David King

0:05:07 Born in Durban, South Africa in 1939; I don't know an awful lot about my ancestry except that at one time I had to trace a British grandfather or great-grandfather through whom I could claim British heritage; there was a period after South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth when you were allowed to apply for British citizenship without going through all the formalities, if you could show that you had British parentage; it had to be through a father's line with legitimate marriages; I did get back to my great-grandfather who was born in Wimbledon; he then travelled out to South Africa; on my grandmother's side, the parentage was equally from Britain, but further back and from Cambridgeshire; I knew my grandfather; he died when I was eight and I wouldn't say he was a major influence; he was a very Victorian figure; his wife I remember with interest, used to taste every bit of food which was on his plate before he would eat any of it; she was a wonderful grandmother figure who told us stories and was utterly charming; they had a lovely old house in Durban, 308 Florida Road; it was very much a colonial house; it had a corrugated iron roof and had a balcony all round - a single-storied house with plenty of well-shaded balcony; there were very large trees, including avocado; it was a great place to visit when we were young; my father moved from Durban up to Pretoria when I was three, where he got a job in a glass bottle factory; he was an accountant; when I was five or six he moved to Johannesburg so that is where I was brought up; my grandfather in Durban was a shopkeeper, and it was clearly a shop for the well-to-do; from what I can gather he sold both clothes and cloth; my father was an extraordinarily powerful influence on my life in a very directed way; I am not only saying that he checked my school reports, and his expectations were very high - I have an older brother and the two of us went through this together - but he was also very keen to establish us as good citizens; we were each sent out to work in holidays and I also worked on Saturdays, from the age of about thirteen; we would have a two or at most three week family holiday but otherwise we would work; my father's job in Johannesburg was with a paint firm; he had become company secretary and the idea in the back of his mind, I am sure, was that his two sons would take over the company; if each of us was going to become a manager in the company, he wanted us to have first-hand knowledge of every inch of it; I worked on the factory floor, carrying bags of pigment, along with black workers; I arrived at work at 5.30 am and got off at 4 pm; I can look back on it as an extraordinary life, but at the time I thought that every other kid did the same sort of thing; I went into the accounts division, filling in the accounts by hand; those were the days when there was a paint shop, in a beautiful building, in the middle of Johannesburg; my father was on the first floor and each transaction would come whistling up to his office in a vacuum tube on a wire, so one of my jobs was pulling these things down and recording the numbers; I went through the paint factory, the accounts, the sales, and I also went into the laboratory; my father had no ambition for us to stop off in any one of these, but rather to experience things so that by the time we were nineteen or twenty he felt he could have us promoted through the company, and we would know the business from the ground up; it was a wonderful idea, and he was very much the Victorian father, "spare the rod and spoil the child"; we did get physically punished if things didn't go well; at the time I didn't think this particularly strange except that my brother and I did not develop many friendships because this was quite all-enveloping; my father's loyalty to the company was total and that was inculcated into us; I had no question in my mind about what I would do; my father, it turned out, was watching each of us; my older brother was called in at seventeen and asked which bit of the company he had enjoyed most; he said accountancy so he was sent off to do a Bachelor of Commerce; when I was asked I said the laboratory; what had happened was that the laboratory was in Durban and as a fifteen-sixteen year old I had gone there; the head of the research laboratory was a Dane who was divorced, and he took me out on the town every night; I had the most wonderful time, staying in a hotel, and being introduced to the adult world; my father was thrilled by my choice; I had been thoroughly bored by accounts, quite enjoyed the factory floor, didn't enjoy sales, but I came back from the laboratory saying it was marvellous; he said he would send me to university to do a paint chemistry degree; I had a close friend with whom I used to play tennis, Baxter Pierce, who had an enormous influence on my life; he said I should not do paint chemistry as it was limiting, but should tell my father that I should do chemistry; and that is what I did; that story would seem to indicate that it was a pretty random choice, but that is not quite true as I enjoyed the work in the paint laboratory as well; by background and schooling, I think it is fair to say that my inclinations were towards English and history rather than the sciences, I enjoyed biology rather than the physical sciences, so it is a bit ironic that I have ended up as a physical scientist; I think I used to irritate the teachers, whether in religion or other subjects, by going for the jugular; all I was doing was trying to find out what they meant but I did ask rather awkward questions; this questioning led to an advisor suggesting I should go into law; I think what I see is the development of a highly rational person who is always breaking things down into their rational components; I do have a memory that is jogged by a little photograph of me playing with guinea pigs when I was two and a half to four, so an age before I had moved from Pretoria; I was reprimanded by a horrified mother who found me with a guinea pig that had been totally dismembered; I had taken a sharp knife from the kitchen and taken it apart; my excuse to her was that I was just trying to find out how it worked; my second excuse was that I believed it was dead before I started

