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I was saddened by the passing of Patrick Bateson  on August 1, 2017. Below is the finest tribute I read on his life followed by the best interview I ever seen done of him by Alan Macfarlane

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Patrick Bateson (1938–2017)

• Kevin N. Laland

  Nature volume548, page394 (24 August 2017) | Download Citation

  Biologist who unravelled how animal behaviour develops.

  

  Image: Royal Society

  Rarely a day goes by without extravagant claims being made about whether some human characteristic — be it intelligence, violence or sporting prowess — is explained by genes or environment, biology or upbringing, ‘nature or nurture’. Patrick Bateson exposed the folly of such false dichotomies. In a 50-year career, he made seminal contributions to almost every topic in the science of animal behaviour, becoming a leading authority on behavioural development.

  Bateson, born on 31 March 1938, decided at an early age to be a biologist. He was influenced by the legacy of his grandfather’s famous cousin, the geneticist William Bateson, and by a keen interest in birdwatching. Bateson was educated at Westminster School in London before beginning an undergraduate degree in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1957. In 1963, he married Dusha Matthews, with whom he had two daughters. Apart from a two-year fellowship working with neuroscientist Karl Pribram at Stanford University in California, Bateson spent his whole career at the University of Cambridge in the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour.

  Bateson’s early research was influenced by two luminaries of ethology, Niko Tinbergen and Robert Hinde. Hinde supervised Bateson’s PhD on behavioural imprinting — the tendency of young birds, such as goslings, to latch on to and follow the first moving stimulus they see, typically their mothers. At the time, the mechanisms underlying imprinting were a mystery and hotly disputed.

  Bateson defused the contention through decades of pioneering experimentation into the underlying genetic, neural, physiological and experiential bases of the phenomenon, largely in collaboration with neuroscientists Gabriel Horn and Steven Rose. As psychologists had argued, imprinting is a form of perceptual learning, whereas, as ethologists had maintained, it involves an unlearned predisposition to attend to the physical characteristics of the mother.

  Bateson also studied mate choice, animal welfare, play, learning and memory, and the role of behaviour in evolution. He had an eloquent writing style and published influential books. These included Measuring Behaviour(Cambridge University Press, 1986), an introduction to the methodology of the field co-authored with ethologist Paul Martin, and Design for a Life: How Behaviour Develops(Jonathan Cape, 1999), also written with Martin. Some of the volumes edited or co-edited by Bateson, notably Growing Points in Ethology in 1976 and Mate Choice in 1983 (both Cambridge University Press), shaped thinking in these fields. He edited the influential Perspectives in Ethology series for 20 years, and for 5 years was editor of Animal Behaviour, the leading journal in ethology.

  Bateson held exalted positions in British science, including provost of King’s College at the University of Cambridge (1988–2003), president of the Zoological Society of London (2004–14) and biological secretary and vice-president of the Royal Society (1998–2003). He proved a leader in other ways too, showing courage, integrity and sensitivity in tackling emotive topics, including dog breeding and the use of animals in medical research. Bateson was also commissioned by the National Trust, a UK conservation and heritage charity, to lead a review into the physiological effects of hunting in deer, which resulted in the trust banning the practice on its land.

  Bateson was adept at helping others to develop a more nuanced understanding of tricky issues, such as overly simplistic adaptationism at a time when ‘gene for X’ language was rife. His calm and reasoned writings ensured that the whole organism and a systems perspective remained in sight during the heyday of genetic determinism.

  Bateson maintained a keen interest in evolutionary biology, but envisaged a broader conception of evolutionary causation, one that eschewed gene-centricism and placed the organism centre stage. This led some biologists to view him as a maverick. Nonetheless, Bateson was ahead of the curve in recognizing the evolutionary significance of mate choice, sympatric speciation (when populations of a species in one habitat become reproductively isolated from each other) and developmental plasticity, which have since become mainstream concepts.

  He also recognized the importance of ideas such as epigenetic inheritance and niche construction, which are now garnering increased attention. Behind the scenes, by organizing conferences and workshops and by promoting the work of progressive thinkers, Bateson helped to incubate ideas that are central to the emerging extended evolutionary synthesis.

  An approachable and affectionate scientist, he insisted on being called Pat by everyone. He was open-minded, a good listener and curious about science. Bateson was dedicated to his students and collaborators, and made time for anyone who wanted to discuss their research. He was a loyal colleague, mentor and friend. Pat and Dusha were excellent hosts in their lodge at King’s College. They would warmly welcome all guests, whether graduate students or international dignitaries, introducing them to their collection of cats.

  Patrick Bateson died on 1 August, aged 79. His death marks the end of a glorious era of behavioural research. His legacy will long be appreciated.

  Author information

  Affiliations

  1. Kevin N. Laland is professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the University of St Andrews, UK. He worked closely with Pat Bateson for 25 years.

     • Kevin N. Laland

  Corresponding author

  Correspondence to Kevin N. Laland.

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Patrick Bateson interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13th December 2007

0:09:07 Born in 1938 on the Chiltern Hills; father designed the house where I was born; had a brother five years older; William Bateson, the biologist, was a cousin of my grandfather; he coined the term ‘genetics’; he had been working on inheritance for a long time and then Mendel’s book became available and he suddenly realized how important his work was and became a champion of Mendel; although I never knew him he was a figure in the family; he was Professor of Biology in Cambridge for a while and then became Director of the John Innes Institute which was in London at the time; he was prolific and got the whole subject of genetics going; fiercely opposed by group of biometricians; he was to some extent a role model for me; remember being fascinated by natural history lessons as a small boy;  the local school had a very good teacher called Mrs Truscott; had a number of people in our house during the war as mother was Norwegian and as a result had Norwegian refugees, including Karen Spärck Jones; had a very happy childhood

5:59:07 Mother was extraordinarily vivacious and everybody loved her; I hardly knew my father who was wounded and captured at Dunkirk; I used to write to him in the Prisoner of War camp; he was not very well when he came back after the war and only lived for another ten years; he had been an expert in timber drying before the war and during the war took a degree in architecture in the Prisoner of War camp; he had great charm; he had a brother, F.W. Bateson, who was a don at Oxford, an English literary critic; Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, was a son of William Bateson; I did not meet him until I was a graduate student; I was taken to a conference in U.S. by Robert Hinde as his student and through an error Gregory was also invited; he was astonishingly like my father even though they were second cousins; we still don’t understand why these likenesses occur even though the genetic relationship is not very great; he was a powerful, curiously inarticulate man though acoiner of terms; had a cult following in California though think his book ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ is a dreadful book; I did meet Margaret Mead at a conference who flirted with me as a seemingly younger version of Gregory

