Tom Blundell

Presenter0:00

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 seven.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is the leading British scientist Sir Tom Blundell.

Presenter0:32

From medical advances in the treatment of diseases such as diabetes, AIDS, and cancer to his radical recommendations on climate change, his accomplishments have fundamentally shifted our understanding and approach to some of the biggest challenges of our age.

Presenter0:47

Indeed, his only spectacular failure is his inability to conform to the cliche of the white coated boffin, wedded to his microscope, and unable to engage in life beyond the lab.

Presenter0:57

Whether it's mapping out the tiniest building blocks of life, playing the trumpet in a jazz band, or the love affair that saw him paying for his wife in cows in a traditional ceremony on the plains of Zimbabwe, he is endlessly inspired to experience first hand the wonder he finds in the world around him.

Presenter1:15

Tom, you've lived a very full life so far. Is the passion for scientific understanding inseparable from the passion to experience?

Tom Blundell1:26

It is. I love my science. It's incredibly stimulating. I find it the most exciting thing I do. But I can't do it without doing other things in parallel. So even when I was a young scientist, I got involved in politics. It gave me a different dimension. And so now, when I'm still heavily involved with my own research team looking at the fundamental processes of life, I still like to be involved in something which will influence our lives more immediately.

Presenter2:00

Yet for a fair amount of time you were quite ambivalent about science. Was there a moment that you properly fell in love with science?

Tom Blundell2:06

Well, I I could do science, so I did it. But I didn't find the joy of it until I actually began to do it in a laboratory in Oxford. And then I suddenly discovered that it was not just about solving problems, but it was about seeing things laterally, really experiencing new things, new ideas. It was much closer to art and music than I had thought.

Presenter2:32

So there's artistry under that microscope there. There are things that stimulate you in a way that are not simply to do with the discovery of facts.

Tom Blundell2:41

Well, let me just say that if you look at life in the very microscopic form, very much smaller than we can see with light, the architecture of the molecules of life are just fascinating and beautiful. So there's many, many pleasures which are parallels with art and with music, the symmetry and the beauty and the melody of science.

Presenter3:06

Tell me about your first piece of music.

Tom Blundell3:08

My first piece of music is something that I've discovered relatively recently. It's Gioberto Gill, who's an amazing Brazilian musician, who's actually now Minister of Culture in the Brazilian Government, but he was thrown out of Brazil for his political views. And it sums up a lot of what I feel about the world.

Speaker 43:54

E D A, E D A Y A L

Presenter3:59

Gilberto Gilles and Raffavela about the favelas, the slums of Brazil, and and reflecting your passion for travel. You were saying you only recently discovered that piece of music.

Tom Blundell4:08

Well, last summer I went to Brazil and went to Manaus and took a boat up the upper Amazon. That was amazing, incredible journey, living above the water, above Cayman Piranha.

Presenter4:22

So an adventurer, as I hinted at in my introduction, an adventurer very much beyond the laboratory. But let's talk for a moment about the laboratory, and let's talk about what it is that spurs you on. Is it as simple as a curiosity, a need to understand how the world works?

Tom Blundell4:39

It's just a huge excitement to see something for the first time.

Tom Blundell4:44

It's an enormous privilege. I can remember when, as part of a group in Oxford in the late 1960s, we suddenly for the first time saw emerging from our work a picture of the hormone insulin, which is involved in diabetes. We were the first to see that. It was just amazing. And of course it gave us so many clues about new things and of course what we could do in medicine.

Presenter5:12

More about some of the raw science a little later. I'm interested to know, though, this curiosity that propels you, did you always have it? Were you a curious boy?

Tom Blundell5:20

Well, my parents didn't have any ideas really about what I was going to do. They just had this wonderful talent to encourage me in everything I took out, whether it was painting or music or doing work at school. I I guess I was curious.

Presenter5:39

Do you think that their impulse to do this came from themselves feeling slightly thwarted? Did they feel that they had not been allowed to realise their full potential?