13:11:08 My mother was a rather insecure person; imagine the situation in South Africa - we had servants, a gardener, cook, cleaner, and they lived outside the main house in small rooms in the back yard; my mother spent most of her time telling the servants what to do rather than doing it; she couldn't cook, she did play a lot of tennis and later, bowls, and then she became chairperson of an old-age home and she put a lot of time and effort into that; I think it fair to say that my memories of her were of anger and control without any sense of direction, whereas my father clearly had a plan for us; I do think that a big part of his plan was good citizenship; I got married before I left South Africa as I was being made to leave by the Government; I had a girlfriend and we got married, mainly because her parents were keen that we did so before leaving; her parents knew though my parents didn't, that we couldn't come back; because neither of us was religious we were not going to get married in a church, and my mother said that they would not recognise it, and would not come to the wedding; instead of getting married in Johannesburg we married in Cape Town to avoid the embarrassment of my parents not being there; then my parents came down, through my father's insistence, to say goodbye; we went to the registry office, got married, and got on the boat, and had a wedding party without my parents acknowledging it; my father, without my mother seeing, gave me a cheque as a wedding present and told me not to mention it to my mother; so there was this rather strange relationship between them; my father was a figure that I respected enormously, and my mother was a very shrill person, and very difficult to deal with; as you will see, I was kicked out because of my attitude to apartheid; my mother was a supreme example of the defender of apartheid, my father had a much more subtle view of life

16:33:19 I remember my first school with utter clarity; we lived in a suburb called Parkview and I went to Parkview primary school which was a fifteen minute walk from home; the incident I remember was just walking to school feeling utterly terrified; it was a perfectly good school but my father felt that the school wasn't adequate for us; we were taken out and put into St John's Preparatory School, a private school in Johannesburg, and we went from there to St John's College; the latter was the most spectacular school building you could imagine, on a ridge in the middle of Johannesburg next to a big park; it was a very privileged existence; it was and probably still is one of the top four schools in South Africa; I was a day boy there; my memories of preparatory school were the close, long-term friendships developed there; I had a series of illnesses, starting with polio in the 1948 epidemic in South Africa; that must have hit my immune system because I then had scarlet fever, meningitis, and encephalitis in 1952, so one after the other; I was in and out of hospital so had a very interrupted period of schooling; from the move into the senior school the illnesses stopped; from that point it was decided that because of the illnesses I should be taken out of sport; I think that almost damaged my life at school after that, because if you were not playing sport it was quite difficult; I did play sport in my last three years at school and thoroughly enjoyed it; I played first team hockey; my parents were keen I did not play rugby, but that was the only real sport in South Africa; what happened as a result of not playing sport - Saturday afternoons at school were that all watched the rugby teams and there was a roll call to see that everyone was there - because I was not doing sport and had an interest in oil painting my parents agreed that I should apply not to go to the matches; this was a disaster from a social point of view; I was taught art by an English woman, oil painting of a demanding standard, and I thoroughly enjoyed it; in terms of the sciences we had a biology teacher who influenced me, but not quite as he intended; he was a good teacher but expecting us to return what he gave us by rote; what happened with my challenging behaviour was that it got to the point where my challenging of biology affected my attitude to religion; he was saying that there were molecules that had a life force and I was keen that he should explain to me what made these molecules different; it was very clear from his response that he felt I was going beyond what a school kid should be asking; so he had challenged me to think about this in a way he had not expected; that was quite a big moment; we used to dissect animals which I thoroughly enjoyed; in the laboratory, chemical experiments didn't interest me as much, but I did have my own little laboratory in an outhouse at home; remembering that this was Johannesburg, and gold and diamonds were around us, I had been taught that diamonds were actually made of carbon and decided that I would make some; I set about imbedding chunks of carbon into lead, melting the lead and quenching it very rapidly, cutting up the lead expecting to find diamonds; it turns out that the pressure wasn't quite high enough; the closest I got to an experiment was to have an idea and then see if I could carry it through, but the business of making fireworks etc. didn't appeal to me

24:47:04 When I was at university I was still painting, but at this point I started thinking about my future career; when I graduated, I just spent the next month thinking; my father expected me to go into the company; I had a professor of physical chemistry who thought I was good and wanted me to do a PhD; by this time I was becoming politically interested; I thought that either I was going into art, (I was also interested in photography), and that will be my career or I can do science and keep the art going; it turns out that is a mistake in the sense that I got less and less satisfied with the art I was doing because I just didn't give it enough time; with art you have got to feel you are doing something worthwhile; I switched my interest from painting directly to art more generally; I have been chairman of a couple of art galleries, including Kettle's Yard; I also purchase the work of living artists

26:56:13 Music for me was of a very popular level; the family background was not classical music so the music I acquired was what every youngster was treating as popular music at that time; although I didn't really like Elvis Presley, that was the sort of music I listened to; music was always rather peripheral to my life and activities; when I finished my undergraduate course there was a great welling up of interest in the world, in philosophy, and so on; I decided to do the PhD, but spent a lot of hours in the library reading the most esoteric books; I didn't have any guidance; I read Schopenhauer, I never took to Nietzsche, Feuerbach, to Sartre, then tried to work back through a bit of Heidegger and back to Husserl; I suppose Sartre was what really fascinated me at that time; I started writing letters to the newspapers while a PhD student; I had gone to university at seventeen, graduated at twenty-one, and went straight into my PhD