13:11:10 After my first school I went to a Prep school in Sussex for five years; I didn’t like being sent off as a boarder at eight and to begin with was unhappy; eventually settled down and had a happy time; from there went to Westminster, initially as a day boy as my parents were living with William Bateson’s brother in Chelsea, looking after him; became a weekly boarder in my second year; initially I didn’t do too well but rose steadily up and by the end was in top sets and had started to do biology, which I loved; also rowing and spent two years in the first eight; hard training and chemistry master was furious at time lost; there was a status advantage in sport that gave me confidence; at fourteen had started going to a bird observatory on the Northumberland coast in my holidays where we caught birds and ringed them to study their migration; we had a neighbour on the Chilterns called Richard Fitter who was a well-known naturalist who had suggested I go there; I had already made up my mind that I wanted to do zoology and wanted to go to Cambridge; there met a schoolmaster who described doing a Ph.D. which sounded like heaven

19:33:06 At school had a very good biology master who had also taught Andrew Huxley; I read ‘Apes, Angels and Victorians’  which I looked at again recently and it is a very good biography of both Darwin and Huxley; reading it at school was the first time I realized how important Darwin was; Westminster had a liberated feel about it; the then headmaster, Walter Hamilton, used to run an essay society which I wrote for and was very helpful in learning to write well; made some good intellectual contacts there, some of which have persisted; I played the cello though not very well

24:06:18 Came to Cambridge for the scholarship exam; should mention that uncle Ned Bateson had been at King’s and keen that I come here; earlier he had take me to see Cambridge and he wanted to take me to his father’s house (father had been Master of St John’s) to show me a little chestnut he had planted; found an enormous chestnut tree had grown; failed to get a scholarship at that point but got a place at King’s in December 1955 and then went to Norway; had a wonderful grandfather who had been Chief Justice when the Germans invaded; the King and Government left but because he stayed he became officially the Government of Norway; he went undercover and ran the resistance; he was never caught by the Nazis and became a hero after the war; I went to live with him and he got me a place in the Natural History Museum in Oslo where I worked every day, learning systematics and how to skin birds; when summer came he introduced me to the NorskPolarinstitut where I got a place as a deckhand doing hydrographical work and went on an expedition to the north of Spitsbergen where I had masses of time for bird watching; came back and started at King’s in October 1957; that winter I went to a conference organised by David Lack at St Hugh’s Oxford for undergraduates; he started as a schoolmaster but then wrote a famous book on the life of a robin and then got a place at Oxford; Niko Tinbergen gave a talk about gulls; I met a fellow Cambridge undergraduate called Chris Plowright who had been toSpitsbergen as a geologist; he was also an ornithologist and we wanted to go there to look at the Ivory Gull; talked to Tinbergen who was very enthusiastic as nothing was know about it; a student of his, Esther Cullen, had just published a brilliant paper on the adaptations of the kittiwake, a cliff-nesting gull, and he was very keen that other cliff-nesting gulls should be looked at; Tinbergen had spent a year in Greenland as a young man and was very keen to go back to the Arctic; the plan was that he should lead this expedition but a few months before we left he developed an ulcer which meant he couldn’t come; I exploited my contacts with the Norwegian Polar Institute and they took us round to the north-east part of the archipelago where we were dumped on an island with all our provisions and two boats; we couldn’t get into the fjord as it was still full of ice but eventually the ice cleared and we could get in and found these pure white gulls nesting on a cliff about 1000 feet up; very exciting to see them; lugged our stuff to the top of the cliff and had five weeks to work on them; found they did not have the adaptations of the kittiwake but it was the first description that had ever been done of them; we nearly got stuck in a blizzard when the boat that was coming to collect us warned us that we were in danger of being iced up in the fjord; Tinbergen was delighted with our results, including very good film; I spent next six months writing up our results

35:47:13 This did conflict with my undergraduate work and only got a 2.2 and feared I’d never be able to do research; George Salt was my supervisor in my first year; he really inspired me, rather severe, but with a formidable mind; after second year did final year zoology which  I loved; taught by Donald Parry and John Pringle; Donald Parry was a kind man but not a very good teacher; at the end of my third year got a first and a University prize; George Salt then suggested I aim at a research fellowship at King’s; by that time I had met Robert Hinde who was willing to supervise me but didn’t want to risk his friendship with Tinbergen by poaching me; did stay in Cambridge; Hinde was Steward at St John’s but soon after got a Royal Society research fellowship; he had come back from Oxford to look after the field station which Bill Thorpe had set up at Madingley; in my first year as a graduate student a Lab was built there and it was renamed as Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour which it still is; Robert has a very sharp mind and reads at an astonishing rate; he was a fantastically good supervisor but very critical; he was like that in seminars where he would tear eminent speakers to pieces; he was unrelenting and people who had experienced this remembered it for years after; as students it taught us to be very critical; do remember that Tinbergen was treated very differently as Robert had a very high respect for him; his paper was on the sorts of questions you can ask about behaviour; question of why gulls removed egg shells from their nests; experimented by putting shells at varying distances from dummy nests and found that the greater the distance from the nest the lower the chance that it would be preyed upon by crows and hedgehogs; suggested this was the reason for the gulls action; this was one of the first attempts to look at the functional significance of a behaviour pattern; he made the point that if you know what the current function of something is it doesn’t tell you why it evolved; it could be that when this habit evolved they were then nesting in marshes where the presence of an egg might have actually encouraged disease; possible that this behaviour pattern evolved for one reason but was co-opted for another later in evolution; he was clear about this but many people still muddle it; Robert a marvellous supervisor and had a number of distinguished student such as JaneGoodall and Dian Fossey, Tim Clutton-Brock and many others

47:38:22 I applied for a Harkness Fellowship and got one to go to California and wanted to work on the mechanisms of behaviour; went to the Lab of a man called Karl Pribram who was a neuro-surgeon andneuro-psychologist; quite different from Robert Hinde; he just loved ideas and was constantly coming up with wild theories; I wanted to work on the neural basis of behaviour and spent two years there; got a rather liberating way of thinking about theory whereas Robert was rather anti-theoretical; an interesting thing to come out of that was an experiment that I did which was to put illuminated panels of letters in monkeys cages which they were exposed to for some time; later they were taken to some apparatus where if they pressed panels letter came up and if they got the right one they got a peanut; discovered that if the monkey had seen one of the letters before then it learnt very quickly; if it had seen two of them then they took much longer to learn to discriminate them than animals that had never seen them before; in a sense they had classified them together and when they had to discriminate between them they had to unlearn the categorisation; this was a new observation and that became the work of one of my graduate students when I came back to Cambridge; I resumed work on behavioural imprinting which I’d done for a Ph.D.; while I was in California I submitted a dissertation to King’s and got a junior research fellowship; an important moment as it changed the course of my life; got this in 1964 and that summer had to interrupt the work I was doing as the Harknessinsisted that we spent three months travelling round the States; they gave us a car to travel to all the main regions; at the time I was a bit fed up as I wanted to get on with my experiment; of course we had a wonderful trip; then continued working there for a final year; had just married before leaving for California

