Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Nobel Prize-winning scientist and grandfather of embryonic stem cell research, whose work illuminated diseases like cancer and Parkinson's.
On the island
Eight records
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Lang Lang, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev
Now he played this at the Nobel Prize concert and I remember he came to sit at the piano in a hush and he then controlled the entire audience with his presence before he played a note, raised his hands and bang into the music. It was a wonderful performance.
The memory of this, it gives me my bedroom at home in Orpington, where I was studying. I was doing homework on a Saturday and there was a Fate nearby where they were playing this again and again at top volume.
Now, this is a song of mental defiance. And I can remember singing this with the volume turned up loud to the record with tears running down my face when this is later on after Judith and I had been engaged and then it didn't seem to be going right and Judith went off for a year to Canada and I thought I'd lost this wonderful girl of my dreams.
What I'm asking to play here is his signature piece, really, Germans in the Shower. He and his two colleagues in the band called The Desmonds are playing this rather wacky track about their camping holiday experiences.
Messiah: Their Sound Is Gone Out
It's a piece that I tried to use the name from in a publication when I was just explaining about these pluripotential cells. And I wanted to say that their sound has gone out to all lands because, you know, they had now once once upon a time they've been rather uh isolated little little study, but now people were really latching on to them.
Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers)
Bryn Terfel, Katherine Jenkins, Aled Jones and the Millennium Stadium Crowd
Oh yes. Well this is um the Welsh National Anthem. I rather like this because it reminds me of my time going to Wales. And as I've said, I we've had very happy times there. It was a very good move.
The Broadway Cast of Les Misérables
Now, this is because I have been fortunate enough to be able to become a trustee of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. And for me, I see the men involved as the angry men.
The Immortal Hour: How Beautiful They Are, the Lordly Ones
My final piece of music is actually really some of my earliest memories of music. This is a piece that my parents had and they loved.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:03What happened [when you got the call about the Nobel Prize]?
Well, I was um near Cambridge in my very oldest clothes in our car with a a sander in the back of the car, just been from to the hire shop, and I was on my way to my daughter's house, where we'd been desperately trying to help her just clear up enough for the imminent birth of a new grandchild. And uh I got a voicemail message saying, Martin, would you very urgently please call this number from one of the secretaries in Cardiff? And uh yes, it was the secretary of the committee [who] told me the news.
Presenter asks
5:55What sort of little boy were you?
I think I was a lovely little boy. I what sort of I was a a quiet, probably rather introverted uh little boy. I was very interested in all sorts of things around me. I loved to sit and cuddle things out and to try and make models.
Presenter asks
10:38How did you meet [your wife, Judith]?
Well, my mother's brother was the professor of astronomy in Cambridge, and his wife used to put on uh lunches. On one of these uh a babe kindly invited Judith. So I remember meeting this lovely girl sitting on a big square radiator they had. You could sit and warm your behind on this radiator. And so I thought she was I thought she was rather nice actually.
The keepsakes
The book
I'd like to take something which will help my imagination to continue.
Presenter asks
17:07Can you explain to me why [isolating embryonic stem cells] was so significant?
It's significant just to cut to the chase because these cells have the remarkable property and these are mice remarkable property of being able to be kept in the laboratory, but then any one of them can go back into a mouse embryo and form part of the resulting mouse, including the germ cells, the sperm or the eggs. And that means that if we have a genetic change in our cell in our laboratory. that genetic change can be transmitted through to the whole working animal, in this case a mouse. That has given us the experimental approach to genetics.
Presenter asks
26:27I wonder if through your work your in-depth understanding of breast cancer made it more easy to bear what you were going through personally, or actually made it more difficult?
Well, both Judith and I needed to know everything we possibly could about it. This is our way of coping. We needed to understand, we needed to understand the treatments. But uh it has been very difficult and as I say, I do admire her immense courage and fortitude going through all the treatments and the chemotherapy and stuff. In a brave way that I don't think I could do.
“I've often been asked: have I always been a scientist? And I've been. Think back you you know, you think back into as far back as you can remember, and did you feel any different? I was the same person then, I think. Certainly it seems to me I was the same person, and the sort of things I really liked doing were very much the same. It's just that I've become a bit more sophisticated and being given rather better tools these days.”
“I think not only should we study the stars in the universe, outside the cosmos, but we should study what I call the stars within ourselves.”
“I still find it. literally unbelievable that I have a Nobel Prize. It is such you know an amazing Honour and achievement. So it's still I have to pinch myself from time to time. Martin, have you really done that, or is it just a dream?”