yet I've never heard Neil Young's music. That genre of music has never appealed to me. It is my wife who is much more modern. She said, I will suggest to you a Neil Young song that you should hear. And in a way, Helpless seems to me to be a rather interesting title. I don't even know what it's about, but it's helpless because I am helpless in this particular area, culturally innocent and helpless.

Presenter16:11

Uh

Speaker 416:44

Ring.

Speaker 416:46

Can you hear me now?

Speaker 416:54

The chain for locked and tied lost my doors

Speaker 417:04

Baby Bay

Speaker 417:06

Sing with me somehow

Presenter17:12

Leo Young singing a live and acoustic version of Helpless. Well, what do you think? Do you your neighbor has talent?

Carl Djerassi17:18

Well, I'm sure he has talent.

Presenter17:20

No, no, do you feel he has?

Carl Djerassi17:22

Well, it would be presum presumptuous for me to say it's n not my cup of tea, but it clearly is the cup of tea of millions of others and uh I'm delighted for that. I'm certainly going to tell him now I I don't have to bluff anymore. When I'll see you next time I can say I loved you, I helpless.

Presenter17:39

You lie.

Carl Djerassi17:41

Yeah, well, okay, but you know, every once in a while one should.

Presenter17:44

The gods got jealous of your happiness, you say, and and and one day this terrible tragedy happened. Your daughter Pammy committed suicide. Uh how how how did it happen? How old was she and?

Carl Djerassi17:55

She was twenty-eight, and I think there was a time when I was closer to her than I'd ever been. I felt she was the only woman to whom I could really confide about my life and son. And I still remember July 4th, 1978, when she came over to my place we sat by my swimming pool and nothing seemed to be wrong and we just had a wonderful talk. And the following day I had a frantic phone call from my son-in-law saying my daughter had left a suicide note and saying I went into the woods to die. For three days we didn't find her body, so we didn't know whether she in fact had died. And I had this vision that perhaps we'll never find out. And then a neighbor of ours saw tracks in the woods and called me and I went there and then saw the bloated face of my daughter. It was the greatest tragedy of my life. I've never overcome it, of course. You can't overcome this. But I felt very strongly that I have to talk about, I have to write about this.

Presenter18:52

What you've written is the terrible irony. You seem to suggest that it was the nature of the place and the peace and the beauty that she had there.

Carl Djerassi18:59

She was an artist and I really learned and I see that now as a writer too. It's a totally solitary occupation. Now for me in my age that didn't make any difference. For her she worked under some, you might say, ideal circumstances, a spectacular, beautiful, lonely place, but really basically in isolation.

Presenter19:20

And it terrified. You used the word terrified.

Carl Djerassi19:22

Yes, I think so. You know, you have to try suicide is different from any other form of death. You have to try to read the message that the deceased left and each survivor reads it differently. I think what really happened is she was clinically depressed. And that was really only realized afterwards. And if she had been in some form of therapy or had been treated, because there are now there were already then perhaps chemical treatments for that. Also, she was at that time in great physical pain from a slip disk and she was a very active person, for instance, always did horseback riding and things like that on the property. She could do none of that. It was that combi it was a combination of things because the day before I would have said everything was wonderful and the next day it was absolutely horrible. But I had to come to terms with that because to survive your own children is really almost anti-biblical. It's something that you can never overcome.

Presenter20:14

Okay.

Presenter20:17

Tell me about the next piece of music.

Carl Djerassi20:18

The next piece of music is Janet Baker singing one of the kindertoten leaders from Gustav Mahler. Kindertoten leader means of course the songs of the child's death. And Gustav Mahler went through the same experience, this horrible experience having one of his children die. And it's in that tremendous sadness that he wrote what to me are perhaps the most beautiful leader that I've ever heard. And I play them every once in a while. I played them of course when I scattered my daughter's ashes in a waterfall on our property. It in a way it brings back the most horrible moment of my life and at the same time it I can't say celebrates it, but it puts it into very wonderful musical terms and one has to come to terms with these things.

Speaker 421:10

Line takes over to your bathroom.

Speaker 421:23

Undenklingskenze

Speaker 421:39

Set all the seashtrays.

Speaker 422:00

But all they say

Presenter22:07

One of Marla's Kindertorton leader songs on the death of children, with the Halley Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter22:15

You said that suicide is a message for the survivors, Karl Jarasi, and the message seemed to be for you that you should expand this Jurassic Foundation you'd set up to help more artists like your daughter. But it changed, didn't it, after her death? You put much more into it.

Carl Djerassi22:31

Well, of course the foundation we established together with my children at that time was not at all for artists but for some philanthropic purposes. But when she died, one aspect of this was that loneliness and lack of peer interaction. Established at Artist Colony, I converted our huge twelve-sided barn into studio spaces and our former ranch manager's home into residence spaces and so on. And what we roughly have is four writers, three or four visual artists, composer, choreographer, photographer. In other words, various disciplines.