53:29:20 On coming back to Cambridge had a job lined up for me at Madingley as well where I became senior assistant in research and had the responsibility of looking after day to day administration; Bill Thorpe was my boss and Robert had by that time got a Royal Society research fellowship and fairly soon after became director of an MRC unit within the Sub Department; decided to resume the work I had been doing on behavioural imprinting; about that time came into King’s for dinner and sat next to a delightful neuro-scientist working in the Anatomy Department and discovered that he was very interested in the neural basis of learning; that was Gabriel Horn and we started on a long period of collaboration; we think quite differently in many ways but at the same time complemented each other in a really important way and got a great deal out of it, including a long friendship; think that  dining together is a very important way for intellectual ideas to flow; to get this coming together between different disciplines is much more difficult in universities where departments have little opportunity to meet; in Oxford and Cambridge we have this fantastic opportunity to meet people; often in the interstices between disciplines that exciting things happen

57:46:24 At that point Gabriel went on sabbatical to Uganda but when he came back we started working together; we didn’t know what to measure at that time and teamed up with a pharmacologist called LesIversen; he left after a while as he thought we were getting nowhere; Gabriel and I went down to give seminars to a group that Steven Rose ran in London; we wanted to find a biochemist who was keen to collaborate and Steven had been interested in the effects of experience on the nervous system; started an important collaboration between the three of us; then designed increasingly complicated experiments which I think were very important; when you try to look for changes in the brain associated with experience there are all sorts of things that can be going on – the animals can become more active, stressed, attentive, stimulated; if you want to know whether the things you are measuring are specifically related to the laying down of the memory you have to do a whole set of experiments, each of which includes a sub-set of possibilities; devised a kind of triangulation approach which I still think was intellectually very important; sometimes when I see people doing work on the neural basis of behaviour they have not gone through the rigour of excluding alternative explanations; famous example is all the imaging that people do; took us several years but finally able to say pretty confidently that there was an area in the brain which was necessary for the laying down of a memory and specifically related to that; we then needed to identify it much more precisely and at that point Gabriel was moving to; still needed to identify the precise point and developed a technique whereby you take two groups of chicks one of which had learnt as much as it will learn about the imprinting object and a group that has just started to learn; you wait a day and then train both groups for the same amount of time; one group has learnt everything and the other has a lot to learn; they are both stimulated in the same way and at that point you introduce your biochemical marker; then you kill them, slice their brain and see where the activity is occurring; using this technique of under-training or over-training then re-training them next day we were able to find an area of the brain which was particularly related to the laying down of memory; very important as once found the area could belesioned before imprinting or after when memory of the imprinting object would be destroyed; that became the basis for a lot of work, some of which I was involved with, which Gabriel built on which became a very important starting point for a whole programme of research

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Second Part

0:09:07 Experience with Tinbergen and his interest in function still going on in the back of my mind so asking myself what is the function of imprinting; the usual answer is that animals imprint in order to know what their species looks like; I developed the thought that it enables you to know what your mother or father looks like so you can avoid the hazards of responding in a filial way to someone who is not your parent; if you look at ducks you will see that a female will attack a baby that is not her own; sexual imprinting takes place later in development; developed argument that this enables you to identify close kin and when adult you chose a mate who is a bit different but not too different; strikes a balance between inbreeding and outbreeding too much; followed with experiments on a quail colony atMadingley and found they had a very strong preference for individuals who were their first cousins that they had never seen before; whether this goes on in the wild is another matter but it indicated that imprinting provided a standard to offset mating preference against; echoes the preference for cross-cousins in human societies throughout the world; did not like the suggestion that these findings explained the incest taboo which I see as conformist behaviour; another thing I was interested in was the development of mother-offspring relationships in cats and also play in cats as little good systematic work had been done on play; love cats and breed them at home; two interesting things came out of this work, one is that play is heterogeneous i.e. play with each other before play with objects; secondly, there had been idea of parent-offspring conflict which was particularly marked at the time of weaning but I felt this was wrong; found that if the mother was in bad shape the offspring pick this up and wean themselves and go onto solid food; conversely the mother has to be sensitive to the condition of her offspring and if they are in poor shape she will spend much longer looking after them if able to do so; now interested in the ways in which cats develop depending on conditions in the environment; David Barker’s work on the life histories of babies recorded in a midwife’s notes from the early part of the twentieth century; found that small babies were much more likely to get heart disease as adults; association of a mismatch between the environmental conditions at birth and the subsequent change which meant they were not adapted to deal with them; problem acute in places like India where heart disease and diabetes are at epidemic levels; conversely, big babies are poorly adapted for famine conditions; reflections from demography; effects on subsequent generations spawned whole new field of research, epigenetics, where the mechanisms of transgenerationaladaptation are explored; no actual change in the DNA but suppression of some parts of the genome and activation of others which are appropriate for the lived in environment and for their offspring; human migration and adaptation subjects of great interest now because of the health implications

15:00:11 Was critical of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene hypothesis as it misled people into thinking genes actively determined development although he himself did not actually think that; he went on to argue that communication did not involve the transmission of useful information but was merely manipulation; still people who believe in the selfish gene rather than cooperative behaviour but they has been a shift toward the latter

17:29:16 By the mid-eighties I had been in Cambridge for a long time and had seen how refreshed colleagues were by going elsewhere; then it was suggested that I should be a candidate for Provostshipwhen Bernard Williams retired; I was a bit reluctant but agreed; odd election as a lot of the younger fellows wanted a Provost from outside and had I been one I would have agreed with them; found the campaigning uncomfortable and feared it would divide the college; I was just elected by a few votes; there was a lot of ill-feeling afterwards and I quite often had a really difficult time on the governing body which persisted for quite a few years; about halfway through things changed and it became much easier; that said, it was a very interesting period for me as it allowed Dusha, my wife, and I to work together because the job requires a lot of entertaining; she was a marvellous hostess; it also allowed us to meet people we would otherwise never have met; the most startling of these was Princess Margaret; shortly I took up residence in the Lodge, Jack Plumb, the historian, asked me to invite her to the Advent Carol service; when she accepted, Plumb said she would stay for the weekend; she came with entourage; we had to treat her as royalty and she was a little awkward about coming into an academic household; it went well and having done it once, Plumb again asked us to host her; she came about seven times in all; over the years we got rather fond of her and it became quite a nice relationship; on another occasion the Dalai Lama stayed; he was wonderful, with an extraordinary warmth about him; he brought two monks with him and we were told he would not have any food after midday though he did join us when we ate; was very interested in science and quizzed me about my work; talked about Tibet and the Lama system; was not very keen on the latter though thought the culture of Tibet was important; the Lama system was, in fact, fairly recent; interesting that when the Chinese moved up to Tibet their the women had to move down to lower altitudes to have their babies; set me wondering whether there could have been selection over the centuries to allow Tibetans to survive at high altitude; we had a question and answer session with him and our students and he was asked who did he most admire in the world and he said Gorbachev; by that time (c1991) Gorbachev was very unpopular in Russia, but the Dalai Lama thought he had done more for world peace than anybody; later on John Barber invited Gorbachev to come to a conference in King’s and he stayed with us; whenBukovsky who had been persecuted in the Brezhnev era and had got out, he became a student here, stayed on in Cambridge and became involved in extreme right-wing movement; he wrote to me saying it was intolerable that I was going to host Gorbachev in the Lodge; told him that what was good enough for the Dalai Lama was good enough for me; found Gorbachev fascinating