29:28:04 What was very apparent to me from quite an early age was the contrast between the way my mother, in particular, talked to anyone of black skin, and my own understanding of their intellectual abilities; the two just didn't match up; she treated them like children, or worse; you sit in the paint factory and get a ten minute break for tea and most people just drink and chat; there was one chap who would sit down with the day's crossword puzzle and would finish it in the ten minute break; I just thought that I couldn't possibly do that; in the paint factory there was an enormous store of pigments, titanium dioxide, all powders that had to be used to make up the paints on one side, and all the varnishes, solvents, etc. on the other; there was one man who knew where everything was, there was no catalogue at all; it was all coded so someone would come and ask for something by its code, and he would direct them exactly to where it was; I was told that he was the catalogue; the system depended on these black people; I did get talking to them, and would sit down and hear their stories; the chap who ran the paint factory had five wives and was paid quite well for somebody living in undignified circumstances; he told me that he saved money for cows and as soon as he had enough he would buy another wife; it was getting into the idea that these people have lives, customs and mores; the man who had the greatest influence on me was our chef; one of my father's punishments at the table was to send you out to eat in the kitchen and I would sit there talking to the chef; he started telling me the history of his people; he had been illiterate until twelve or thirteen which meant he had this stunning oral tradition memory - he was Zulu; the stories were utterly fascinating, and I actually used to look forward to the moment I was sent to the kitchen; he also challenged me, this white kid who was brought up with the silver spoon; he would say that the Queen of England was going to live for a very long time but that no kings of England had done so; I asked him why, and he said that the kings were given poison so that they didn't live long, because the men around him could control the queen but not the king; another major influence was both political and religious; I had been very interested in religion, used to serve in the local church which was high Anglican; both my parents were believers, and St John’s College was also high Anglican; I would help the priest with the incense, wine and bread, wearing my little red cassock; I even did think for a while of going into the priesthood; partly because of the hypocrisy that I began to see around me - of people treating black people in a dreadful way, but then appearing to be very religious - and partly because of my own pigheadedness - that I didn't quite get the idea of 'First Cause'- I became very dissatisfied with religion; at university I joined the Rationalist Society; the man who was President of it was Professor Eddie Roux, Professor of Botany; Eddie had been a member of the Communist Party and was a complete thorn in the side of the apartheid regime; he was an Afrikaner, one of them, and yet he had joined the Communist Party, although he left it at the beginning of the Stalin pogroms because he received orders from Russia about who should be eliminated from the South African Communist Party; Eddie wrote a book called 'Time Longer than Rope' which was an indictment about the apartheid system - the title referred to a slave song which said never mind the masters, we will win in the end; Eddie was a very big influence, not by direct conversation always, but just by being there; he was somebody whose views were rather close to the way mine were developing, and he was real, not just a book in the library; I became Chairman of the Rationalist Society; I wrote my first published paper in that time on the religion and ethics of Albert Schweitzer; I had been interested in Schweitzer, the great so-called Christian missionary - I found that he had been forbidden from preaching because of his atheistic views; I was fascinated by the notion that nevertheless he had gone out as a missionary to Africa, and everyone regarded him as such; that piece of work formed the basis of a talk I gave at university; around this time was my entire political and philosophical awakening, the exciting time of my PhD, which was terminated quite quickly; two years into my PhD I was a regular writer of letters to the newspapers; the editor of one of them, Lawrence Gandar, had actually called me up in the laboratory on one occasion encouraging me to write; I was stimulated by the national press printing my thoughts, and was rather excited by it; I had also been reading a fair bit of Bertrand Russell who was quite a big figure at that point; suddenly I was called in by the Special Branch and interviewed on the seventh floor of the Grays building in Johannesburg; it was a terrifying experience; at this point one had to paint in a picture of a country that was democratic (although only whites could vote), had a free press, and had all the trappings of freedom and democracy; at the same time, with Mandela on the loose, so the African National Congress being banned, Mandela goes underground, sets up Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed resistance movement is formed - a group of my friends involved in that, so a white group; around the streets of Johannesburg we began to see these armed vehicles full of armed soldiers, so suddenly the trappings of a police state were beginning to emerge; I was writing these letters to the papers thinking I was living in a liberal democracy; the shutters came down on that; I was called in by Special Branch, in my laboratory, picked up the phone, and this chap just said they wanted to interview me tomorrow at 3pm; I knew from the address that it was the Grays Building where Special Branch were based; at this time it was well known that people "jumped" out of the seventh floor window; I was interviewed with the window behind me wide open, with a clunky old tape recorder on the desk and a very threatening attitude from the chap in front of me; I went into the interview having said goodbye to my girlfriend, having had a haircut; I knew from several friends who had gone for interviews, people who had been involved with the armed resistance, that sometimes you didn't come out in a short period of time; the interview was fairly straightforward; they had a book, with copies of every single letter I had published pasted in it; somebody had gone through it underlining phrases which were read out to me; the sum was that I was accused of being a communist and at this point because of the breakdown in the Treason Trial the Minister of Justice was allowed through an Act of Parliament to decide for himself who was a communist; ninety day detention had come in and had turned out to be a repeat process where people were allowed out, then rearrested; I was given the option to leave the country and I said that I planned to do a post doc in England; they agreed that was the best option; I was told I should not stay longer than three months to finish my PhD; I was told not to divulge anything about the conversation; I handed my thesis in three months later and had booked my passage from Cape Town; it surprised my PhD supervisor, but he accepted it and I suspect he knew a little bit about what lay behind it, so I was examined in absentia

