Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar

What lessons did you learn from dealing with serious diseases like bird flu and SARS that have been most useful during COVID-19?

The first one is they're scary. I mean, they really are terrifying. I remember at the start of SARS-1, and indeed again with bird flu, although this did not prove to be true, you're dealing with something you don't understand. You do take on a real degree of humility. You're in the face of the power of nature. And you can do so much as a doctor or a nurse. It makes you question your whole professionalism. It makes you question why you're there and why you're in the hospital looking after people. It's frightening. And you have friends and colleagues who get sick, and you have friends and colleagues that die. And again, it's why I have such respect for healthcare professionals. But the other lesson I learnt in all of those is don't act slower than the speed of the epidemic. It is no point saying we've acted faster than usual and we got there in six months if the epidemic has taken two weeks to get going. So make the decisions you can in good faith with the best evidence you can, but don't wait until you've got all of the data because by the time you've got all the data, it's too late.

You were born in Singapore and moved around a lot as a child. What kind of upbringing did you have?

I didn't come to this country really until I was a teenager. We emigrated to New Zealand when I was a child. But my mother, who was always the sort of forceful one of the family, I hate to say this because I've got a lot of friends in New Zealand, but found New Zealand in the late 60s quite chauvinistic. And she was an artist and slightly bohemian. And the bigger issue was we lived next door to this glue factory, which I still remember. If I could choose a song which gave you the smell of a glue factory, I would choose it. And the school my father was going to be a teacher in hadn't been built. And so my mother, who sort of ruled the family really, said, Look, we're not having this. So we all got on a boat. And so when I first came to Britain, I came by boat. And then we left Britain soon afterwards to go and live in Libya. I don't really have anywhere that I call home in my younger life. You know, I often used to think wistfully of those people that had been brought up in a city or town and knew it very well. I didn't have any of that, but I gained in other ways, I guess.

You moved around a lot as a kid. How did that affect your schooling? What kind of student were you?

I was a really good student. Until the end, my father was a teacher, so you couldn't get away without trying to do well at school. But then, through my latter years at school, which some of it was then in this country, in the UK, actually, again from my father, inherited a reasonable ability to play sport. And I was playing an enormous amount of sport in the latter years at school. And there's no doubt that I neglected some of those studies and probably wasn't good enough either, is the truth. And so, having been pretty good at sport at various levels and being head of the school and all of those sorts of things, I then hit this brick wall, which was I didn't quite fail, but I might as well have done, failed my A-levels. And, you know, that was as an 18-19-year-old. And that comes as a pretty big shock. And I had to resit them, and then I had to knock on doors in London around universities a year later. But I used to wake up with nightmares thinking, I've got to do my bloody A-levels again for years. So it's only in the last year or two that I've got over that, actually. It's amazing the scars. But it also shows you, you know, there are late developers, there are people that come to it late, there are people that have bad days. And I just hope we haven't lost as a world the ability to let people have a second chance in education because I do worry it's become so pressured. And to be able to say that you failed your A-levels and things turned out okay, I think if that inspires a single other individual who listens to this, I'd be thrilled.

How does that bifurcation work — focusing on what might be possible in 30 or 40 years while also responding to the urgent needs of the present?

You have to try and make the world a better place in the time you have available. But you've also got to think there will still be challenges 20, 30, 40 years from now. And some of the major advances will be made through blue sky research that's being done today, with no real sense of where it's going to impact in 20, 30, 40 years' time. You know, stem cells are now a huge part of medicine. But the first work was done by a character called John Gurden because he was interested in these funny cells and he had no idea that they were going to lead to where they are today. The same with people working on monoclonal antibodies, which are going to be a major treatment for Ebola and COVID-19 and many other areas. You can't strategize discoveries like that. That is because good people working in a rich environment, by rich, I mean culturally rich, not wealthy, and they're allowed to dream. And I would like now being in a funding body welcome to try and push us to liberate those minds, to free them from the short-term thinking of just chasing grant after grant after grant and bring some of the sort of hope and dreams and idealism of science back to bear so that it is the excitement of pushing back the boundaries of uncertainty that I love and thrive in. But also making sure that part of what we do We have an Ebola vaccine, we have a COVID vaccine, and that is needed not in 20 or 30 years' time, it's needed next week. And I think you can bring these two together.