Sir Andre Geim

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

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Uh

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My castaway this week is the Nobel Prize winning physicist Professor Sir Andrei Gein. Born in the Soviet Union, his early years were spent in Sochi with his grandmother, a meteorologist. Perhaps it was her small weather station on the beach that sparked an early interest in science. As a student, his intellect was rigorous, but his timing was also spot on. Glasnos, the political movement that swept open the Iron Curtain, enabled him to travel and study throughout Europe, finally settling at Manchester University.

Presenter1:05

If you haven't yet heard of graphene it was his work developing the substance that won him science's highest prize then brace yourself. Graphene is the thinnest and strongest material ever discovered. Using it, electricity can travel a million metres a second, it has unique levels of light absorption and is flexible and stretchable. Of his research he says It's like being Sherlock Holmes, but being a detective of science. It's trying to find things out using very limited information, like a hair on your coat or dirt on your shoes or some lipstick. The winner is the one who needs the fewest hints to get the answer. So, um Andre Geim, that notion of being a detective, tell me a little bit more about that. Um what is it you find pleasurable in that experience?

Sir Andre Geim1:55

You know, being an academic it means that you spend a lot of time in the lab, and you try to make it as much fun as possible. And there are many, many smart people who are doing science professionally, and uh they compete with each other. You need to be in the very very thin layer at the top. So how you compete? You compete in this kind of Sherlock Holmes experience, trying to get very little information and then guess the finite answer, and then from this finite answer you try to confirm it. It's a life long game of a detective.

Presenter2:41

Romantically uh we like to think that the Eureka moment exists for scientists, you know, maybe only once i in a career. Do does it, or is it far more subtle and incremental in that, when you are discovering, up until then, unknowns?

Sir Andre Geim2:55

At some moment there is a an eureka moment when you start seeing a big picture. Initially it's like a puzzle. You know, you don't see anything. Like, you know, sometimes psychological tests give you a picture and you can't guess what this picture is. And s then someone tells you, Oh, it's a person, and then all those lines come to life and you start seeing the person. So the same is with a scientist especially, an experimental scientist as myself. And then a boring and tiring job is to prove that this initial guesswork is correct. But the eureka moment is always there when you first see this big picture.

Presenter3:48

That was such a great description. We're going to go to the music. Tell me about your first one this morning then. What what is it, and why have you chosen this?

Sir Andre Geim3:55

Well, at some moment in my life when I was 32 years old, I had to leave the Soviet Union because for me as a professional scientist there was no way of doing science at a high level, which I always aspired to do. And I have to leave in search for better facilities to do what I was trained to do. And this is farewell to homeland. And I think it signifies a very important part of my life saying bye-bye to Russia and to the Soviet Union.

Presenter5:31

That was Oginski's Polonaise Farewell to Homeland. So, Sir Andrei Geim, I want you to explain what graphene is.

Sir Andre Geim5:38

You take a pencil and a piece of paper and draw a line. What do you see? You see a pencil trace. Yes. It's black because there is graphite inside. If you take a good optical microscope and start investigating the trace more carefully, you will find that some of those flakes are just one atom thick. And this is graphene, the thinnest possible material you can make. So we isolated those pieces which are just one atom thick, and in addition we started studying properties of these materials, and those turned out to be marvelous.

Presenter5:45

Yeah.

Presenter6:23

It is compared to the invention, say, of the steam engine or the Internet in terms of it being something that changes the game and enables us to do things that up until now we have maybe not even been able to imagine doing. Can you describe to me some of the practical uses that in future years graphene w will be used for?

Sir Andre Geim6:43

Well, I usually say that I can accurately predict only the past, not the future. There are thousands of scientists working around the world and their imagination sometimes runs very wild, but there are many, many uses which has proposed, some of them graphene as a substitution of silicon in our computer chips, like using graphene for very speedy DNA analysis, but those are so far behind the horizon I can't even assess whether it could be true or not. But some other applications like foldable computer screens, like touch screens for mobile phones, like batteries, they're coming thick and fast. I have a mobile phone with a touch screen made out of graphene. We are trying to use graphene now to solve Fukushima contamination crisis. We learn how to make very thin barrier films which completely impermeable to anything, like water, and we can make those films even in the zones which are not accessible to humans. But this is a very young material. It's less than ten years old. Usually it takes about forty years for any new material to come from academic lab to industry to consumers, and within short ten years it's already in some applications. So yeah, I'm very hopeful, but until something happens, I'm ob objecting predicting the future.