Tom Blundell5:47

My father felt that tremendously. Looking back, I know he was as intelligent as many of my colleagues in Cambridge. He had this amazing ability to think through things in a rational way, but he had no confidence in himself. My mother was very arty and the very opposite of that in many ways, but she was also, I think, very bright. And so.

Tom Blundell6:17

Yes, I guess they probably did encourage us all, because they saw possibilities if we were encouraged.

Presenter6:23

And were you a bright schoolboy?

Tom Blundell6:24

Yeah.

Tom Blundell6:25

I guess I did reasonably well in all the exams.

Presenter6:29

I think you might be t terribly underplaying this, Tom. I mean, how well did you do?

Tom Blundell6:33

At school I I didn't do exceptionally well, but I did get a scholarship to Oxford in the end.

Presenter6:38

Yes, pretty well then. And w I mean, were your parents preoccupied with the idea that there would be uh academic achievement, or were they pretty much leaving you to it?

Tom Blundell6:46

Nobody in my family had ever been at school beyond the age of fifteen. My parents had no idea about university. I went to a country grammar school, continued in the sixth form to do art, and I was pulled out of the art class just before the A levels so that I could do well on the science and get a state scholarship. And it was really just following the school that I ended up going to Oxford to do science.

Presenter7:14

What a very significant message that was to you, though, wasn't it? I mean, for teachers to say you simply can't pursue both. It's one or the other, and this is the one you'll do.

Tom Blundell7:21

Yes. I was tremendously upset and resented it. Of course I'm not very good at painting, and probably I'm not a very good musician either. So they were probably right. But I think they were wrong to the extent that you can't do both.

Presenter7:40

Tell me about your next piece of music, if you will.

Tom Blundell7:42

I used to do a paper round and when I was thirteen I eventually managed to save up enough money to buy a cornet and this was one of the first things that I played on it with a group of friends in our first traditional jazz band.

Speaker 38:00

Oh, I hate to see the evening sun go down.

Speaker 38:07

Yes, I hate to see the evening sun go down.

Speaker 38:15

Always makes me think I'm on my last go round.

Speaker 38:22

To the gypsy to get my thoughts on

Presenter8:27

Chris Barber's jazz band with Ottilie Patterson and New Saint Louis Blues. So in the early sixties, Tom Lundle, you were supposed to be uh studying for a degree in science, but other things were taking up your time. What were those other things?

Tom Blundell8:39

Well, I found Oxford was a wonderful place to be. The first evening I arrived I heard someone playing the clarinet, playing some jazz, and that was a friend called Dave Meekin, and we played in a jazz band together for several years. That led me through friends into increasing political activity, and so that was another thread. I was very active, not only in the university, but in the town of Oxford.

Presenter9:08

But but to engage politically, of course, there has to be a political awareness. You have to have been or or be politicised.

Tom Blundell9:14

Well, I think what politicized our family was education. I had passed the 11 plus, and so had my sister. My brother went to a secondary modern, but I should say that later he ended up being a professor at the age of 31. So that just shows the 11 plus was a terrible system, and selection was completely arbitrary.

Presenter9:32

It doesn't exactly get misless.

Presenter9:40

So so as a family you felt that clearly here were here were three very capable young people and yet one of them was hived off.

Tom Blundell9:47

Absolutely. It seemed to me and still education and opportunity is absolutely the key thing.

Presenter9:56

So in Oxford you were involved in labour politics and you became at a young age a labour councillor. Did you actually do anything, change anything to do with uh local education policy?

Tom Blundell10:06

In fact, I got more involved in planning than education. That was because the main issue in Oxford at the time was building a motorway from the west into the centre and then driving it through the south part of the Oxford meadow and crashing into East Oxford, where I lived. And when eventually I became chairman of the planning committee, I stopped the motorway building, introduced more pedestrianisation, more bus lanes, and more conservation areas.

Presenter10:36

But as you said earlier, you did eventually fall in love with science. When was that?

Tom Blundell10:41

In fact, at that time, in parallel, I was very much involved in science because I'd joined the team of a very famous scientist, Dorothy Hodgkin, and we were working on this problem of the insulin molecules architecture. And so I was doing science, and it was a huge conflict and a huge tension.