30:19:19 Another visitor was Salman Rushdie who was then in hiding but we heard that he wanted to give an address in the Chapel; we agreed; incredible police procedure as they feared for his life; they minutely inspected the Chapel and the Lodge garden;Dadie Rylands complained about rough looking types with dogs in the garden; Salman came for lunch and all the guests were carefully vetted; behind every curtain was an armed Special Branch man; sitting in Provosts stall in the chapel, looking up at ceiling bosses which are Tudor roses, seen from the side, look like the face of an angry man; not sure how intentional it was but once you see it you see it all the time; notion that God scowling at me as a non-believer; think I am an atheist as I really don’t believe in a god; was brought up in Church of England tradition and I love a lot of the ceremony; music in the Chapel is wonderful and am a great supporter of the choir and Stephen Cleobury; thought that this was one of the truly great things about this college; I had no compunction about taking part in ceremonies though could have been accused of hypocrisy; predecessor were of similar opinions; coaching for bible reading from Dadie Rylands was just to breath deeply

38:49:47 When I had to take on role of fund raiser that meant quite a lot of travel in the US and meeting absolutely delightful people; there were aspects of the job which I liked very much; also in the second part of my Provostship I instituted the Provost Seminars which were also very good; brought students and fellows together and we had some marvellous speakers; also Dusha and I used to have musical evenings in the Lodge; students would organise the music and we would give them a meal afterwards

40:57:16 One of the changes that occurred during my career as a behavioural biologist was the increasing rigour in the way people worked; had a very bright graduate student, Paul Martin, who came back to Cambridge as a post-graduate for a while; wrote ‘Measuring Behaviour’ with him which has been very successful; marked a change in the subject where people were getting increasingly careful about how they measured and did experiments; downside was that it is very easy to measure things in a trivial way and stop focussing on the big questions; at the same time I was also editing a series with a man called Peter Klapfer where we were trying to encourage people not to be constrained by tight methodology; we invited essays for this series and sometimes got pieces that were incomprehensible so had to strike a balance; many good students at Madingley, particularly in the 1970’s, like Tim Clutton-Brock and Richard Wrangham; also some very good research assistants, one of whom was Pril Barrett now wife of Gabriel Horn and she worked with me on play in cats; Nick Humphrey had been a student of LarryWeiskrantz and gone with him to Oxford; applied for a job at Madingley and he was a delightful and stimulating man, doing interesting work; however he felt increasingly that very few people would actually read his papers and wanted to get at a much wider audience; decided to get involved in television and mistakenly, I thought, gave up his job to make films; in the end the films were not very well done and he had a difficult time getting back into the academic world; in a book that Robert Hinde and I edited celebrating twenty-five years since Madingley was established, Nick wrote a wonderful chapter on the social function of intellects, the most cited chapter in the book which started to become a whole new field on brain development

46:38:23 I had been doing a study for the National Trust on the hunting of red deer by hounds; suspect they thought I would do a whitewash but I decided it was to be done properly; reported to the Trust in great secrecy and on the strength of my report they banned such hunting immediately; I became the object of hatred to hunting people and they did their utmost to ruin my reputation; just at that time I was elected to become Biological Secretary of the Royal Society; I enjoyed the role as it enabled me to encourage the Royal Society to be much more positive in getting science across to the public; AaronKlug was President when I joined and in his quiet way did a lot; he is a shy man  who doesn’t relish a public profile, but a wonderful man; his successor, Bob May, was quite different and very good at projecting science; as Biological Secretary I had to sit on all the sectional committees which deal with biological candidates for the Royal Society; was worried about tactical voting and decided to institute a new procedure which made the voting records transparent and encouraged honesty

51:37:07 When Gabriel Horn retired from the headship of the Zoology Department to become head of Sydney Sussex I agreed to take it over; thought it would not be for very long as we had a candidate from the US, Jared Diamond, who everybody wanted; he wanted to come but the pension arrangements are so much worse here and after a long period of indecision he decided not to; the next candidate also failed to come so my period of headship extended; at the same time I was Provost of King’s; the difference between the department and King’s was striking; department meetings were businesslike and efficient; at King’s there would be long discussions which appeared to be reaching a consensus when someone who had been quiet until that point suddenly lobbed in a hand grenade and shattered the consensus and you would have to start again

54:47:04 Noel Annan was Provost when I was an undergraduate and later became a good friend; an important Provost who got the Research Centre going; Edmund Leach, his successor, was also interesting and we had good discussions on the whole business of nature and nurture; towards the end of hisProvostship he was torn about whether he should give up so he appointed a committee of three to give him advice on when he should retire – Bernard Williams, myself and Ross Harrison – three future Provosts; Bernard Williams was totally different in style; very quick and intelligent but could lose patience with people; it was he who persuaded me to take over as Provost

59:45:06 Advice to a young scientist is to enjoy it

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On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

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Related posts:

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I was saddened by the passing of Aaron Klug on November 20, 2018. Below is the finest tribute I read on his life followed by the best interview I ever seen done of him by Alan Macfarlane.

Show captionScience

Sir Aaron Klug obituary

Chemist and biophysicist who won the Nobel prize for developing crystallographic electron microscopy

Georgina Ferry

Mon 26 Nov 2018 08.10 EST

One of the mildest, most broad-minded and most cultured of scientists, Aaron Klug was once seen as a radical too dangerous to be permitted access to the US. The state department’s denial of his visa not only ensured he would make his research career in Britain, but also set the stage for his meeting with the X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin that would define his scientific future.

Klug, who has died aged 92, won a Nobel prize in chemistry for his inventive approach to understanding how some of the key components of the living body assemble into its working parts. He was never a headline-grabber; his understated leadership of two of Britain’s foremost scientific institutions, the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge and the Royal Society, steered the scientific community’s response to major upheavals such as the Human Genome Project (HGP), the BSE crisis and the row over genetically modified food.

As a young South African with a Cambridge PhD, in 1952 Klug was on the point of taking up a post in the US. The South African government told the US authorities that his membership of a youth group meant that he was a communist. Offered the chance to “renounce” communism, he indignantly refused, never having taken it up in the first place. No visa being forthcoming, he returned to the UK.