44:16:00 My attitude towards religion is so close to my attitude to politics I can't unscramble it; I am a Richard Dawkins fan - he writes beautifully, and 'The Selfish Gene' is just marvellous - but I don't like his attitude towards atheism; I am too respectful of people of religion to take that approach, but at the same time I think that religion creates so many problems for our societies, so that is where I come into politics; the situation I saw in South Africa was people from the Dutch Reform Church who were able to take the view that it was all biblically determined, that black people were second-class citizens; on the other hand, at school, I did have an influential man, a priest, who took us in our final year into Sophia Town, the black township in Johannesburg, where we could witness at first hand what otherwise none of us had ever seen; we lived in white areas where the only black people were servants, and had never seen black families living in deprivation; I saw both sides of what religion was doing; the divisions between religions have left me very cold towards Christianity and Islam in particular; it was a big revelation for me much later, on going to Japan, to see a very different approach towards religion; people can happily go into a Shinto shrine for an appropriate occasion or a Buddhist temple, and then turn up in church for Christmas; it is a broad acceptance of what religion has to offer which we don't have in Europe and America, and, I fear, in much of the Middle East; my approach to religion is almost a practical one about how do we, humanity, get on with each other; as Master of Downing, before I was elected I did say that I had no difficulty in attending or speaking at functions in Chapel, but I had no intention of saying grace; one piece that I left out from my childhood was that my father also decided we should be properly bilingual, which meant English and Afrikaans; my brother and I were sent separately to live with Afrikaans families, so in addition to going into the paint business we also found two weeks at a time to spend on an Afrikaans farm; there I not only got to speak Afrikaans rather fluently but also saw the other side of the white divide, and experienced this amazing doctrinaire attitude towards race; my friends were brought up with the friends of the chef, who were playing together until they were five years old, and then they were not allowed to play with each other any more; the grace at table was a rant about the separation of the races, and I am sure it was intended for my benefit; politics and religion in South Africa were so closely linked in, which I suppose is why I still link the two together

50:46:18 Came to England to do a post doc at Imperial College; I managed to have time to apply for a post doctoral fellowship immediately after my interview with Special Branch; I had already got an application in for a Shell Fellowship, and at this point it was the great fellowship to get in South Africa to come to Britain; I was interviewed and won the fellowship so arrived on my feet; I could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, or Imperial College; I knew the Professor of Physical Chemistry at Imperial because he had lectured in Johannesburg and was very close to my own field of study, so I went there; I arrived in England in September 1963 and it was a brilliant sunny day; all of the South Africans on the boat had expected terrible weather; I was greeted at Southampton most curiously by a customs officer who looked at my exit papers, welcomed me to Britain and said he thought South Africa had a wonderful Prime Minister; at that point on the boat we had all our belongings, so there was a massive pile of baggage to get up to London; London itself was just the most exciting place for me to be; first of all there was this great weight off my shoulders; I was no longer feeling that I could be put away at any moment - I was really in a pretty paranoid state by the time I left; then I had to look for a flat and was simply astounded to see advertisements for flats in coffee bars etc. stating that no blacks or Irish need apply; I found that pretty shocking; London, for a young man emerging from South Africa at this time, was the swinging place to be - Beatles, short skirts, and London was the real focus of this new age; I got back to painting and took life classes; I dived into my work at Imperial College, and I read philosophy avidly, so it was a wonderful period; we toured around Europe and did the South African thing, visiting every country to tick it off, but my tour of Europe was a tour of art galleries; if you can imagine a young man who loved art but had never seen an original Van Gogh, then to see the three dimensionality, I was spellbound; all of his work was then housed in the Kroller-Muller Museum, some miles outside Amsterdam; the current Van Gogh museum is stunning, but I still love that museum because that is where I first saw his original work; I literally went round Europe from one art gallery to the next with this great sense of wonderment and excitement

56:10:11 My post doc was in a sense a continuation of what I was doing in Johannesburg; my PhD thesis was on catalysis - ammonia synthesis reaction - a very important reaction, fixation of nitrogen was very important for fertilizers to feed the world, and ever since 1917 no improvement had been produced in the industrial catalyst, and I have to say even today; so despite all my 45 years later the same catalyst is still the best, but our understanding of how catalysts work has been totally transformed over that period; we were simply throwing different materials into the reactor and trying them out; I say that, but I was always driven by the need to understand how these catalysts worked, and so the rest of my research has been around understanding how solid surfaces can cause molecules to react together with each other to produce different products; the Japanese word for catalyst is 'shokubai', which means marriage broker - it brings molecules together, gets them to react, and produces infant products; I started from the difficult end, just trying to make better catalysts for ammonia synthesis; I then arrived in London and suggested to my supervisor that we had to try to improve the apparatus, the instruments, to match the process; we designed a new instrument and started measuring things a lot more accurately, and the rest of my life has been around measuring things more accurately, then developing theories taken from the best available state of quantum theory, to see if we could calculate these properties accurately; I have gone from the extraordinarily difficult to every atom and molecule being understood, what their functions were, and being in control, then back to the more complicated and maintaining that high level of understanding; the post doc was with F.C. Tompkins; I was the only one who was allowed to use his first name, the only one who was invited to his place for dinner, and we used to talk politics and philosophy, and it was tremendous; he was a very shy man and one of the world's leaders in the field; he taught me an awful lot, it was such a steep learning curve from where I was when I arrived; from then on I have been independently driven by that period at Imperial College, and subsequently, three years latter I had a sabbatical period at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington which was my next big step forward