Presenter8:39

Let's have some more music, Sir Andrei Guyn. Let's hear your second choice of today. Tell me about this. What have you chosen?

Sir Andre Geim8:45

This is Edith Piaf, Jenny Regrettor Jan. It reminds me my childhood. Everyone at that time listened to Beatles. Somehow my parents had a collection of vinyls and I constantly was listening to this music. I'm still completely mesmerized by this tobacco infested voice of Edispiaf and my parents joked that I like her because it reminds my own rolling ah in my accent.

Speaker 39:25

Nominal Na legal

Speaker 39:35

Nigga be a for my faith Nigga marshal

Speaker 39:53

Na liberator.

Presenter9:58

General Retrien, by Edith Piaf there. Um so, Sir Andre Gandh, you were born in nineteen fifty eight in the Soviet Union. Can you tell me uh a little about your parents?

Sir Andre Geim10:07

My parents were engineers, well educated, but of German descent. So the first time I was called Russian actually in England when I came at the age of what thirty-two at the University of Nottingham, I remember quite well that a person told me, Oh, we have this Russian visitor and I ask who who is he? And they tell it's you and I thought, I'm not Russian. Call me Soviet.

Sir Andre Geim10:43

A year later there was no Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union my ethnicity was always uh German and my name Geim is from Germanheim and there were all problems related of not being ethnic Russian or ethnic Ukrainian, which knocked me out from the crowd as not exactly a foreigner, but someone who is not as reliable as the rest of the crowd. So I had this uh a black mark or a badge of honour, it depends on your position in in this life, which which followed me for the first part of my life.

Presenter11:26

Although you only find this out later, as I understand it, your your father, and indeed his father before him, had spent time in the Gulag, and at one point your mother was sent to Siberia. Was it because of their German descent that they were sent t to these prison camps?

Sir Andre Geim11:41

Yes, it was ex exactly. Their surnames, one Isheim, another Bayer, were Germans, and they were not considered, especially during Stalin years, as reliable Soviet citizens, so they were sent to Siberia to gulags and labor camps, which I learnt only after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Presenter12:05

Why, why did you not know that about your parents?

Sir Andre Geim12:08

It was normal parents' protection. I have to feel plenty of fonts going to the university and applying for different jobs, and there was always a questionnaire asking whether your parents were repressed during Stalin years, were they in any concentration camps during the World War Two? And I honestly replied No, no, no.

Presenter12:36

What was that like to learn this at that I mean, relatively late stage in your life?

Sir Andre Geim12:41

I think it was.

Sir Andre Geim12:43

It's explained some things which didn't stick together, because there were some accidental mentioning about my descent from Polish aristocracy, about my father being working in Siberia, and then everything uh fell into the right place and I managed to appreciate better my place in the life and my position within the Soviet Union.

Presenter13:19

I mentioned in the introduction then that your parents had sent you, u until you were seven, I think, to live with your grandmother in Sortship. What are your memories of those early days with your grandmother?

Sir Andre Geim13:29

She was very influential. She spoke fluent French, played piano. I never managed anything like that, but she was kind of a a very intelligent person, tried to teach me uh how the life is, and uh until uh she died when I was twenty eight or thirty, uh she was the closest friend ever I had.

Presenter14:02

Let's have some more music, Sir Andre Keim. Tell me about this third piece.

Sir Andre Geim14:06

Farewell to Slavanka. It's a beautiful music written before the revolution and then somehow it has become Soviet military march. It's probably this controversy within the music itself which mirrors controversy of the life in Soviet Union, both good and bad, all together beautiful and ugly. So I have chosen this piece to mark my Soviet Union years.

