Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A microbiologist who co-discovered Ebola and pioneered HIV/AIDS research and policy, now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
On the island
Eight records
Toumani one day played for me and my wife in Bamako. And also we have the Cebola outbreak in West Africa. And it is very much on my mind. And you can't really understand a number of cultures without understanding and appreciating their music.
Second uh uh disc, and this is a song now, is by Jacques Brel, who is one of the great uh francophone singers, and he sings about uh Le Plapé. Le Plapy means the flat land, the lowland by the sea, uh about Flanders, where I grew up, and ironically it's uh a song in French.
Well, the next one is uh a bit different. It's uh Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan and uh I desperately wanted to learn English and uh I tried to learn English with Bob Dylan and I still don't understand fully what he's singing about. It drove my parents absolutely nuts because we only had one record player and I had bought with my savings an L P and I would play it all the time and and I pretended that it was to learn English but of course it was about more than that.
Emma Kirkby, James Bowman, Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood
The fourth is from Giovanni Pergolesi, a piece called Stabat Mate. And when I was in high school, okay, maybe I was a rebel and I certainly enjoyed Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones and the Beatles and so on, but I also organized classic concerts. I tried to play the violin, which was a disaster for my environment. And I got really interested in Baroque music. And this is one of my favorite pieces. It goes really through bone and marrow. And it's the sorrow of a mother. And it's religious music. And it reminds me also something that's similar in a completely different context. And that's the area of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute.
Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen
Collegium Vocale Gent, Philippe Herreweghe
The fifth disc is by Bach from the St. Matthew's Passion, Komte er Dochter Haftmür Klagen. And it's conducted by Philippe Herowiger. And he was a year ahead of me in medical school in Ghent. He is a psychiatrist, but his real passion was music. And for me, he has brought passion into Bach and tried to interpret it as he thinks, because who knows, Bach wanted it. And so I think that all his interpretation of Baroque music is very different from anything else I've heard.
The sixth piece is by Franco, who is one of the great Congolese musicians. And I love Congolese music and Congolese dance. And it's a piece by Franco called Attanción Na Cida, Watch Out for AIDS. And he made that and he died himself from AIDS actually. And we asked him to sing a song about AIDS and HIV prevention, which was really devastating Kinshasa and Congo in these days. Because I was convinced also it's by using culture, popular communication, be it soap operas and music that you can reach people.
Che farò senza EuridiceFavourite
Kathleen Ferrier, Glyndebourne Festival Chorus, Southern Philharmonic Orchestra, Fritz Stiedry
Seventh disc is from an opera by Gluk called Orfeo at Eridici. I had a good friend who died from it, Jodiwa, and he was a theatre and opera director in Belgium and the Netherlands. And he initiated me into opera, which I still really love. The song I selected here is Kefaro Senza Eridici. What would I do without Eridici? It's one of the most beautiful love songs that I know. It's sung by Kathleen Ferrer, who has an incredible voice, and also it's an old record from Glendeborn, and it gives also this sense that it comes from the underworld where the whole scene is playing.
Yeah, I'm probably too old for this one, but anyway, it's by a Belgian also, Stromai. He's one of the most popular singers on the continent. I went to a concert by him in Apollo in Hammersmith. It was sold out in a few days, and I think I must have been the oldest in the room. And I think he reflects our current society, multicultural. He's also a great poet. I think he's the new Jacques Brell, and he represents the future.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:46How does this sort of job [as director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine] suit you? You know, in a big institution, I imagine sitting in the office quite a lot.
Well, first of all, being head of the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine is going back to my roots, because I started my career in Antwerp at the smaller sister institute. And I love it because people are there, because they believe in improving health worldwide. You know, they're passionate about that. It's like the United Nations in one building. We have students of over sixty countries. And we work on health, but from the molecule to health economics and clinical and everything. That's what I feel so privileged. But also, I don't spend actually that much time in my office, to be honest. I can't sit still and so I travel a lot. I wanna see where our staff is and I'm on lots of committees and all that. So yeah, I thoroughly enjoy it.
Presenter asks
2:42It's thirty nine years since you first identified Ebola. As I understand it, the figures in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are plateauing, but the picture is far from clear. How do you think the responses on the ground and from governments are doing? Is enough being done to make things better and to make sure those figures start to go down?
In December I went to Sierra Leone to have a look myself and to see how we can evaluate a vaccine against Ebola, because that's what we may need. And actually I think the situation is definitely getting better. I was also impressed by the UK response, various agencies, NGOs all kind of working together in a way that I've rarely seen, which is good. It's all coming late and so lots of time has been wasted, but let's look into the future and I think that over the next few weeks we'll see a good decline of number of cases. But then I believe that it will take a long time before it's really over.
The keepsakes
The book
Hugo Claus
I love books with a difficult choice, but I would go for the complete works of Hugo Klaus. He's a Flemish writer.
The luxury
I'll go for a an old English rose a better plant, so that I can enjoy it for many years on my island. ... not only for the shape, but also the scent and the perfume.
Presenter asks
8:47You were born in Belgium in 1949, the first of four children. Was it a very traditional Flemish upbringing? And if so, what does that actually mean?
Yeah, I guess my DNA is Flemish, uh and it was a traditional Flemish upbringing. I come from a small village. Very Catholic and uh where everybody was kind of watching each other. And uh I grew up in a forest. Uh we had no neighbors. Uh walked to school where we did sports, where we got history of the world, not only of uh Belgium and uh lots of art and music. But whereas I loved it on the on the one hand, I I felt suffocated and when I was ten I had one goal in life, and that's get out of here. That was my goal in life, and I think I've managed to do that.
Presenter asks
10:41As I understand it, leprosy made an appearance very early on in your life. Tell me how you first got interested in it.
Yes, the village I come from is Kerbergen and the next door, Tremelo it's called was the birthplace of Father Damien. Damien was a a priest who went to Hawaii, to the island of Molokai, and devote his whole life to caring for people with leprosy. And he died himself of leprosy. And there was a small museum. That was about the only thing in the that I could cycle to. And so I would go there and I would kind of dream about the pictures of Africa and Hawaii and so on, and then the figured patients with leprosy and a lot about stigma. And I was really impressed by it. And I think it influenced me enormously to go into medicine and what's called global health.
Presenter asks
18:53When you explained to the nuns that their practices [reusing needles] were spreading the disease, what was their response?
It was very hard to explain. First of all, let's not forget they were still in shock, some kind of post-traumatic syndrome, because in this closed community of seven sisters, four had died. And this is a very isolated community. They live twenty-four hours with each other. So they were still really the sorrow was still enormous. They had lost so many of their local friends and people they were devoting their life to. And then in addition to explain that they had really a responsibility that was very, very difficult. And I'm not sure they ever accepted that.
Presenter asks
27:38As a young man you had a very strong sense of social justice. What is it that has kept that alive inside of you? For many people it gets snuffed out by the drudgery of trying to make things happen in huge organisations.
I really don't know. I think one is that I don't give easily up. So you can call that to be that I'm stubborn, but it's really you need a long-term goal and not deviate from that. And how you get there, that's tactics. And secondly, I think you need to protect yourself from being complacent. And that I built into my life in a sense by sitting down with people living with HIV, by travelling. And you have a need a good dose of passion. But I don't give easily up. Never take no for an answer.
“I love it because people are there, because they believe in improving health worldwide.”
“I felt suffocated and when I was ten I had one goal in life, and that's get out of here.”
“At some point I wanted to save the world, but that I've given up.”
“It looked like a worm.”
“I took a deep breath and I said, This is what I want to do. This is what I want to work on, and I want to stop this.”
“Never take no for an answer.”