Second Part

0:05:07 At the National Bureau of Standards I was working as a visiting expert in the surface science laboratory; I was working with two, equally young, keen scientists, John Yates and Ted Madey; at that time it became a meeting place for four or five of us who were the young turks in the field, each of us feeling we were opening up the field in a totally new direction; taking a study which had always been macroscopic - we knew what the temperature was, the product reaction rate was, what the catalyst was in terms of its solid properties, but we had no atomic or electronic understanding of what was happening; what we were developing was a new methodology which was quite challenging because surfaces form a very tiny proportion of a given piece of matter; we were not going to work with very high surface area materials where the proportion of the matter which is surface is much greater, but with pieces of material which look rather like a one penny coin, so we had a very tiny number of atoms to work on; defining these atoms with atomic resolution was going to be a challenge; crystallography had been developed through the development of X-ray techniques; X-rays go right through the solid, that is their great beauty, and they give you the average structure of the solid, but by that definition they are of absolutely no use for the surface; we had to use techniques based around electrons that would be reflected back by the solid, involving photons, electrons, helium beams, then taking old techniques - infrared spectroscopy was one of them - and developing them in new ways; we became a rather obstreperous group of young people, forming a "surface science for lunch bunch"; would go through the paper of somebody who was still living in the macroscopic world and pull it to bits, then we would invite them over to give a talk and then tear them apart; it was unpleasant in a way, but what it taught me was that the business of challenge was central to good science; we all had the same rather aggressive approach to challenge; I can now look back on that as a massive springboard in the development of surface science; it was not as if we were the only ones doing it, but there were three or four people who really were responsible for developing modern surface science and that springboard was a big part of that; I think a combination of steely resolve with a gentle manner has been useful in my role as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, but I matured into this; as a young man in America I was quite an aggressive young man

5:32:23 I was at Imperial College for three years, then went to the University of East Anglia to my first teaching post as a lecturer in chemical physics; it was a new university with a new bunch of people; at the end of the first year the head of physical chemistry, Norman Shepherd, called me in and told me that the lowest marks in the chemistry exam were for my course on thermo-dynamics; he suggested that I looked at how I taught the subject; this was a big awakening for me, and critically important was the realization that I had to stand as if I were the student rather than just broadcasting; I spent two months preparing my thermo-dynamics course, I re-evaluated the whole business of teaching the subject which is a very mathematical and abstract part of a physics or chemistry course, but it can be made much less abstract by dwelling on concepts; I began to develop a new mode of teaching thermo-dynamics which was to capture interest around concepts and then develop the mathematics behind it; this sometimes horrified my colleagues; one of my essays which I set was to give them a cartoon from the 'New Yorker' of a man running up a steep slope followed by a boulder that was rolling up the slope after him; my essay simply said 'Discuss'; the notion of energy conservation, the second law of thermo-dynamics and entropy, all of that was bound into this cartoon; for these young people this was fascinating; entropy was often seen to be the ultimate in the abstract concept and I had to explain to them that I thought energy was a much more difficult idea than entropy; that was a way that I could capture their interest; the reason I am emphasising this is that it was a very important step in my eventually becoming Chief Scientific Advisor, it was the ability to explain and capture the interest of people; I do think I hadn't even got close to that when I arrived at the University of East Anglia; eight years later I think I had honed that into something that was really worthwhile; I thoroughly enjoyed teaching; the privilege of being a teacher-researcher in a university, interacting with these bright young people, is what has made my life so pleasant, and still is; I came to Cambridge quite late as Head of Physical Chemistry so did not do much supervision at all; both at the Universities of East Anglia and at Liverpool my teaching was done in groups of 10-12 students; I enjoyed this, though interestingly not so much in the practical laboratories which was a bit of a chore, but I enjoyed the discussions extending concepts from the bench to the real world; the teaching of thermo-dynamics, spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, all of these things were a big learning process for me; what I thought I understood when I was an undergraduate I realised as I moved on had been a very superficial grasp of how it all worked; by the time I got into Government I think I had developed this into an overall view of science; I realized that although I had trained as a chemical physicist I could use these concepts and apply them to virtually any aspect of science; I was interested in the philosophy of science and this drew me into the history of science rather than the other way round; the philosophy also led me to the limitations of science; this doesn't take me into religion but rather into the world of existentialism, closer to Buddhism rather than any other form

11:55:01 I was awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of London, and the Orator did say that I was one of three people who had been attributed with developing modern surface science, the others were Ertl and Somorjai, of whom only Ertl got the Nobel Prize; this did relate back to the work I described earlier, even beginning with my PhD work in South Africa, and not being happy with that rather macroscopic view of the world; the analogy is easy to make with biology and molecular biology, so this was taking catalysis from that rough description into an atomic view of what was happening; I used that as a model for developing modern surface science; the three of us Gabor Somorjai, Gerhard Ertl and I - who are still close friends and nothing will change that - have interacted with each other over a period of many decades; the field has undergone a massive transformation to the point where in the laboratory here in Cambridge today I have just been looking at the latest study of water molecules on a metal surface; we have managed to pinpoint where all the oxygen and hydrogen atoms are in quite a complex structure; I am excited about this because water molecules have evaded our ability to work on them until just the last couple of years, the culmination being this wonderful revelation this morning; water molecules are very difficult because we had to use electrons so that we got surface activity, but electrons were breaking the molecules down before we could determine their structure; we had to develop a piece of equipment that was about a million times more sensitive than previously, and this is our first result; that little description is just one step in what we have been doing all this time; continually refining techniques and then managing to work at the limits of sensitivity; part of it has been the excitement of imaging and manipulating individual atoms; that in itself, people writing words with atoms, signifies the amazing transformation; we are unique here in Cambridge in pulling together the development of new instruments and the development of new theories, so both state of the art together - quantum theory and the development of new instruments, each pushing the other; the state of the quantum theory is so good that sometimes I am not sure which is more accurate, the experiment or the theory; therefore the whole object of the game is to try and develop ways of using surfaces in the computer and then taking that knowledge back into the laboratory and making something work; for example, a car exhaust system is a dreadful, poisonous piece of apparatus, emitting carbon monoxide and NOx gases - suicides could just attach a hose pipe and put it in the car to kill themselves - and we were filling the air with that, with cities like Los Angeles disappearing under a haze of automobile exhausts; what is in the back of a modern car exhaust is a catalytic system which converts these noxious gases into harmless ones; we have been working at improving this, using fundamental knowledge rather than just random trials; there is the story of the Nobel Prize which is very recent and quite raw