Presenter15:48

Farewell of Slavankia performed there by the Red Army Choir. Did you want to say something, Andrei?

Sir Andre Geim15:53

Yeah, I thought, okay, that reminds me. I was a graduate from a top technical university in Moscow, and because of that, after the graduation, I was automatically issued a rank of lieutenant in the Red Army. So you probably don't have many Red Army Lieutenants being interviewed.

Presenter16:15

Uh

Presenter16:16

I think you might be my first, yes. And what did that involve? A lot of marching?

Sir Andre Geim16:17

So yeah.

Sir Andre Geim16:20

Yeah, it was a gimmick of the USSR at that time, but to provide some plausibility for being a lieutenant we were sent for two months to a boot camp in some mosquito infested part of northern Russia, and uh to kill any free spirit we were marching for two hours every day under the sun to this fair wall, to Slavyanka. And uh as a badge of honour I remember I was reprimanded in my file, quote, for laughing during taking the military oath.

Presenter17:00

So you were at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Um what sort of student were you?

Sir Andre Geim17:06

I was not the best student, one can imagine. I probably had a reasonably high IQ, so studies uh came very easily and uh uh because of that I I didn't attend lectures, I didn't do much studying, so I was one of those who try to get maximum percentage from minimum efforts.

Presenter17:35

Is it true that you memorized a thousand-page chemistry dictionary?

Sir Andre Geim17:39

Yeah, I had a very good uh memory at the age of sixteen, seventeen. There was a chemistry olympiad, so one day before I did memorize this book, okay, what happens? It was a very short memory, so I remembered this book only for one, two days, and then happily forgotten.

Presenter17:59

The joint.

Sir Andre Geim17:59

But when they Yes, I won, but next time I was too bored to to learn another book, so I didn't progress into the next round.

Presenter18:08

Tell me about your fourth piece. What are we going to hear now, Andrei Guy?

Sir Andre Geim18:11

It's a Bachstekaten fugue in D minor. It reminds me of my university years. I came from a province, and then suddenly I found myself in Moscow with its wealth of different theatres, concert halls, and for two three years I just couldn't stop myself going to all those concerts. Initially it was operette, then opera and ballet, but finally I settled up on organ music, and Bach is a good example.

Presenter19:55

That was Philip Ledger at the organ of King's College, Cambridge, playing bass, toccata and fugue in D minor.

Presenter20:02

So, Sir Andre Geim, you won the Ignobble Prize in the year two thousand. It's a it's a science prize, but it is awarded in the spirit of the tongue you know, sort of firmly in the cheek, if you will. Yours was for work on oh, I'm going to say a levitating frog.

Presenter20:17

Is that fair?

Sir Andre Geim20:18

Yeah, it is. At that time I was in the Netherlands and there were those big outdated facilities, and I thought what can I do with those facilities? So once upon a time I pour water inside this huge magnet. It's not the way usually scientists behave pouring water on top of their expensive equipment, but I did this and then found that water was levitating. And to just put an exclamation mark behind this experiment, we thought what you can do else and an obvious candidate was a live rock or a hamster. But the physics behind was trivial, so it was educational experiment rather than anything else.

Presenter21:13

Um we are a nation of animal lovers, as you know, was the frog all right?

Sir Andre Geim21:17

Yeah, the frog was absolutely all right. It survived my experiment. I'm not sure that it survived experiments in biology departments.

Presenter21:27

Let's have some more music then. We're on your fifth, a slightly different flavour, this one. Andre Geyn, tell me about this.

Sir Andre Geim21:33

You know, at the age of thirty two, thirty-five, people usually get permanent positions, settle down. I had couple of papers in Soviet journals no one read, either before or now. I had no money, nothing. I came to the West and my second life began and the only thing I had was my education. So the first five years in the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands was run and run to catch up with the sinking sun, like Pin Floyd singing this song.

Speaker 422:18

When you run and you run to catch up with the sun raised

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Racing around to come up behind you again

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Time is the same in a relative way, but you're all time.

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Shoulder a friend, and one day closer to death!