Presenter11:02

Passion for it then, though, you knew that was where your life lay.

Tom Blundell11:05

I knew that there were two sides to my life and that I couldn't give up science, that I had to do it properly.

Presenter11:12

Can you just explain to a lay person like me why this project, the Insulin project, was so significant? It's

Tom Blundell11:20

Because in the 1920s insulin was discovered and it was used and shown to be able to keep diabetics alive, but really people didn't know what it looked like. And in the 1950s, Fred Sanger, who's a famous Cambridge Nobel Prize winner, had worked out what the linear sequence of amino acids which make up a protein are. But we still didn't know what it looked like in terms of its architecture. And just as with town planning, you need to know about the shape and the architecture if you're going to understand function. So at this molecular level, you need to know the architecture. And that's what we defined.

Presenter12:09

Even I understood that. That was beautiful. Beautifully explained. Thank you. Let's take a break for your next piece of music.

Tom Blundell12:16

Well I'd like to move on to um Charles Mingus, because he brought together this sense of the roots of jazz, the blues, together with very modern jazz. It's incredible improvisation.

Speaker 412:52

Yeah.

Presenter13:23

Charles Mingus and Wednesday night prayer meeting. You were worried during that that people might be turning off in their droves. I mean, it's quite out there.

Tom Blundell13:31

It's just amazing to be part of, though.

Presenter13:33

I mean, we heard some extraordinary improvisation there, but underpinning it, of course, i is an important structure. I'm I'm hoping, without being too tortuous about it, that I might draw some sort of comparison between that sort of music and what it is you do, that underpinning life are these fascinating molecular biological structures that make us, help us understand why things behave the way they do.

Tom Blundell13:56

Yes, I I think that's a rather good analogy because in a sense what we're doing in molecular biology is understanding

Tom Blundell14:05

how nature has played with a theme. And what you can see is actually the evolution of rather primitive ideas, primitive molecular structures, which have then been elaborated so that they carry out all the complex functions that allow you and me to be what we are.

Presenter14:26

Um, it does sound, of course, to most of us listening to the kind of things that you spend your life doing, intensely complex, this sort of sub-microscopic research. The key, though, is finding ways to treat conditions that so many of us are struggling with, conditions like AIDS and cancer. It is highly applicable to everyday life.

Tom Blundell14:48

Absolutely, and the science that you do which is really basic and fundamental is exactly the same science as you need to make new medicines. So in fact, from my laboratory, we've spun out a company which now has a hundred people on the Science Park, and there we make cancer drugs and we use exactly the same ideas. We try to understand the shapes and we then try to target those shapes of the molecules, and that's how we design new medicines.

Presenter15:22

And why is it that the mapping, the finding out of the shape,

Presenter15:26

of these proteins then helps you unlock the key to whether they I was going to use the word misbehaving, I don't know if that's how you would characterize it, but why they are acting in a way that is dysfunctional or against the health and well being of a human being.

Tom Blundell15:40

Well, in many cancers you have mutations in key molecules which change the shape and change the function. And so they in some cases don't function, but in other cases, even more disastrously, they function all the time. And so, for example, one of the things we would want to do when that happens is to target that molecule, that enzyme, quite often with a very small molecule to turn it off. And that's the secret to modern drug discovery, modern medicines.

Presenter16:14

So it is then, when you're in the laboratory with your team, a very visual process.

Tom Blundell16:20

I think it's not by chance I've ended up in a very visual area. It just fascinates me. But yes, I I see the molecules, they're shapes to me, they're real, but of course they're very, very small.

Presenter16:32

and very, very beautiful.

Tom Blundell16:34

and very beautiful.

Tom Blundell16:35

But I can put about a hundred million of them across my finger. They're that small.

Tom Blundell16:41

Let's take a break for your next piece of music.

Tom Blundell16:44

Well, my next piece of music is Strange Fruit, which began as a poem written by a New York school teacher but was made famous by Billie Holiday. One of the key points in my life was when in 1964 I won a prize for a travelling scholarship and I got on a greyhound bus with my wife at the time for three months and we just headed down south and we saw the discrimination that there was there, the emerging movement to get rid of it. And of course that's reflected in Strange Fruit.