17:35:16 The idea forty years ago that we would be able to image every single atom on a surface would have been a total dream; you would have been thought mad at thinking it could ever be achieved; just to get some average properties of these surface atoms was a dream, but to pick them out individually and then actually measure their properties one at a time - this is the equivalent of better instrumentation in astronomy; if I was to give advice to a young scientist I would categorise it in two different ways; one is how do you optimise your own ability to develop your talents - a general piece of advice which would apply in many spheres - you need to follow your own interests but at the same time attach yourself to a master, become an apprentice; that is critically important because you can be utterly brilliant, and may well eventually become a great scientist, but the short-cut is an apprenticeship; my attitude towards a PhD studentship is that it is a period of apprenticeship; I never would abandon a PhD student in the corner of a lab to sort out the PhD all by themselves; it is critically important to surround them with an intellectual environment which is continually challenging; the second part of my advice would be to ask what would be the best areas to get into today; I am fairly clear about this in the sense that you could choose to go into particle physics if you are mathematically minded, go to CERN and hopefully afterwards there would be a further stage with an even bigger accelerator; I suspect you might discover that humanity is getting less and less interested in going further and further back in time; we have now got to a sub-microsecond after the big bang, there is no stopping that, going from a millionth to a billionth of a second; I think we know enough about that, especially given the enormous cost in terms of talented people and the cost of building the equipment; I would rather suggest looking at what is challenging humanity today; we have a completely new set of challenges all arising from the fact that by mid-century there will be nine billion people on this planet, we will have run out of a whole lot of resources that we all take for granted at the moment, and the nine billion will have to manage with a more restricted set of resources; then there are other resources that we are totally mismanaging, in particular, the atmosphere and the ocean, but also land; there I am setting out a set of challenges - were you interested in the life sciences, physical sciences, engineering - I am suggesting your talents can be best made use of by moving into one of these very demanding areas; if you are an economist, how do you move into a new design or attitude towards economics where we look at sustainability as the most important thing rather than GDP growth which is what we have had for many years; if we look at physics or engineering, what do we use as alternatives to energy sources from fossil fuels; we have nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal energy, but how do we mine those forms of energy efficiently for all of our uses; if we look at the question of mobility, how do we get around; each of these problems may sound very practical but each one has a fundamental edge to it so you can tackle these at any level; those are my two approaches to advice

24:11:09 I suspect the common trait of the scientist is obsessiveness; we scientists may even have a tendency towards Asperger's Syndrome, where we can really focus on problems; give me a problem that I have yet to solve and it is in my mind constantly; I may appear to be having a meal with a group of friends but in the back of my mind it is still there; I think obsessiveness is vital; I don't actually know what happens when I am obsessed with a problem, it is not as if I feel that I am totally focussed on it; I am aware of it, there is a sense of tension and frustration, but what does emerge is what is best described as a Eureka moment because there is a point of clarity with which it all seems to fall into place; when I was younger that used to come as a complete surprise, now it doesn't happen so instantaneously, I can see it all emerging more slowly; my greatest Eureka moment was sitting with some stunning results, that means unexpected and requiring a new explanation; with PhD student Alison Crossley, who is now based in Oxford, (this was in Liverpool in 1975) - we had been sitting all day until ten in the evening trying to sort it out, and at four in the morning I woke and there it was; I had to get up and write it down; then I couldn't just sit there because I wanted to go and tell her, but the decent thing was to wait for a decent hour; I jumped in my car and drove into town at quite a speed, and was stopped by a policeman and fined; I was so elated I didn't mind one little bit; for most of us it is not that you are consciously trying to think on a problem all the time but you can't let it go