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Every year is getting shorter, and I seem to find the time.

Presenter22:55

That was Pink Floyd and time. So, Andrei Geim, just to update people on where you were when you got here, you had uh got your PhD in metal physics in nineteen eighty seven and your timing was perfect because this was the time of Mikhail Gorbachev's Glas Nost of people being allowed to travel where before it would have been made very difficult for them. You came to the West and you say that you arrived with next to nothing.

Sir Andre Geim23:19

The first time I came to the UK I vividly remember that all what I had is was probably a hundred dollars and one uh pound coin in my uh pocket when I landed up in Hithrow and was met by a representative of the Royal Society.

Presenter23:41

And how was your English?

Sir Andre Geim23:43

Oh, it was horrible, very basic, and uh my way of speaking irritated people, so it didn't help to establish relations with people. My sense of humour didn't go through

Presenter23:58

Were you lonely?

Sir Andre Geim24:00

At that time I got already married. We met before in mountains actually. My wife is a physicist. She first stayed in Russia and then joined me in the UK. She actually works on the same floor, a couple of offices from myself in she is having the same specialty, uh working these days on graphene.

Presenter24:05

Oh f

Presenter24:24

You met in the mountains. I'm not going to let that one go. How did you meet?

Sir Andre Geim24:28

We were both members of the same club who went to mountains. Those were expeditions where you carry all your food, all your fuel, for two, three, sometimes four weeks. I'm not a great climber, but I'm good at high altitude. I enjoy high mountains, especially going down.

Presenter24:53

Is it true that you had you had quite a bad mountaineering accident? You fell down a crevasse about a hundred metres, I read. Is that true?

Sir Andre Geim24:59

Yeah, it was my own stupidity. I decided at that time that I'm so experienced with glaciers that I can go anywhere without ropes, and the colour indicated that I was one metre away from the edge of this hidden crevice, and I was wrong.

Presenter25:19

Tell me then about your next piece of music. What are we going to hear?

Sir Andre Geim25:22

That's the snows of Kilimanjaro by Pascal Danel. It's not much about the music and about the words, it's about the word Kilimanjaro. It was and remains my favourite mountain. In the morning you go outside your hostel and see all those dirty dwellings and so on, and then suddenly you turn around and see this beautiful mountain. It comes from nothing, from a plain, then there is a layer of jungle, layer of rocks, and snow on the top. And this is breathtaking scenery. This is one of those experiences everyone has to have before they die to climb Kilimanjaro.

Speaker 426:15

In Iran?

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Babuku, Priloa.

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Lenny

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The um

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Be a toe

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Flood.

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Leba, dumb little water.

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We know

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Du Kinimon Joe

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And the film have no

Presenter26:48

That was The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Pascal Banel. So Sir Andre Geyn, let's talk a little bit about your role as Regis Professor of Physics at Manchester University. To what extent do you enjoy interaction with the next generation of scientists?

Speaker 426:48

That was

Sir Andre Geim27:04

To be honest, I don't like students very much. They come absolutely ignorant and they are not grown up yet as interesting people, but sometimes over two or three years of their PhD they grow exponentially fast, pick up experiences and then they become real persons and after that, okay, we become not like a professor and a student, we become as a colleagues and we do research as colleagues and that's really enjoyable experience.

Presenter27:48

Um you've argued that students should be exempt from these new stricter immigration rules that we're operating under now. You say that if they had been in place when you were going to come to Britain to study, you would never have got in.

Sir Andre Geim28:00

I said many words in my life, many of those were wrong, and that's probably one of those right ones, because as a nation we have to be pragmatic rather than populistic, and we should draw from the resources outside this country, trying to bring the brightest mind to compete in the future world, and the future of the country is where the brains are. So if you tap into the foreign talent, it's very appropriate.

Presenter28:39

Let's have some more music, Andrei Guyn. We're on your uh seventh choice. Tell me what we're going to hear now.