Speaker 417:20

Southern trees bear strange.

Speaker 417:31

Blood only lives.

Speaker 417:35

And blood at the rule.

Speaker 417:41

Black body swinging

Speaker 417:45

In the southern breeze

Presenter17:50

BILLY HOLIDAY AND STRANGE FRUIT. So by the time you were in your early thirties, Tom Blundell, you'd shared the scientific stage with a huge scientific figure. You were active in politics. You were married with a young son. But life didn't quite fit. I mean, you you chucked it all in. You left it all behind.

Tom Blundell18:07

I didn't leave it all behind, but I it got out of control. There were amazing pressures of having a a young family, of being chairman of a planning committee in a large city council and doing science which takes up all your time. And I just found the pressures enormous. My marriage broke up and I decided that I really had to do science on its own for a bit. But I also wanted to travel, I wanted to get out.

Presenter18:37

So he ended up travelling across Europe, the Far East, and India.

Presenter18:41

Were you looking for something else? Was there a sense in which you were slightly, by this point, not just maybe a little exhausted, but also disillusioned with the

Presenter18:50

Western sort of orientated goals of a scientific career or the structure of a political career.

Tom Blundell18:56

I guess by that time I saw science as a very international activity, and during that journey I've met up with all sorts of friends and I met through science, and that was also very enriching. But there are certainly things in Eastern philosophy which I found very helpful.

Tom Blundell19:13

In particular, this idea of Christianity and permanence I think is dreadful. What the Japanese have is a sense of beauty in the falling cherry blossom, and this idea that things can be beautiful just because they change is a wonderful thing that we really don't understand fully in the West.

Presenter19:35

But what about if you we were talking about um

Presenter19:38

The plan, the architecture of a cell. If there is a plan and an architecture, some people would say, well.

Presenter19:45

It's got to be a town planner, hasn't there? There's got to be somebody who planned this beautiful, linear, sensible thing.

Tom Blundell19:53

Of course not. You can, given time, and we we've been going for very many years, you can explore things. And if you have a process which selects things because they're advantageous, then you can very quickly move on and make progress so that you can get organization, you can get function. You don't need a creator.

Presenter20:20

Now I want to bring you back from this wonderful journey away from conventional day to day science and away from politics. You came back, and what did you do when you returned?

Tom Blundell20:32

Well, I went to Sussex University and I decided, I guess rather unimaginatively really, that I'd try and do something a little bit similar to what we've been doing in Oxford. In Oxford we were working on insulin and there's another molecule called glucagon that puts the sugar levels up again. And so I decided I'd work on that. And I discovered to my horror that there was already a Nobel Prize winner called Bill Lipscomb in the States working on it. And I rather boldly, I think probably foolishly in retrospect, said I'd like to work on it. And he was just amazingly gentle. And then I asked whether I could see some of the data he collected and he even provided that. But the first experiments we did, I realized what had been going wrong. And when I changed it, I could see immediately what we had to do. And so suddenly, within a year, we'd solved this problem.

Presenter21:31

How long did you think it might take?

Tom Blundell21:33

Well, the previous problem had been going on for thirty years. So I thought I was going to be at Sussex for a long time.

Presenter21:40

Yeah.

Tom Blundell21:40

Yeah

Presenter21:40

Next piece of music.

Tom Blundell21:41

Yeah.

Tom Blundell21:43

My next piece of music goes back to my long travel because I ended up in India and there I got interested in Carnatic music and I recruited myself with a guru in the Veena, which is a kind of large lute with seven strings. So I'd like to play a piece by Veenai Jayanthi, who is one of the leading practitioners of the Veena. I think it's a very beautiful piece.

Speaker 422:21

Yeah.

Speaker 422:26

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 422:28

Mm-hmm.

Presenter22:42

Veena Jaianti and Saki Prana. So there you were, as you described it, after this unexpectedly speedy scientific breakthrough. And you were only thirty three, Tom Blundell. You were offered this very prestigious chair of crystallography at Birkbeck College in London. What was it like working there?