From 1954, at Birkbeck College in London, he began to collaborate with Franklin on her studies of tobacco mosaic virus. They faced the immense challenge of solving the structure, not of a single molecule, but of the complex assemblies of proteins and nucleic acids that make up virus particles.

Franklin’s exquisite technical skill in producing X-ray diffraction images, combined with Klug’s deep theoretical understanding of matter, eventually enabled them to solve the general outline of the structure just before Franklin’s early death from cancer in 1958. He credited her not only with introducing him to viruses, but with showing him “that you have to tackle long and difficult problems rather than publishing clever papers”.

Klug’s fascination with assemblies of molecules and biological complexes led him to develop a new technique. Such assemblies fall in size between individual molecules that can be explored with X-ray crystallography, and structures that are large enough to see with a light microscope.

Electron microscopy covers this gap, but produces two-dimensional images that do not reveal detailed structural information. During the 1960s, working at the newly founded LMB, Klug showed how electron micrographs taken from different angles could be combined to reconstruct the whole structure in 3D. The inventors of X-ray CT scans later developed them from his methods.

He went on to use the technique to unravel complexes of protein and nucleic acid in viruses and in the chromosomes that carry genetic information. It was this work that brought him his Nobel prize in 1982, as the sole recipient.

In 1986 he was appointed the third head of the LMB, an institution that famously had “a Nobel fellow on every floor”. He was notably supportive of female colleagues, and of researchers with projects that were almost recklessly ambitious.

When the biologist John Sulston began to show that sequencing the whole genome of the nematode worm might be possible, he promoted him to head a new division of genome studies. He later negotiated with the MRC and the Wellcome Trust for Sulston to head the separate Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), which successfully completed not only the worm genome but also one third of the international Human Genome Project.

He went on to use the technique to unravel complexes of protein and nucleic acid in viruses and in the chromosomes that carry genetic information. It was this work that brought him his Nobel prize in 1982, as the sole recipient.

In 1986 he was appointed the third head of the LMB, an institution that famously had “a Nobel fellow on every floor”. He was notably supportive of female colleagues, and of researchers with projects that were almost recklessly ambitious.

When the biologist John Sulston began to show that sequencing the whole genome of the nematode worm might be possible, he promoted him to head a new division of genome studies. He later negotiated with the MRC and the Wellcome Trust for Sulston to head the separate Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), which successfully completed not only the worm genome but also one third of the international Human Genome Project.

Klug was knighted in 1988, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1995. The same year he became president of the Royal Society, the UK’s premier scientific academy. On his watch it produced an authoritative report into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its transmission to humans.

This was the first of several that provided a basis for public discussion and policymaking. Responding to the GM food crisis of the late 90s, another report acknowledged that GM technology could not be deployed without winning the confidence of consumers. Klug recognised the importance of engagement between scientists and the public, and developed the Royal Society’s resources for working with the media.

Klug was born into a Yiddish-speaking family in Zelva, Lithuania, the second of two sons of Lazar, a cattle drover, and his wife, Bella (nee Silin). Lazar occasionally reported for newspapers in Kaunas, then the capital city. When Aaron was two years old and his brother Bennie four, the family migrated to Durban, South Africa, where Bella had relatives. After Bella died in 1932, her sister Rose took her place as the boys’ mother; in due course she married their father and had two more children.

This turbulent start to his life left Klug remarkably unscathed. A voracious reader, he breezed through Durban high school at the top of a class of boys two years older than himself (including his brother). After reading Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, a classic work of popular medicine published in 1926, he decided to study medicine, and entered the University of Witwatersrand on a scholarship at the age of 15. In the same class was Sydney Brenner, also from a Lithuanian Jewish family, also 15, and also a future head of the LMB and Nobel prizewinner.

During his studies Krug’s interests shifted to pure science, and he graduated in physics, chemistry and biology. He followed this with a master’s degree in physics at the University of Cape Town. There his supervisor was Reginald James, who had survived Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1914-16. James was an X-ray crystallographer who had worked alongside one of the subject’s founders, Lawrence Bragg, at the University of Manchester.

Crystallography appealed strongly to Klug’s polymathic instincts, combining physics and chemistry and requiring both mathematical insight and experimental creativity to explore the atomic structure of molecules in three dimensions. It was at Cape Town, as he later recalled in his Nobel biography, that he developed “a strong interest … in the structure of matter, and how it was organised.”

With James’s recommendation, Klug obtained an 1851 scholarship to go to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, now headed by Bragg, for his PhD. He arrived there in 1949 with his new wife, Liebe (nee Bobrow), a dancer and musician. He hoped to join the new MRC unit at the Cavendish, led by Max Perutz, which was exploring the structure of proteins. But Bragg assigned him to work on a theoretical project on how transitions occur in the microstructure of steel when it cools.

What many might have seen as a dead end, Klug approached as an opportunity: he later said that the work had assisted his thinking about the assembly of virus structures. He advised younger scientists to “equip yourself to do a wider range of things than you are actually interested in immediately. You never know what might pay off.”

The Klugs had two sons, Adam and David. As a family they retained a strong connection to their Jewish cultural roots, attending synagogue and observing festivals. They made many visits to Israel, being particularly attached to the city of Be’er-Sheva and Ben Gurion University, where a research centre is named in Klug’s honour.

Liebe and David survive him. Adam died in 2000.

• Aaron Klug, biophysicist, born 11 August 1926; died 20 November 2018

• This article was amended on 27 November 2018. Adam Klug, rather than his brother David, died in 2000.

Interview of Aaron Klug, part one

Aaron Klug interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 11th December 2007

0:09:07 Born in Lithuania in 1926; father’s father was a cattle dealer and had a farm which was unusual for a Jew; father was trained as a saddler but went back to the farm to help his father as a cattle dealer; realized there was not much future in Lithuania and moved to South Africa in 1929; mother’s family had emigrated there in 1900 (her family name wasGevisser) and had established a business in Durban so that is where we went; learnt English early; have an elder brother; father employed in the Gevisser firm as a hide merchant; he had gone ahead to Durban and found a place to live and the family followed; father’s brother later emigrated to Johannesburg; father much concerned with making a good living and had been regarded as clever; he would go to the synagogue and was interested in the Talmud and when he retired he went for weekly study; when I married in England he sent extracts by post; mother died when I was about six of pneumonia; mother’s younger sister had come with us and later married my father; told that one of the older Gevisser cousins had said it was her duty to marry my father and help bring us up; we still continued to call her aunt though later realized she was our mother and changed to mum

