Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Nobel Prize-winning scientist knighted for cancer research; discovered how human cells multiply and leads Britain's most important cancer charity.
On the island
Eight records
Dancing in the StreetFavourite
Well, I thought if I'm sitting on a desert island I'm going to sometimes be a little bit miserable, and I'll want to be happy and get up and dance.
Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 'Appassionata'
I do like thinking. And I like music that makes you feel more contemplative. And I think Beethoven is really the composer for me that makes you think that way.
Well, I'm a sixties child, and I think that archetypal track I Got You Babe sums it all up.
Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102
David Oistrakh, Pierre Fournier, Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent
I was introduced to classical music when I was at university, and the very first classical record that I had was one given to me on my, I think, nineteenth birthday by a friend of mine in my hall of residence
Recorder Sonata in F major, Op. 1, No. 11, HWV 369
Marion Verbruggen and Ton Koopman
I didn't really learn how to play an instrument when I was at school. And I felt this was a lack in my twenties, and so my wife and myself and a friend, my wife Anne, decided we'd learn the recorder
Well, I'm going to be lonely sometimes sitting on my island, and perhaps I want to be sentimental sometimes, as well as jumping round the fire
I'm a fan of Shakespeare, and there's a very beautiful opera by Benjamin Britton. I met Benjamin Britton once, when I was a graduate student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, Karl Böhm
Although I think I'm going to like being on my desert island, eventually I want to be rescued. And uh there is this nice trio in Cozy Fantuti where everybody is waving goodbye as they sail away on the sea.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31Is it the beauty of the biology itself, or the beauty of the discovery [that inspires you]?
It's really both. I think the discovery process in science and actually finding out something that is new that nobody else has ever even dreamt of before is one of the most amazing things that a human being can do. To sit there looking at a new land that nobody has ever seen is just it's like being an explorer in the Amazonian jungle or in the Antarctic. So it's absolutely amazing. But also that the process itself can be beautiful.
Presenter asks
6:00Did you realize when you began with yeast that you might in the end have an application to cancer and cancer therapy?
Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought this was possible, but I really thought that m that the work we were doing in yeast would be more of a metaphor rather than exactly the same sorts of molecules. I just thought it would help us think properly about the same problem in human beings.
Presenter asks
6:32How long then did it take you to show that the gene that you had isolated in yeast was in fact pretty much the same in human beings?
It probably was, and I I think I first identified this gene in the mid seventies, and then my work and of course the work of many others, because science is truly a social activity, led to the physical isolation of the gene in the early 80s from yeasts, and then another five or six years before we made the link with humans, so quite a long time.
The keepsakes
The book
Jacob Bronowski
because this was such an important book for my own intellectual development, and it's so beautifully written I shall want to dip in it constantly.
The luxury
I can look at the stars at night, I can look at the birds, um during the day and I can look for the ship that's going to rescue me.
Presenter asks
11:08How did you get [into university] in the end [after failing O-level French]?
Well, I sat it twice more and continued to fail it, so that I ended up with six failures. And then, curiously, one of my universities I applied to, which is the University of Birmingham, the professor of genetics there, Professor Jinks, looked through the applications and noticed that I had actually pretty good A-level grades, but had failed on this problem with O-level French, asked me to come and see him, so I got on my motorbike, went up the M1, spent the afternoon with this famous professor, and at the end of it he said, Well, I'll get a special dispensation and you can come.
Presenter asks
23:27Can you describe to me the wrongs of [private industry attempting to patent important key genes] in relation to your work?
What has to be recognised is that there's a lot of public money going into basic research to understand disease, and that's going to be useful for mankind... What I think particularly bothers me and many others is when we see unscrupulous behaviour on the part of certain companies... if a company comes along at the last moment and puts one hundred people working on this problem, just to move that last one or two per cent to get the gene... then they end up controlling that, and then all that public work they've simply taken over. Now that cannot be right.
“Science is tough, it's difficult. And keeping yourself going through those long hard nights when very little actually happens, when you have failure after failure, because if you're at the cutting edge of research, you will have lots of failures.”
“It's practically the same gene, despite the fact that it's been 1,000 million years, or maybe 1,500 million years, immense period of time, since yeast and human beings, since the origins diverged. It's quite extraordinary. And that moment was it is a Eureka moment.”
“We'll never see a cure for cancer because there's just too many different types of cancers out there. But I really confidently predict that we're going to see a major attack on many of those cancers in the coming generation.”