Tom Blundell22:58

It was fantastic. It was a laboratory which had been set up by J. D. Bernal, who was, in my mind, one of the most brilliant scientists, the person who got Perutz and Crick and many others involved in the kind of science that I do, of course, long before. It had a lot of young people in it, and we had nothing to lose, so we worked together in a very collaborative way. It was just amazing.

Presenter23:30

I it was at that time that you met Lynne. Tell me about her.

Tom Blundell23:34

Lynn is an underbelly speaker from southern Zimbabwe, Matabililand. She had come to London when she was, I think, seventeen, made her way up and eventually ended up in Buckwhat College in London, where I was. I mean, people often ask me whether I met her when we were travelling across Africa, but I'm afraid it was her initiative and not mine.

Presenter24:02

You did decide to get married in Africa. I mean, I couldn't resist but mention that in the introduction to you. It's such an extraordinary image. Tell me about the wedding. Tell me about the cows.

Tom Blundell24:11

Well, what I remember is this incredible rolling scenery with lots of people relaxing and this incredible music. And then, at the end of this ceremony, I was led to meet an elder of the women of the extended family and introduced to the idea that it was traditional to pay for one's ride in cows. And so, this was a bit of a surprise to me.

Presenter24:42

Cannot be Indelicate and ask you how many

Tom Blundell24:43

You may ask me, but I'm certainly not going to tell you.

Tom Blundell24:48

But I can say that one of my nieces once wrote to me and said, Uncle Tom, I've just been seeing one of your cows munching very happily.

Presenter24:59

You've got uh two children. You have taken them on your travels together all over the world. Not for you, the life of the the Poolside and and the Kids' Club.

Tom Blundell25:09

No, well if you're brought up in Africa as my wife was and if your home is there and we all go back then the kids of course go wild in Matabele land with all their cousins. So once one gets used to that idea then living in southern India, in Kerala or in China or various parts of South America as we have over the years it didn't seem to be a problem.

Presenter25:39

Um it sounds like this marriage, your second marriage, and the children, came at just the right time for you, a time when you were ready to en engage with it. Do you think that's fair compared with the first?

Tom Blundell25:48

Oh, absolutely. It's it's much easier to be a father when you're a bit older. I've been very lucky in having a very supportive wife and wonderful kids.

Presenter26:00

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Tom Blundell26:03

Well, I've chosen Bellini and in particular Norma, which is a dreadful story, really, but the music makes up for it.

Speaker 426:22

Oh, say come.

Speaker 426:27

Oh your heart holds the beautiful heart it's too

Presenter27:11

Jane Eaglin and Qualcorradisti from the second act of Bellini's Norma, conducted by Riccardo Mutti. You have a very clearly defined field of scientific research, then, Tom Blundell. You've also, though, strayed into other areas, most significantly on to government science committees. How did you end up being asked to do that?

Tom Blundell27:31

I think originally it's because people knew I had an interest in politics, and so I ended up around nineteen ninety being appointed to be head of a research council.

Tom Blundell27:45

In fact, it was a very challenging time because I was responsible for all of the basic science that underpinned, for example, mad cow disease. And it's very different really. If one's a scientist, one defines one's problem. And you know, being a clever scientist, you define a problem that you can solve. That's one of the tricks you learn. But as I discovered earlier in local politics, you don't define the problems if you're a politician.

Presenter28:17

So that's what you're getting at when you say I mean, you've said in the past that being a politician is much harder than being a scientist because you can define your own parameters as a scientist, whereas as a politician, the media are getting at you, your constituents are pressurizing you, there are all of these external forces bombarding you from day to day.

Tom Blundell28:35

That's right. And if I were a scientist, you see, on the Macau disease issue, I would say, well, I haven't collected all my data yet. But if I'm a science policy person or a politician, I have to make policy now because we know there are things going on and therefore one has to take a precautionary approach. So it's a very difficult challenge.

