Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A scientist who led the UK's contribution to the Human Genome Project, mapping and sequencing human DNA to transform disease treatment.
On the island
Eight records
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Antal Dorati
I think the opening of The Rite of Spring is is a lovely place to begin. It's a record that I bought very early on and I think it's like an introduction to life.
From my student days really, I remember so well listening to A D P F and we're going to have the song that's perhaps most strongly associated with her, Che ne reguetrien.
After being in Cambridge, Daphne and I were married in the in the summer of nineteen sixty six, and we went to California, and there, of course, we heard Simon and Garfunkel.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
Karl Leister and the Brandis Quartet
This is actually going back a little from California in my memory, although it's a record that's been with Daphne and me all our lives. But when I first went to see her in her bedsit, this Mozart clarinet quintet was the record she most often had playing.
Don't Come the Cowboy with Me Sonny Jim!
The next piece is a celebration in a way of a life because Kirstie McColl tragically died earlier this year. And I am remember her not only for her songs and her life, but because she was one of the many wonderful singers that were introduced to Daphne and me by our children...
The songs of Tom Lehrer, I think, are a wonderful satire on all sorts of things. And this particular one, I think, is a satire on marketing things that really should not be marketed.
Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90, 'Dumky'
For no very good reason, but just because I love it, we're going to hear Dvorak's piano triona E minor, the Dunkey trio.
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130Favourite
The last one is a a late Beethoven string quartet. It starts sadly, almost gloomily, but ends serenely. I think it's an old man coming to terms with his life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:52Have you, John, now, actually held the book of life [the human genome] in your hand?
Yes, I have. In in the draft form that we have, it's as yet incomplete. We shall be completing it over the next couple of years. But I've held it in the form really of a C D-ROM on the sort of thing you might put into your computer to play a game. We can write the instructions to make a human being on that disk.
Presenter asks
3:34We certainly put scientists such as you on a pedestal. Surely you belong there, don't you?
No, absolutely not. We are artisans, I think, in the sense that we're trying to understand the universe. And this particular bit of the universe that we're talking about at the moment is our own bodies. The difference, perhaps, from a car mechanic is that we are discovering the workings of a car which somebody else has built. And it's a very, very complicated car.
Presenter asks
8:37Why was it, therefore, that you started with the worm? What was so special about the worm?
Because we were working on it, because it was there. The worms grow very fast. They're very simple animals. We can manipulate them in various ways. But in so doing, we got ourselves going for the big one.
The keepsakes
The book
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Arthur Quiller-Couch
what I really want to take is the Oxford Anthology of English Verse. And the reason I want to take it is because I want to declaim those poems, some of which I remember from my school days, some of which are new to me, some of which I don't know yet, as I walk along the beach.
The luxury
If I have to choose, I have to go for the microscope because there is going to be so many things on that island undiscovered and I want to spend the rest of my time there looking at them in detail.
Presenter asks
15:22How long did you sit at that bench staring into the microscope?
Well, off and on it went on through the seventies, but the particularly difficult bit, the par what went on in the egg, occupied me solidly for a year and a half. And I guess that was right at the end of the seventies.
Presenter asks
29:03Do you have faith that [the human genome] is not going to be misused in some way?
I think, first of all, we must keep on acquiring new knowledge. I see that as a good. I think the other thing, though, the condition, if you like, I'm a conditional optimist. I really demand of myself and society, my fellows. That we use knowledge responsibly, because I think that's really what it's about.
“One long string of letters with no punctuation whatever.”
“One is the cell one is watching. One divides as the cell divides. And one sees, therefore, where the pieces go, because you are that cell. That's the way, actually, we understand everything.”
“I do feel that in the case of the human genome, the code that makes human beings, there's something rather different, that this is something which is a heritage. It's not something that should be in any sense bought and sold.”