8:36:12 Went to a primary school; lived near the bush; Durban had a white population of 100,000, mainly of English origin who thought of England as home; Britain had taken Natal from the Dutch and in 1870 there was a large emigration to Durban; on our first holiday in England we went to Swanage and noticed that the beach huts there had been copied in Durban, so had the post boxes; as a child knew a lot about England so when I came here knew exactly where I was; later moved to Durban High School where the philosophy was that if you were bright you went into the Latin class (Greek had been abandoned as we had to do Afrikaans as a second language); if you were middling you went into the science class, and the rest made do with geography; I was very good at school and always came first and my brother, second; he was in the same class although two years older; I had been pushed up but he was my protector; we did do one science subject; was very good at Latin; also brother and I went to Hebrew classes and I was pretty fluent in Afrikaans; later when I began collecting ancient coins could read the inscriptions; later when one of my sons started doing Latin at school got an interlingua text but found the Latin word order had been changed to fit the English so threw it away in disgust

15:56:08 Thing that mattered most at Durban High School was sport which occupied four afternoons a week; had cadets on the fifth day; brother was a good cricketer; I was not good at sport and later when undergoing an army medical found that I had an optic atrophy in my right eye; brother keen on music and I began to listen to serious music in last few years at school; in primary school I couldn’t sing in tune; my wife is musical so I do listen; she ran the Cambridge University modern dance group at some time and experimented with Stockhausen and electronic music

19:46:13 No particular inspirational teacher at school; was good at all subjects; at one time became seriously interested in Egyptology and tried to teach myself hieroglyphics and learnt a good deal on the origins of the alphabet; at school read a book by Paul de Kruif called ‘Microbe Hunters’ which turns out to have influenced many people; he was a Dutch science writer and in this book he told the stories of Pasteur and Koch; made me think I should become a microbiologist; at fifteen went to university to do medicine (as did Sidney Brenner) as two years ahead of my age group; no medical school in Durban so went to University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; sailed through my first year; stayed in my father’s brother’s house; had won a scholarship so did not have any fees; in my second year started doing anatomy, physiology and physiological chemistry; enjoyed dissection to begin with and found physiology and biochemistry much more interesting so decided I should learn some chemistry and give up medicine; went to see the Dean of Science who agreed that I should do a range of subjects – chemistry, physiology, histology, physics and maths; did a four year course instead of three; got firsts in every subject

25:56:05 No particularly inspiring teachers but a man who gave a popular talk on the Schrödinger wave equation had inspired me to do physics; I had intellectual curiosity and found everything interesting; always read history and have continued to do so; where I got inspired was in Cape Town where they were offering a master’s degree in physics; kept myself by teaching practical classes which gave me enough to live on; lived simply in a room in the old slave quarters; parents sent me money but I returned it as wanted to be independent; the Professor was R.W. James and he was an inspiration, not only because of himself but where he had been; he had gone with Shackleton on his polar expedition and been marooned on Elephant Island; he was recruited byShackleton when just out of Cambridge; was a contemporary of Lawrence Bragg; Shackleton asked him if he could sing as they had to supply their own entertainment; I did apply to the South African Antarctic Survey but they wouldn’t take me as I wore glasses; met my future wife, Liebe, in Cape Town; she was a music student at the University and later went to modern dance school; fell in love and was absorbed in the wider culture of a beautiful old city; Durban was provincial in comparison although it had a good library

31:56:03 James had worked with Bragg and in 1937 emigrated to Cape Town to take the Chair; Bragg moved to Cambridge in 1938 when Rutherford died; it is possible that when I came to Cambridge they wanted me to do crystallography as I’d started in X-ray crystallography in Cape Town as James had done; James represented to me the modern Cambridge position; I did the two year M.Sc. course in one year and actually solved the crystal structure of an organic molecule by a new method using Fourier transforms; on the strength of this James thought I should go to Cambridge; I had toyed with the idea of going to London as the crystal structure I had solved was rather unusual and I had taught myself quantum chemistry so when I came to Cambridge I wanted to do something unusual in X-ray crystallography; had heard of the MRC unit doing work on haemoglobin andmyoglobin; went to see Bragg on arrival who told me the unit was full; don’t believe that was true but one of my predecessors from Cape Town had been a lady, Virginia Martin, who proved to be very clever but hopeless at research; asked Bragg what I should do who said there was an interesting problem in order disorder in silicates; I now find them fascinating but didn’t think so at the time; boat took two weeks from Cape Town and for the first two months in Cambridge still had no supervisor; was at Trinity where my tutor was William Hamilton who was not much help; originally thought I might do a Part II but he thought I knew enough for a PhD; finally taken on by D.R.Hartree, Professor of Mathematical Physics, to work on a problem left over from the war on the cooling of steel; in the end I had learnt a lot of metallurgy and worked out a model of phase transition to account for the dissipation of heat; I modelled this on a computer; never published my PhD thesis; Hartreewas not a good supervisor; he was a train addict, but not inspiring; enjoyed my time going to mathematical lectures and learnt group theory, which later stood me in good stead

40:53:01 Married very young and wife went off to live in London to study at the Joos-Leeder School of Modern Dance; the school had been housed by AliceRoughton in Adams Road, Cambridge, during the war but had moved by the time we arrived in Cambridge; my wife kept herself by teaching in a Secondary Modern school; never worked with Bragg; now realize that he may have thought me odd as I only wanted to do things that interested me; however, when I worked on the assembly of tobacco mosaic virus people were trying to understand how the virus assembled and they mixed protein and the RNA and waited twenty-four hours; I managed to do it in two to three hours using the model of nucleational growth that I had developed for my Ph.D. thesis to understand my experiments on tobacco mosaic virus (description)

46:05:14 Spent a year with F.J.W. Roughton, the husband of Alice; worked with him solving the mathematics required for the problem of the combination of oxygen with haemoglobin where both simultaneous diffusion and chemical reaction occur at the same time; used the mathematics developed for PhD; went back to crystallography in London but continued doing things for Roughton; memory ofRoughton household in Adams Road; saw advertisement for a Nuffield Fellowship at BirkbeckCollege where J.D. Bernal was; he was an amazing man who never carried anything through to completion as always interested in the next problem; went to work on protein crystallography with Harry Carlisle who Bernal had recruited from Dorothy Hodgkin; he was trying to solve a protein by some method that didn’t work and he refused to see it; I was banished but still had my Nuffield Fellowship and I found myself in a room next to Rosalind Franklin; I had been there for four months already but had not met her before; she showed me her pictures of tobacco mosaic virus; she changed my life as she introduced me to an important and difficult problem that would take years; I worked with her from 1955 to 1958 when she died; she had come from King’s College to work on the tobacco mosaic virus, work which Bernal had started in the 1930’s but which was interrupted by the war; as a person she was brisk, to the point, and not at all the person painted in Watson’s book ‘The Double Helix’; she was a rationalist; I got on with her quite well and she treated me as an equal; when she died I took over her three post-graduate assistants including Kenneth  Holmes and John Finch who later moved with me to Cambridge; we managed to get a grant from the United States National Institute for Health as we were the only group working on virus structure; in 1958 after her death I took up the problem of polio virus structure which she had started; through the introduction of a new kind of glass managed to solve polio in 1959; showed Bernal the first X-ray picture of polio virus crystals and he said that the picture was worth £10,000; I had not realized that Bernal had to keep raising money to fund his lab; Rosalind Franklin had been hired to work on coals and carbons not on plant viruses; Bernal’s idea was to raise money from applied research to fund pure research; [shows the model of RNA on the staircase of the MRC unit in Cambridge]