Presenter23:09

But who's been through? Who that we would have heard of?

Carl Djerassi23:11

We've had a lot of people. Let's talk about Englishmen. David Nash, a wonderful sculptor, Alan Hollinghurst, a very good novelist. And people from all over the world. Vikram Seth, I think. Vikram Seth, I'm not looking at an Englishman, but as at that time, certainly an Indian who actually lived in the United States at that time. We get roughly 700 applications a year for maybe 70 people. And they get free room on board, and they just have to get themselves there. And we actually get very good food. And the people who are completely alone, they cannot be disturbed in their studios unless they invite someone, except in the evening when there's a communal dinner, usually a very good one. I joined them very often. And hundreds of times I thought, what would my daughter have thought of this? And the other thing, that would not have happened if she had not died. So in a way, I have to say, I wanted to create something living out of death, not as some memorial, some building and so on, but a dynamic process. And that, of course, will continue now even when I'm dead, because it's become a completely independent thing. It's called the Jurassic Resident Artist Program.

Presenter23:22

Vikram Sen, I think.

Speaker 223:24

Yeah.

Presenter24:09

And

Presenter24:17

Not this because you funded it so enormously well. One of the ways in which you funded it at the beginning was that you sold a fantastic art collection which included Picasso and Giacometti and Henry Moore and Degas. But what you kept and in fact you have, I think, one of the most significant private collections of this man, you kept your Paul Clays. Why him?

Carl Djerassi24:17

Do you found

Carl Djerassi24:36

Well, because he's my favorite artist and he means an enormous amount of money. He's the most intellectual artist that I know. He was also a painter, he was also a violinist, he was also a writer, a musician, a teacher. In a way, it's a sort of intellectual polygamy that I practice. Except I'm, of course, not a painter. Next piece of music. The next one is Victor de los Angelas singing one of the Sephardic love songs, roughly fifteenth century.

Presenter25:07

Why do you want that?

Carl Djerassi25:08

It is one of the songs that I played when we scattered my daughter's ashes. Respond to me is really in a way what I continuously still ask my daughter.

Speaker 425:21

Yeah.

Presenter26:18

Rodrigo's Sephardic Love Songs Respondimos Ansimi, sung by Victoria de Los Angeles, accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons.

Presenter26:25

It it was a few years after her death, Pammy's death, I think, that you um turned to writing. You do most of it here in London. Now, I wonder why when uh you know, you have all that beautiful space you've described, and all we offer is traffic congestion.

Carl Djerassi26:37

And we offer

Carl Djerassi26:39

In 1986, I came to terms with my mortality. I was diagnosed having cancer, and it was a very serious operation. I did not know whether I'd survive it, or what my prospects would be. And I really was rather depressed and thought, if I'd known that five years earlier, I would have led these last five years differently, not as a workaholic scientist and so on. And I said, of course. And what would I have done differently? Lead another intellectual life. And that's when I made a decision. And my wife became the director of a Stanford program at Oxford in 1986. And I was a faculty husband at Oxford and started writing short stories.

Presenter27:15

Boot on other foot, huh?

Carl Djerassi27:16

Yes, but I loved it. And I wrote my first published book. It was published here in England now out of press, unfortunately, called The Futurist and Other Stories. And I wrote virtually all of that at Oxford. I have totally different social friends. They're primarily literary or theatre people or journalists and things like that. Primarily through my wife, who's an English professor. And I don't really have much to do with scientists here. My scientific life is really California. And that has meant an enormous amount to me.

Presenter27:45

And you've been prolific, as we've mentioned, two autobiographies, novels, plays and so on, mainly about scientific dilemmas, you know, who discovered oxygen, who discovered calculus and so on. But an ethical dilemma that you've highlighted in your play Immaculate Misconception is about the nature of reproduction. Now you believe that in this century, and I don't know how far off we will divide sex from reproduction, from procreation.

Carl Djerassi28:11

The current newspapers in England just describe a scene from my play. I found it was just incredible because we're talking here about a woman using her frozen egg and then having it fertilized by a technique called Ixi, which is a direct injection of an egg by a single sperm.

Presenter28:27

So a woman will freeze her eggs, a man will freeze his sperm, he can then have a vasectomy.

Carl Djerassi28:30

We can then have a view.

Carl Djerassi28:33

That is of course the future implication that in fact you would not need contraception. As it is, I mean you can freeze your gummies, freeze your eggs and sperm, that would be the idea, and then get sterilized exactly. And when you want to have a child, you check it out from the bank, so to speak. And the interesting thing is these techniques, remember after all, in vitro fertilization was discovered in England by Edwards and Steptoe. The Ixipud seizure was discovered in Belgium. We're talking about European, not necessarily American discoveries.

