Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Eminent geneticist, studied snail evolution, fruit fly reproduction, slug sex lives, and gave Wreath Lectures challenging racial purity.
On the island
Eight records
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Academy of Ancient Music & Christopher Hogwood
I thought if I was doomed to spend the rest of my life on the desert island I'd better take something that reminded me of my main interest in life. which is about, I'm sad to say, genetics and evolution.
Lucy in the Sky with DiamondsFavourite
Well record number two is kind of, oddly enough, a kind of African record, and maybe I'll explain why after it's played. It's a record I think all of us know and love...
The Carnival of the Animals: Fossils
Katia and Marielle Labèque & Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta
On record number three, um again I thought it'd be nice to get away from something which is quite so politically charged and get back to the fossils.
Well the next record is actually it's rather s I think it's the only snaily record I can think of. It's the theme from the Magic Roundabout, and I think you'll notice that the snail, most people will know, is called Brian Snail.
Orpheus in the Underworld: The Fly Duet
Richard Angas, Lillian Watson & English National Opera Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder
Well this too is a an evolutionary one. It's uh about Orpheus going down to the underworld to find himself a mate, and appropriately enough, at some time during his rather unlikely adventures, he and his mate find themselves turned into two flies who make an interesting courtship song.
Again, I thought perhaps to lighten the mood a bit, we'd get back to the evolutionary um the evolutionary theme, in fact to human evolution, a very important document in the history of the theory of human evolution, which is Tommy Steele with the cavemen.
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden conducted by Sir Colin Davis
Yes, I thought I'd like to say a bit more of a genetical record, in fact a eugenic record. Eugenic comes from the word eugene, eugene well born, and my next record is from Tchaikovsky's Eugene on Yegin.
Number eight is the last record and having had the sixties in with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I'd like to play something by what was without doubt the best band of the sixties, which just disappeared.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:54Surely you inherited an aptitude for science from your parents, even if they both proved themselves to be talented at the thing?
Um I suppose I did, but I mean uh arguably I also inherited an aptitude for playing the piano, but I never learnt to play the piano, so I think a g a great deal depends on one's environment as much as one's genes, and I genuinely think it's usually impossible to separate the two effects.
Presenter asks
7:02How do you know that we are all born of a handful of people from Africa?
That seems to be the most likely pattern. There are various bits of evidence which suggests that's true. The strongest evidence that we all came from Africa, I think, has to be in fossils, because the fossils are the absolute proof that there were humans living there before they were anywhere else. ... And also, more important perhaps, if you look at the amount of genetic variation that there is among the peoples of the world, the most variable by far are the Africans, which suggests that perhaps they were the ancestors and we're just a small sample of our African great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers.
Presenter asks
11:06How much do you feel the weight of the disreputable past of your science of genetics, the Hitlerian past of it?
The keepsakes
The book
Anthony Powell
There's a series of books I know I'm not allowed a a series but there's a series of books by Anthony Powell called A Dance to the Music of Time, which actually is a really lovely way of describing evolution. If I have to take just one of them, my favorite one is called The Valley of Bones.
The luxury
The stuffed body of Kenneth Clark
at University College London, where I work, we have we honour our founder, Jeremy Bentham, by keeping his stuffed body on the premises. I'd like to honour the present Minister of Education, Kenneth Clark, by taking his stuffed body to my desert island.
I think it does in some senses. What I find a bit refreshing is the is the blissful ignorance of all genetics undergraduates about the fact that genetics does have a past. I think it's finally lived lived through its past. It took a long time, and it was a very murky past indeed. As is often the case in science, people are most confident about what they say when they know least. And genetics has been no exception to that. ... And I think with knowledge has come humility, and I hope with more knowledge will come yet more.
Presenter asks
15:37If you weren't genetically predestined to become a scientist, who or what nurtured your interest environmentally in science?
Well I think as is the case with many people's professions, maybe scientists more than anybody. Um I can trace my particular interest in science, and in biology in particular, in fact, back to one good schoolteacher. ... my schoolteacher, who I've never seen hide nor hair nor since, was a mister Simpson, who when I was thirteen or fourteen taught me biology in a really inspired way, and made me think seriously at that age that I wanted to be a biologist, and I stuck with it.
Presenter asks
32:42What do you mean by [saying] anyone can be a scientist?
No, I I actually think it's a it's the real truth, which I think most scientists would i would uh acknowledge. ... It is absolutely not the case, it seems to me, that any one of us or anybody can be an ar a good artist or an artist of any kind. To take a trivial example, nobody would have written Eugene on Yegin if Tchaikovsky hadn't written it. Somebody would have discovered the structure of D N A if Francis and if Francis Crick had not done so.
“I really would say it's extremely difficult. In fact I'd go further and say it's probably impossible to disentangle the effects of nature from nurture in characteristics like that.”
“Not only do we all, the people living in the world today, have unique genetic attributes, unlike anybody else, but we're, each one of us, uniquely different from anybody who ever has lived or ever will live, which is quite an astonishing statistic.”
“I think the best that scientists can do, biologists can do, is to inform people of what choices are available to them. And the experience has been that when people are informed of these choices, they do make what seem to be very intelligent decisions, in genetic disease, for example.”