Second part

0:09:07 Bernal was a Communist in those days and I didn’t get on with him; in 1956 when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary there was a meeting of University College, Birkbeck and the Fabian Society; Bernal spoke about knowledge of the purges only since Khrushchev’s speech in June that year; later got to understand him and to realize that he looked with  the long eye of history where revolutions move things on; Rosalind Franklin never complained about not having recognition for the important part she played in Crick and Watson’s discovery; blamed herself for not noticing the two fold axis of symmetry in her photograph; she did not know enough crystallography; when at King’s she had worked out the A and B forms of crystal symmetry of DNA; she knew the B form was helical and said so but the A form eluded her; Watson recognised the relationship between the two forms and they got hold of her report which had been sent to all MRC units and he and Crick used her data; had she lived, she should have shared their Nobel prize but there was also Wilkins; he was shy and he and Franklin would never have got on; he was clever and had chosen DNA as a problem but had no punch to go ahead; Franklin had been brought in by Randall, the Professor at King’s, to put more muscle into the DNA effort; irony was that Wilkins, Stokes and Franklin had all attended Bernal’s courses in Cambridge in the 1930’s in crystallography and had all learnt about space groups; none of them twigged to it except Crick; only came out later when he and Watson wrote their paper in 1954, on their route to the discovery of the double helix

6:55:14 John Griffiths’ part in the DNA saga not relevant but Franklin’s work was the key but she had nobody to talk to; if I had been there a bit earlier I would have seen it; [article: ‘The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix’ amended and signed]; Maurice Wilkins was slow and careful whereas Rosalind was quick and decisive, sometimes brusque, so they would never have got on, it was not because she was a woman; worked at Birkbeck 1954-58 and during that time worked out the overall structure of the tobacco mosaic virus and I also developed analytical methods for turning the X-ray data into a map; wrote papers, one with Crick, on how you do this; after Franklin died her students, Finch and Holmes, came with me to Cambridge in 1962 and continued the work; Holmes went off to be Professor of Crystallography at Heidelberg and John Finch stayed with me; Holmes gradually worked out the three-dimensional structure of tobacco mosaic virue but we had an outline of the structure as early as 1958 which is the model on the stairs [see end of film]

13:03:12 In October 1962 I came to Peterhouse as a teaching fellow; John Kendrew was the Director of Studies and I later succeeded him; at Peterhouse I taught a number of subjects as there were not many teaching fellows including crystallography, microspectroscopy and chemistry, and always taught physics; I was later a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, worked in a biological lab. and taught physics; I enjoyed physics and was quite a good teacher; Ken Holmes had been taught by Fred Hoyle and Abdus Salam but never learnt anything as they would just dash off a problem; I was a good teacher as I had to work my way through it; physics stood me in good stead as before I developed three-dimensional image reconstruction I did various optical experiments which I wouldn’t have done if I had not been teaching optics; I occasionally lectured for the University in place of Perutz; later when I introduced three-dimension electron microscopy I was asked to give some lectures; awarded a Nobel prize in 1982 but went on teaching until about 1984 when Hugh Dacre, the Master, said I should become a supernumerary fellow with no teaching duties; accepted but still continued teaching for a few years until I became more involved with the zinc finger work; in 1986 became head of the lab after becoming President of the Royal Society in 1985

16:34:10 Was President for five years; had turned it down five years before and found that I was the only person to have refused it since Faraday, but I had just started a new division at the Lab and I thought that being head of the MRC Lab was just as prestigious; I introduced a department of neuroscience here which we had not had before; as President of the Royal Society had to deal with a lot of issues such as genetically modified organisms which, by the way, with zinc fingers we can do much better now; this is producing what has been called a game change in plant agriculture; zinc fingers are used to modify genes and you can put genes into a specified place; had to deal with privatization from Mrs Thatcher as she wanted to sell off all our laboratories; also started on global warming; every year in my anniversary address I, like the elder Cato, would bring up the subject; started work here with John Sulston on the human genome; Sydney Brenner and others were going round the world creating the Human Genome Organization; John Sulston started out using any sequencing facilities that there were and made huge progress; Brenner had wanted him to work on the products of the genes, the proteins produced by the genes, and to sequence those, or rather to sequence the RNA which is the intermediate between the DNA; I, in contrast, encouraged Sulston to do the whole genome because there you get not just the products of the genes but, probably equally important, the DNA sequences for binding the regulatory machinery; now, ironically, I am working on zinc fingers which are the most powerful weapon for intervening in gene regulation; after turning down the Presidency I did not think they would ask me again at the age of sixty-nine but Alex Todd had been the same age so there was a precedent; my wife enjoyed the challenge and we opened up the place by having lunches and improving the menu; we had a flat in London and I had thought we’d go to theatres and galleries, but was too busy as it also overlapped with being head of the lab

23:10:20 Started in the Lab in 1962 and had my own group, but did spend time working with Crick on chromatin; we published very few things together; had a very good post-doc., Roger Kornberg, who got a Nobel prize last year, and together investigated the sub-structure of chromatin; he discovered working on the chemical analysis of chromatin samples that the histones which are used for packaging the DNA on their own form aggregates; the psychological breakthrough was that the proteins form a globular aggregate like haemoglobin and here could not be sitting in the grooves of the DNA as people like Wilkins had assumed; Kornberg discovered the nucleosome; I did not put my name on the paper though might have done; got him to see not “beads on a string” but string of DNA on beads; I also started work on tRNA; also started an Alzheimer group which is flourishing as I thought we should be doing something that is relevant to medical research; had not realized that Alzheimer’s disease was specific to certain areas of the brain; realized that it must be caused by a malfunction; work had been in the hands of neurophysiologists and they had been cutting sections of Alzheimer brains; I said we must get the material out as had been done with chromatin; introduced chemical separation methods which we’d used on chromatin, chopping up the material with enzymes etc. so we discovered the filaments; work continues but I moved on to zinc fingers