Presenter28:59

But there's apparently less of an ethical objection to freezing an egg than there is to freezing an embryo.

Carl Djerassi29:04

In my opinion, that's nonsense. An embryo is already potential life. But potential, it is a two-day, three-day old embryo that's then frozen. It can only become life when you put it back into a woman and it implants in the uterus. Well, a sperm is potential life because you take a sperm and put it into an egg, it gets fertilized, an embryo, etc. Well, if you think about trillions of sperms are destroyed every day by masturbation, no one has any compunctions about this. Why would that be any less or any more objectionable than an embryo?

Presenter29:33

Go.

Presenter29:39

But how long do you think it will take us to get to the point that you describe, where sex is simply recreational as opposed to recreational?

Carl Djerassi29:46

A hundred years from now, this may be the norm. I do not know this. But we are moving in that direction. We've already crossed that barrier. I do not believe that genie can be put back in the bottle.

Presenter29:56

Recoven.

Carl Djerassi29:58

Beginning of the first movement of Razumovsky, Quartet No. 3 by Beethoven, which I've picked because it is wonderful cello part with which it start.

Presenter30:02

But

Presenter31:04

The opening of the third of Beethoven's string quartets written for Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Austria, played by the Takax Quartet. So we prepared to cast you away to this desert island, Karl Jarasi. Um I understand you're a fit man. You exercise on one of those cross country skiing machines.

Carl Djerassi31:20

And I do cross country skiing also, yeah, mm-hmm.

Presenter31:23

Um but on the machine you do it naked, I'm told.

Carl Djerassi31:26

Why not?

Carl Djerassi31:28

But because I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is I go on the machine before I take a shower. I also swim naked, so I

Carl Djerassi31:37

I see no reason why one has to cover oneself.

Presenter31:39

And skiing, which you don't do naked'cause it's a bit nippy out there, um you still do, but you don't have a knee. I mean, your tibia is welded to your fibia.

Carl Djerassi31:42

That's the only thing.

Carl Djerassi31:48

Yes, I have from a skiing accident, but I've had this for over forty years, this fused leg, and that's why I do cross country skiing rather than downhill skiing now.

Presenter31:49

Yeah.

Presenter31:57

So, you see yourself coping perfectly well on this desert island, do you? You see yourself.

Carl Djerassi32:01

Oh, of course. I believe you offer me some luxury item. And what I call luxury item, you of course will immediately reject.

Presenter32:10

We shall argue after your last piece of music. What is it?

Carl Djerassi32:13

It's a wonderful piece that I saw first here at the South Bank, The Cave by Steve Rice. It is really the question is who were your ancestors? And this desire to find your roots.

Speaker 232:27

Ibrahim was neither Jew nor Christian, but a Muslim.

Speaker 432:32

People he knows, people he knows, never.

Speaker 232:38

Neither Jew nor Christian.

Speaker 432:46

Mahinas, by the way.

Speaker 232:48

Neither Jew nor Christian, but a Muslim.

Carl Djerassi32:54

Our common ancestor, see?

Presenter32:57

Who is Ibrahim from the Cave by Steve Reich, played by the Steve Reich Ensemble, conducted by Paul Hillier. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you choose?

Carl Djerassi33:08

Uh the Kinderton leader.

Presenter33:09

The Mala.

Carl Djerassi33:10

The Marla.

Presenter33:11

You get the Bible and you get the complete works of Shakespeare.

Carl Djerassi33:14

Can I trade one of them in?

Presenter33:16

No. Well, what for which?

Carl Djerassi33:19

I would trade the Bible for the Encyclopedia Botanica.

Presenter33:23

Okay, special dispensation, you get that. But one book, as well as those two, you can have. Not a collected works. One single book. Yeah. Yeah.

Carl Djerassi33:30

Let me pick collected poems of Wallace Stevens.

Presenter33:34

And then this luxury. What is what's the problem with your luxury?

Carl Djerassi33:37

Well, mine is a solar battery operated computer with a secret compartment which is large enough so you can put a small vial containing a white powder in it.

Presenter33:52

But which particular white powder did you have in mind?

Carl Djerassi33:55

The powder is cyanide. I do have some cyanide in a secret place, and I would want to take it with me on that desert island. And if I found that life at some stage would become intolerable, I would want to be in a position to end it.

Presenter34:12

And there I was thinking you wanted a roll of lavatory paper.

Carl Djerassi34:16

That was not a luxury item. I'm assuming that I can take that toothbrush and toothpaste. But I'll tell you, that word processor would enable me to do what in a way that choice that I've made, that new intellectual life, because as a writer, I'm not dependent on anyone.

Presenter34:21

Like it isn't true.

Carl Djerassi34:39

It is solitary and yet I am with an enormous number of people all the time.

Presenter34:44

Carl Jirasi, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Carl Djerassi34:47

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 434:55

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