28:14:24 In October 2000 I became the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government; I had been offered the job that July when I was Master of Downing College and Head of Chemistry at Cambridge; it didn't seem possible and I wasn't sure it was desirable; looking at a job in Government was a total black box to me; I had been completely engrossed by my work in Cambridge, running a research group of twenty-five people, and I had avoided taking any jobs in government or research councils; I had no preparation for this apart from my anti-government experience in South Africa; when I came to this country, for a period I worked for the Association of University Teachers, and when I was Professor at Liverpool I became President of the same association; I had that sort of political inclination, and that created the interest because I was head-hunted for the post; I accepted and started part-time on 1st October, and relinquished all my work except for research, including chairmanship of Kettle's Yard, from January 2001 when I took the role full-time; my major objective was to try to get governments moving on the issue of climate change; what I immediately did was to set about a study of energy research in the United Kingdom; there was this fascinating discovery that here we were about to go into a period when we needed to find alternative forms of energy other than fossil fuel based, and yet our report showed that energy research had totally collapsed; we had the biggest energy research laboratory in Europe which was the Central Electricity Generating Board Research Laboratory, and the Gas Board also had a research laboratory; when electricity and gas were privatized the casualty that had hardly been picked up was that all of the utilities that were formed immediately shut down the research laboratories they had inherited, the capability of research in Britain had more or less halted; just when we were getting this underway we had the foot and mouth disease epidemic which began on 23rd February 2001; I got involved in early March, reading the newspapers and thinking this was what the Scientific Adviser's job was about; it was all being handled within the then Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries and they had their own scientist, the Chief Veterinary Officer, and I thought I should leave them to operate on their own; but as I watched this epidemic take off around the country and saw that it was just growing exponentially I thought I should take an active interest; John Krebs, now Lord Krebs, and I got together a team of people who were partly Government people and partly external professors, and we just discussed what was happening and decided that what we needed to do was to model it; my interest in molecules on solid surfaces had taken me to one piece of work on how molecules move on solid surfaces; this rather elaborate model which we had published in the 1980s I now realized was rather like a virus moving round farms; farms are two dimensional like surfaces; quaintly, on average, the British farm has got five nearest neighbours, and we were able to set up models, both all farm, all animal, models in the computer - this was done by a Cambridge group - and a simple model which was based on the sort of algebra I had been developing which was based on how many near neighbours there were to a given site on a surface, or farmland on a map developed by a group at Imperial College; the two models gave much the same result so we were able to have a theoretical description of this epidemic in its early stages; we then therefore knew what the rate of infectivity was going from infected farm to the neighbouring farms; from that analysis we very quickly realized that this epidemic was completely different from the 1967-8 epidemic; that epidemic had been mainly driven by wind-borne disease and was driven by pigs, which yield from both ends a very large cloud of aerosol which carries the virus, so the direction of the wind was critical; in the 2001 epidemic it must have been animals virtually touching across fences because it was spreading locally, one farm to the next; I realized what the Ministry had done was to simply take the lessons learned from the earlier epidemic and apply them, and they were not actually relevant; the other thing we learned was that the epidemic instead of just growing by wind direction would suddenly pop up all over the country; that turned out to be non-random; in essence, animals were born on one farm, and sent to be fattened on another farm in another part of the country; this had not happened in 1967-8; farming has become much more honed, so farmers are optimizing the development of their animals and preparing them for market; all of our modelling revealed these surprises, and we now had a computer program in which we could try different strategies to bring this thing to an end; on March 22nd I went in to see the Prime Minister - this was my first meeting with Tony Blair - and told him about the nature of the epidemic, and that we could switch it off in two days if he followed the procedure used in our models; this was that as soon as a farm was infected, send in a vet and if he confirmed the likely cause, before waiting for a confirmation by blood test, the animals should be slaughtered; the reason for immediate action was that a blood test result would take six days; however, if the blood test was positive, all the immediate neighbouring farms should have their animals slaughtered as by that time a number of the animals would already be infected; if we do this, then we can virtually stop the spread of the disease; the Prime Minister was quite pleased; he called a meeting of COBRA where all Departments were represented; he appointed me to hold a science meeting every day and to report to him morning and evening; we fortunately had the sense to have an army expert do the logistical model for us and I was able to tell the Prime Minister that there were forty-five new infected farms reported across England and Wales, and in nine days time if they carried on with the old method there would be ninety infected farms; the army had said they only had capacity to deal with sixty farms, so we needed to start immediately; the next day I was sent out by the Prime Minister to broadcast on television and radio why the policy had changed; what I didn't realize was that the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Nick Brown, had done a big press conference saying that everything was under control; in my first television appearance I said things were out of control at the moment, but we needed to follow certain procedures to get it under control within two days; the interviewer told me that Brown had just said it was under control, so I had to explain that 'out of control' was a scientific statement, that the RO term was actually greater than 1, that meant that for each newly infected farm today, tomorrow there would be more than one; the upshot was that we did bring it under control, I showed my curves on television predicting how it would go; Richard Wilson, Head of the Civil Service, called me in and told me that I was in a very dangerous personal position; I was being sent out to explain what was being done on my own, with no politician with me; if the strategy failed, I would be blamed; I said I was pretty confident and everything went as planned; the date of the General Election was 5th May but it was delayed until early June; I know that date was chosen on the basis of my curves, because on May 5th it would be high, but by 6th June it would be fully under control