27:43:04 Max Perutz

was head of the Lab when I came here as a group leader; John Kendrew was the head of one of the divisions in the lab called Protein Crystallography; Hugh Huxley was working on the structure of muscle; I was working on viruses; Perutz and Kendrew were working on single proteins; we worked on biological assemblies using both X-rays and electron microscopy; Hugh Huxley was the best electron microscopist of his time, a mystery why he did not get a Nobel prize for his work on muscle; Max was single-minded and determined; wasn’t very learned but as he went along he learnt; not highly imaginative but solved, over a period of years, the structures of haemoglobin both in the oxygenated form and the deoxygenated form and shown the structural transition between them; John Kendrew was very different; a marvellous staff officer, very well organized with a meticulous filing system using a form of punch card; when I told Max how tobacco mosaic virus assembles [shows figures from Nobel Prize lecture] he didn’t believe it; own work on spherical viruses described; collaboration with Donald Caspar [shows model of a spherical virus]; in 1966 Max gave an interview for ‘Science’ and spoke about all the successes of the lab – Nobel prize for Crick and Watson in 1962, and himself and Kendrew, Sydney Brenner’s work on the messenger RNA, and “Klug’s work is very satisfying” but was “very far fetched”; his gift as Director was to let me get on with my work without believing in it; Crick understood it immediately and I know that he put me up for the Nobel Prize; spherical viruses and Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes

40:06:05 Electron microscopy takes a two-dimensional image; 3D image construction allows you to combine all the 2D views mathematically using a computer and producing and three-dimensional image which is the basis of the X-ray CAT scanner; some thought I should have got a Nobel Prize for this work but Hounsfield patented the machine not the technique; felt a bit sore in 1979 when he got the Nobel Prize because he knew my papers and referred to them and I’d exhibited with him at the Royal Society [shows images of electron micrographs of virus particles and describes use of tilting experiments using computer methods leading on to the method for the CAT scanner]; my paper came out in January 1968 and in August Hounsfield took out a patent for building a machine at EMI; to begin with it produced nonsense as he did not collect enough views for the detail he was looking for; however, in 1982 I got the Nobel Prize on my own for chemistry; earlier tried to interest radiologists to take up computer automated tomography based on image construction techniques but they thought it would be too harmful to take a series of X-ray photographs

51:22:18 Work on zinc fingers; became interested in active chromatin which has become susceptible to enzymes which will attack the “open” DNA which correlated with genes which were going to be activated; began looking for a source of active chromatin in large quantities; found that the gene of ‘Xenopus Leavis’, the South African frog or toad, which was present in large amounts; colleague Hugh Pelham had actually worked on it; decided to work on the 5S RNA genes which in this case gets incorporated into ribosomes which are protein synthesis factories; had a new post-doc, Jonathan Miller, and uncovered by purely biochemical experiments over a number of years that this had a repeating structure [shows diagram and the amino acid sequence that came out]; went on from strength to strength [shows number of zinc finger genes from simple forms to human] a marvellous modular system where each finger has a different amino acid sequence which can recognise a short sequence of DNA; so suggested to me a tool for making synthetic fingers having access to genes; now a big technology; with my colleague Yen Choo who formed a company call Gendaq; MRC hold the patents; in the lab started to make libraries of zinc fingers and began to work out the rules of recognition; Gendaq was bought out by an astute American who created a biotech business called Sangamo which may be successful and make some money; now the method of choice, ‘game-changing’ technology; know I’ve been noted for another Nobel Prize for it; I didn’t set out to be a benefactor of mankind but just out of curiosity which is the driving force; its not only thinking but also doing; we used to make fingers in the lab chemically so I had to learn how to synthesise these things; the first paper on zinc fingers appeared 1985; when I wrote it, I thought it was unlikely to be confined to a lowly gene in a lowly animal; needs not just intelligence but also imaginative powers of the “what if” kind; also need some technical expertise unlike Linus Pauling who often proposed things that were unrealizable as he didn’t have enough technical understanding; the truth is in the detail…

—On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

—

Related posts:

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I was saddened to learn of the passing of Sir John Sulston on March 6, 2018  and I wanted to spend time on several posts concentrating on him. Probably the best video tribute to him I have found is this video below, but the best interview of Dr. Sulston ever done was by Alan Macfarlane and it is below too.

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Interview of Sir John Sulston – part one

Interview of Sir John Sulston – part two

An Interview on the life and work of Sir John Sulston, Nobel Prize winner, who organized the team which sequenced the human genome for the first time. For a higher quality, downloadable, version, with a detailed summary please see http://www.alanmacfarlane.com

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QUOTE from Dr. Sulston:

I see that we have enormous amounts to discover as a strategy for going forward as human beings; I believe atheism makes coherent sense; all the religions are in conflict with each other; they have different stories, based on insubstantial records, but justify them with saying that there was some direct communication with a deity in the past which has led them to this belief; I find those unconvincing, particularly because of the conflict; this was my main argument in discussions with my father and he found it hard to answer that.

John Sulston death: Tributes paid to ‘unsung hero who made modern genetics possible’

Colleagues and experts hail a man who was pioneering in his discoveries – and generous in the ways he allowed people to share them

• • Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin
  • Friday 9 March 2018 17:21

Sir John Sulston, a pioneering geneticist who helped found his discipline, has died aged 75.

Colleagues and admirers praised a man whose pioneering and innovative work wasn’t always recognised for what it was. Sir John wasn’t only remarkable for the work he did, they said, but also the sometimes unacknowledged work he did in making sure that both his and others’ discoveries were shared and made available.

“Sad news that the humble unsung hero of the Human Genome Project who made modern genetics possible has died,” said Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College London.

Sir John headed Britain’s contribution to the first working draft of the human genome, the publication of which marked a milestone in science.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology in 2002, along with two of his former colleagues, for work aiding the understanding of how genes control cell division and cell death in organisms.

Sir John founded the Sanger Institute – then called the Sanger Centre – at Hinxton, near Cambridge, and was director between 1992 to 2000.

It has gone on to become one of the leading centres for genome research in the world.

Professor Sir Mike Stratton, director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “He had a burning and unrelenting commitment to making genome data open to all without restriction and his leadership in this regard is in large part responsible for the free access now enjoyed.

“We all feel the loss today of a great scientific visionary and leader who made historic, landmark contributions to knowledge of the living world, and established a mission and agenda that defines 21st century science.”

Sir John led the 500-strong Sanger Centre team which, as part of the international Human Genome Project, sequenced a third of the human genome – the complex pattern of chemicals that makes up our DNA.

Part of the genome consists of genes which contain all the coded instructions for creating a human being.

Jeremy Farrar, director of biomedical research charity Wellcome, said: “John was a brilliant scientist and a wonderful, kind and principled man.

“His leadership was critical to the establishment of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Human Genome Project, one of the most important scientific endeavours of the past century.”

Sir John was born on March 17 1942 and showed an interest in the workings of organisms from an early age.

He completed his undergraduate degree in organic chemistry at Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge in 1963, and went on to join the department of Chemistry to carry out a PhD.

At the time of his death, he was professor and chairman of the Institute of Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester.

Additional reporting by agencies

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CRAIG VENTER, JOHN SULSTON, FRANCIS COLLINS, HAMILTON SMITH AND JEAN WEISSENBACH

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

In  the second video below in the 61st clip in this series are his words but today I just wanted to pause and look at this life. 

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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Related posts:

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