Sir Andre Geim28:45

So it's a Racini's figurous area. That reminds me of my years in the Netherlands and early in the UK when I came to Manchester, where I tried different subjects. I tried to jump from uh the flying frog to magnetism to superconductivity to geckotape to semiconducting physics, which can be described only by figura here, figura there, which this is exactly what figura is seen in in this piece.

Speaker 429:21

Vido, so quiet.

Speaker 429:23

Hey, people.

Speaker 429:43

Apro Figuro Bravo Provisimo Haro Figuro Bravo Pravisimo Fortunatisimo Fortuna Tissimo Fortuna Tissimo Carmenita Prala La La La La La La La La La La La La Ati Fortuna At Fortuna Ati Fortuna Okera Somba in Pato Dena Chita Soma in Patondo Dena Chita Dela Chita

Speaker 430:05

Oh.

Presenter30:14

That was Figarozaria from Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville, sung by Hermann Prye, and the music was played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abado.

Presenter30:24

So, Sir Andrei Guyme, since twenty ten, then you have been a Nobel laureate, and I imagine, apart from being constantly asked to appear and speak and travel round the world, there is a lot more weight these days to what you say and do. People listen to Nobel laureates. Do you feel more pressure upon your scientific endeavours from here on in?

Sir Andre Geim30:44

On scientific endeavors, no, I don't feel pressure, and uh I work as hard as I was working before the Nobel Prize, and there are plenty of nice things about this two-dimensional materials which we introduce to the world. I want to put many stakes in the ground, but in addition to this scientific background, there are indeed a lot of pressures from different walks of life, obligations, public and private, as a Nobel Prize winner, many inquiries. I managed to resist most of them. The hardest thing I learn is to kill emails without replying, okay. Actually very few people can do that, but uh but sometimes it's better not to reply than reply with saying just sorry.

Presenter31:44

How do you think you'll be alone on this island, Andre Geim? Will you cope?

Sir Andre Geim31:50

Unlike most of your interviewees, I know how hard it is to be alone. When I was younger I went to mountains alone for one to weeks, and uh it's much worse than being in a solitary confinement in prison where you know that there are guards. But this hostile mountains really makes you scared and unsafe. So I think I'll survive, but it will be a very tough experience. We're social animals, we can't live without other people around.

Presenter32:33

Let's have your final piece of music, then, Sir Andre Guyne. Tell me what we're going to hear, your eighth of the day.

Sir Andre Geim32:38

As I just said, Nobel Prize was a great experience with a lot of new obligations and previous obligations which didn't disappear because the scientific subject is not dead yet. So life is very intense, full of different events. So Sabre Dance by Hachiturian with its intensity just reminds me of the intensity of my life at the moment.

Presenter34:07

CACHATURIN'S SABER DANTES, PLAID There BY THE VIENA PHILHARMONIC CONDUCTED BY THE COMPOSER. So, Sir Andre Guyme, it's time now then for me to give you the books you get to take to this island. You get to take the complete works of Shakspeare, and the Bible, and one other book of your own. What are you going to take?

Presenter34:24

Bye.

Sir Andre Geim34:24

I would rather take a whole library which is not allowed or take just Shakespeare.

Presenter34:28

It's not.

Sir Andre Geim34:31

Bible only if you insist.

Presenter34:33

I don't insist.

Sir Andre Geim34:34

Yeah, so yeah, I'll take only Shakespeare and uh read it and enjoy it.

Presenter34:36

Yeah.

Presenter34:41

It's yours. And a luxury. What will your luxury be?

Sir Andre Geim34:46

If I may, it would be a bottle of Amaroni, or a better case of it. It's a type of wine I prefer, Italian wine. It's a wine taken from a little bit old grapes, and it's very intense and very viscous wine.

Presenter35:05

I will give you a cellarful. And of these eight disks, which one would you save from the waves?

Sir Andre Geim35:12

I think it would be a dispiav, genie regret or yen. I can imagine uh having this uh bottle of wine in front of me and uh listening to a dispiav and thinking, Alone, I don't regret anything.

Presenter35:35

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

Sir Andre Geim35:40

Thank you for providing with this session of Psychotherapy in Public.

Presenter36:29

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter36:32

You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.