Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Leading British scientist whose research on diabetes, AIDS, cancer, and climate change transformed medical and environmental approaches.
On the island
Eight records
Chris Barber's Jazz Band with Ottilie Patterson
I used to do a paper round and when I was thirteen I eventually managed to save up enough money to buy a cornet and this was one of the first things that I played on it with a group of friends in our first traditional jazz band.
Wednesday Night Prayer MeetingFavourite
It's just amazing to be part of, though.
One of the key points in my life was when in 1964 I won a prize for a travelling scholarship and I got on a greyhound bus with my wife at the time for three months and we just headed down south and we saw the discrimination that there was there, the emerging movement to get rid of it. And of course that's reflected in Strange Fruit.
I ended up in India and there I got interested in Carnatic music and I recruited myself with a guru in the Veena, which is a kind of large lute with seven strings. So I'd like to play a piece by Veenai Jayanthi, who is one of the leading practitioners of the Veena. I think it's a very beautiful piece.
I've chosen Bellini and in particular Norma, which is a dreadful story, really, but the music makes up for it.
Hugh Mazukeda is one of my heroes. He plays the flugelhorn and cornet. He is a South African who had to come out of South Africa for a long time and somebody who's been immensely powerful in his thinking and uncompromising.
Va, pensiero (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)
Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli
It's because I'm quite often in Italy, where I every year look after a school for a couple of weeks, and my Italian friends in the warm evenings sing, and they often sing this. It's really the sort of national anthem of Italy.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15Is the passion for scientific understanding inseparable from the passion to experience?
It is. I love my science. It's incredibly stimulating. I find it the most exciting thing I do. But I can't do it without doing other things in parallel.
Presenter asks
2:00Was there a moment that you properly fell in love with science?
I didn't find the joy of it until I actually began to do it in a laboratory in Oxford. And then I suddenly discovered that it was not just about solving problems, but it was about seeing things laterally, really experiencing new things, new ideas. It was much closer to art and music than I had thought.
Presenter asks
5:39Do you think that [your parents'] impulse to [encourage you] came from themselves feeling slightly thwarted?
My father felt that tremendously. Looking back, I know he was as intelligent as many of my colleagues in Cambridge. He had this amazing ability to think through things in a rational way, but he had no confidence in himself. My mother was very arty and the very opposite of that in many ways, but she was also, I think, very bright. And so... Yes, I guess they probably did encourage us all, because they saw possibilities if we were encouraged.
The keepsakes
The book
I'm going to take lessons in Underbele, because I hope that eventually I'm going to be rescued from this island, and I hope that I'll find my wife and family, and I'll be able to impress them by speaking Indebele fluently.
The luxury
A combined heat and power micro unit
because I quite like to have my book in an electronic form.
Presenter asks
11:12Can you just explain to a lay person like me why this project, the Insulin project, was so significant?
Because in the 1920s insulin was discovered and it was used and shown to be able to keep diabetics alive, but really people didn't know what it looked like. And in the 1950s, Fred Sanger... had worked out what the linear sequence of amino acids which make up a protein are. But we still didn't know what it looked like in terms of its architecture. And just as with town planning, you need to know about the shape and the architecture if you're going to understand function.
Presenter asks
17:50By the time you were in your early thirties... you chucked it all in. You left it all behind.
I didn't leave it all behind, but I it got out of control. There were amazing pressures of having a a young family, of being chairman of a planning committee in a large city council and doing science which takes up all your time. And I just found the pressures enormous. My marriage broke up and I decided that I really had to do science on its own for a bit.
Presenter asks
31:22How much do you worry about [the risks of trialling drugs]?
I worry about it hugely. It's just a very difficult moment because one works first on molecules and then on tissues and then in animals and still one doesn't have any certainty as to what's going to happen in the human body because what one's really doing is targeting one part of it, but it's a huge complexity and so we're never quite sure.
“if you look at life in the very microscopic form, very much smaller than we can see with light, the architecture of the molecules of life are just fascinating and beautiful. So there's many, many pleasures which are parallels with art and with music, the symmetry and the beauty and the melody of science.”
“It's just a huge excitement to see something for the first time. It's an enormous privilege.”
“What the Japanese have is a sense of beauty in the falling cherry blossom, and this idea that things can be beautiful just because they change is a wonderful thing that we really don't understand fully in the West.”
“If you have a process which selects things because they're advantageous, then you can very quickly move on and make progress so that you can get organization, you can get function. You don't need a creator.”