Presenter28:58

Current political preoccupation, of course, is climate change, and the carbon reduction targets that have recently been announced were actually suggested by you. I mean, you were compiling the paper in nineteen ninety nine. The recommendations came out in two thousand. How frustrated are you that it is not until seven years later

Presenter29:16

That there are headlines and government statements and people standing up on podiums saying this is of the utmost importance.

Tom Blundell29:22

Well, many people apart from myself and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution that I was chairing at the time were saying the same thing. And so I am frustrated that it's taken some time. It's now become very much of an issue, and I think that's a good thing. But there are huge problems in being a politician. Getting people to change their use of cars, to decrease their use of heating and air conditioning, all of these things are not easy.

Presenter29:53

Your next record.

Tom Blundell29:55

My next record really brings me both to politics and back to Africa. Hugh Mazukeda is one of my heroes. He plays the flugelhorn and cornet. He is a South African who had to come out of South Africa for a long time and somebody who's been immensely powerful in his thinking and uncompromising. I'd like to play his Send Me.

Speaker 430:23

I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around, when they triumph over poverty.

Speaker 430:33

I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AZ. I wanna learn a hand. I wanna be there for the alcoholic. I wanna be there for the dry.

Presenter30:51

Hugh Masakela and Send Me describe a typical working day for you, Tom Blundell.

Presenter30:57

Yeah.

Tom Blundell30:57

Well, I'm a little crazy. I get up every morning at uh five o'clock, if I'm under pressure at half past four. I do my administrative work and then at seven o'clock I really get up and go into the laboratory or sometimes go out to my company. I get home quite late.

Tom Blundell31:18

I hope to see my children and eventually go to bed.

Presenter31:22

I mean, you're juggling it all, aren't you? It was 1995 you were offered this post at Cambridge, and now you have a very significant role at Cambridge University. You have this drugs company. I mean, you just quickly flitted over that there. But it's doing very significant work, this research into proteins that might fight cancers. What about the difficulties, of course, of trialling these drugs? I mean, we saw the most horrific depiction only in the last year of the young men who were so horribly injured by the drug trial that went wrong. How much do you worry about that?

Tom Blundell31:52

I worry about it hugely. It's just a very difficult moment because one works first on molecules and then on tissues and then in animals and still one doesn't have any certainty as to what's going to happen in the human body because what one's really doing is targeting one part of it, but it's a huge complexity and so we're never quite sure. But of course we take as many precautions as we can and use our knowledge to target carefully. But there's always a risk and always a concern.

Presenter32:29

Quite a responsibility.

Presenter32:31

Um you see science as beautiful and exciting. Um ultimately, then, is it the beauty that enraptures you, or is it the excitement of ploughing new ground?

Tom Blundell32:44

Oh, I don't have to choose between those both, of course. They both compel me forward and I just feel that there are plenty of things to do, and I'd like to continue doing them for a little while.

Presenter32:57

What's your last piece of music?

Tom Blundell32:58

My last piece of music is the song of the Hebrew slaves. It's because I'm quite often in Italy, where I every year look after a school for a couple of weeks, and my Italian friends in the warm evenings sing, and they often sing this. It's really the sort of national anthem of Italy.

Speaker 433:47

Praise God.

Presenter34:21

The song of the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi's Nabucco, with the chorus and orchestra of the Deutschen Opera Berlin, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. So we give you, of course, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, although, given what you said earlier, I'm not sure you'll find much use for it, Tom Bundle. Another book you're allowed to take. What will it be?

Tom Blundell34:40

I'm going to take lessons in Underbele, because I hope that eventually I'm going to be rescued from this island, and I hope that I'll find my wife and family, and I'll be able to impress them by speaking Indebele fluently.

Presenter34:56

And we allow you a luxury to make

Tom Blundell34:58

Make life more comfortable. What might it be? A combined heat and power micro unit, because I quite like to have my book in an electronic form.

Presenter35:07

I'm going to force you now to save one record. If you had to, what would be the record you would save?

Tom Blundell35:11

I'm going to go for the Mingus. It it's just wonderful.

Presenter35:16

Professor Sir Tom Blundell, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Tom Blundell35:19

Thank you.

Presenter35:27

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