43:36:15 My first trip to Washington was just after President Bush had declared that Kyoto was dead which I believe was early February 2001; I went as the foot and mouth epidemic began, but unwittingly; the amusing thing about that trip was both to deal with Bush's anger over Europe declaring that they didn't want any American food that contained genetically modified foodstuffs, and I had to go and explain that Britain was going to make a lot of money out of such food, and that we in Cambridge had invented molecular biology and planned to make good use of the invention; at the same time I needed to explain why Kyoto should not be dead; I went on this mission with Michael Arthur so it was called the King-Arthur mission; we were very politely received in the White House, and I did meet a whole range of highly-positioned people in the Government though I did not meet Bush; we were given a very polite hearing on both issues, however there was a pretty negative response; the Prime Minister had asked me to go to deal with the GM question and I asked if I could discuss the climate change issue as well; I think it would be fair to say that Blair’s focus on science was on the science-innovation-wealth agenda; in 2001 I persuaded him to give a speech to the Royal Society on science, under the title 'Science Matters'; I saw his most astonishing speech-making ability at first-hand; the speech took three or four months to prepare, there was a team of three or four of us involved in the preparation, and he was involved in discussions with us roughly once a month; in the last two nights before he began rewriting it; as he often did, the night before the actual speech he stayed up until the early hours of the morning; those amazing speeches that he gave he put an awful lot of effort into; he would rewrite and then virtually memorize; he did read more of the science speech out than he normally did, but it was the big statement that Britain was extraordinarily strong in the science base, and the Government was committing itself to building it up at twice the rate of our GDP growth; there was thus a commitment to spending on science; the speech talks a lot of how molecular biology was invented here and that we should benefit from the technologies that emerged; for me the fascinating thing was that the following year, Premier Wen Jiabao of China had a state visit; he was of course seeing the Queen and Prime Minister, and a message came from the Embassy saying that he would like to meet the Government Chief Scientific Advisor; I met him on a Sunday so it didn't happen officially, and I took a group of Vice-Chancellors with me; for a Chinese Prime Minister it is not odd to meet scientists as half his politburo are engineers or scientists; science has a very high status in China; it also turns out that 'Science Matters' had been translated into Chinese, and he told me that they had altered China's policy to match what was written there and he wanted to talk to the man who had advised his Prime Minister; this began a very strong relationship which I maintained with the Chinese, much stronger than with the Bush regime, over the following years; it meant that I brought China into the world's biggest ever technical project, the ITER project, which became my big baby; it meant that I was able to advise them on climate change; we took our team who had developed Britain's approach to adapting to the challenges of climate change in flood and coastal defences; we took our team out to China to work in the area around Shanghai, and I have personally no doubt that what turned the Politburo's decision-making on climate change around two and a half years ago, was receiving a report from their own scientists, engineers and economists, on the impact on the Yangtze basin area; Shanghai, by the end of the century, if the world doesn't manage the problem, goes under water; flooding from the Yangtze and from the ocean with sea levels rising will make it unmanageable; that beginning, meeting with Wen Jiabao, has led to quite a fruitful outcome; I have been to Beijing this year and put the idea to a rather astonished climate change advisor to the President and the Premier, that if he and President Obama were able to stand on a platform together and declare what needs to be done with climate change, the rest of the world would follow; it didn't quite happen that way because President Obama couldn't, without Senate approval, reach that point, but it came pretty close.

51:46:09 On capture of solar energy, I got Richard Friend to make a presentation to the Prime Minister on this; I think this is so important that it is worth the British Government investing tax payers' money in setting up sufficient investment into the base around Cambridge to enable these spinout companies that are developing these ideas to really compete at the world level; I think what we have always missed in the past is backing really good ideas by British Government funding; we have got several hundred million going into this now; it is not only that plastic photovoltaics would be far cheaper than silicon-based ones, but it is also plastic-based computer hardware; they can actually eliminate the use of silicon; I honestly think if you get this right it will insure the financial future of the United Kingdom; we won't need to survive with bankers doing what they do; the idea of being able to cover every building with material which will turn solar energy into electricity; I have been introduced to the man who is in charge of energy for China; I have sat in front of members of the Politburo and a range of Civil Servants for a few hours and asked to advise them how to manage climate change; I had essentially told them to do what we introduced in Britain in 2004 and was rolled out into Europe, which was to cap and trade in CO2; I suggested they do it across China and it would be the way to control energy; they had very inefficient energy usage processes in place and this would drive through alternative energy sources to fossil fuels; I went back in February this year and met the man who told me that, through the Government's top down decision making, he had been told the maximum amount of coal that he could use in any given year, and that his job was to find alternatives; he said that they were now the world's biggest producer of photovoltaics; they have under construction, nearly completed, a one billion watt power station which is entirely photovoltaics, covering a piece of desert; this is using silicon-based photovoltaics; if you took Richard Friend's plastic photovoltaics you could do that everywhere, at a tiny fraction of the cost to the Chinese Government; the Chinese now have the world's biggest program of building new nuclear power stations, so they are facing up to the alternatives; they are caught up now in managing the problem of growing their economy and decreasing their dependence on fossil fuels; the idea of using plastics has so many attractions; it is lowering the cost, attractive for architects to use on the outside of buildings - plastics come in all forms, shapes, and colours - and it also means that we can hope to develop ceramics, tiles that are photo-voltaic, paint, so what we can do is convert quite high percentages of the sunlight hitting the planet into the energy we need, and the problem is virtually solved; if you think of the amount of work that has been done on silicon, by thousands of people, and how little work on plastic you can be pretty sure that they will be able to get the photon capture up from the present 7% to 20%, which will be all we need

58:45:14 I think I have had the most amazingly privileged existence, not only working with all these young people, being kept lively and young by them, but living in Cambridge, and now in Oxford, experiencing Government from within, making friends with extraordinary people like Gorbachev; two of the greatest political characters of the twentieth century who really made a transformed world possible were Nelson Mandela, showing that you could have transformation without violence, and Gorbachev; another is Tam Dalyell, the senior parliamentarian of the UK, a man who I admired enormously for his courage and tenacity, his challenging of Margaret Thatcher during the Falkland's war - the privilege of meeting this iconic figure for me, and then we became friends; I never imagined I would meet people like that; I enjoyed every moment of being in Government, just as I enjoyed every moment of working in chemistry here, and in Downing, and my new life in Oxford