Tim Hunt Interview - part one

Tim Hunt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7th July and continued 28th July 2015
Minor corrections by TH, 3 October 2015

0:05:06 Born 1943 in Neston on the Wirral; my father was a lecturer in palaeography at Liverpool University and my mother was a physiotherapist; they met because my father had a bad back; it is said that my first words were uttered in a broad Beatles accent which was quickly beaten out of me because we moved to Oxford when I was two; my mother's parents lived in Parkgate, Cheshire, which is by the sea, and they make potted shrimps there; I took the girls back there recently just to have a look and it was totally unchanged; the only difference is that the Dee estuary is now totally silted up so what had been a little fishing village is now just salt marshes; I can remember as a child going back to visit the grandparents, having fun making dams in the channels as the tide came in, being slightly scarred that we might be trapped like the poor Chinese cockle pickers who perished; I always wondered what my father did in the war; it turned out that he wasn't working in Liverpool but at Bush House in London; there are letters from him at Bush House asking how I was doing; what was amazing was that he never spoke of it and I had never plucked up the courage to ask him; even his own brother did not know that he was working in Bush House; according to my mother she did mention once that when the Italian campaign came to an end he came home, so I suppose he was in some kind of intelligence role; I don't know what was going on in Bush House in 1943-44; I suppose there must be records of everybody who worked in such things; on my mother's side of the family I can't go back at all; Harry Rowland [grandfather] was an importer of hardwood, a timber merchant; my mother was very fond of him; when she was a student at St Thomas's Hospital in London he would occasionally show up and take her out for a treat at Lyon's Corner House, which was regarded as a tremendous thing in those days; so she came from a commercial background and in contrast to the academic life it was based very largely on trust; my father's father, Sidney Hunt, had been the Medical Officer of Health for Derbyshire; they lived in a place called Spondon; they had a house with a big garden, and I remember a huge lawn and the sound of lawnmowers, playing cricket, a pile of rotting grass cuttings in a corner and a sandstone wall round it; it would be interesting to go back but it is probably a housing estate now; one of his sons was also a medic, a daughter, an almoner, and there was a teacher; before him you can go back to a chemist's shop in Winchester which until recently bore the family name of Hunt; I think at the beginning of the nineteenth century we run into the peasantry; so there was a medical bent in my background, but the idea of being a doctor did not appeal to me at all because having the power of life and death over others struck me as appalling; I suppose I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time I came to that conclusion; my father was an academic and his greatest triumph was when he recognised the marginal comments in a manuscript as being authored by Petrarch; he and my godfather, a medieval historian called Dick Southern, used to tour around the libraries of Europe; R.W. Southern wrote 'The Making of the Middle Ages', and I recently read his 'History of the Medieval Church' because I got very interested in the Great Schism of 1054, after a trip to Serbia; he was a Fellow of All Souls and I remember him telling me when they elected their first scientist, an expert on butterflies; this would have been E.B. Ford whose studies of industrial melanism did much to promote the cause of Darwinism; he was a very nice man and eventually became the Master of St John's; he gave me a copy of the Bible in Greek when I was about eleven or twelve which is still unread; however my daughter makes up for me as she has spent the whole of the last year properly learning Greek at Oxford

9:07:24 I think the most salient feature of my parents was that they were both very devout Christians and I was steeped in it; church every Sunday; roast goes in the oven before we go to church and is brought out when we come back, and cider bought at the little corner shop that was open on Sunday; my mother in later life was very nearly "received into the arms of Rome"; the church was called St Barnabas and I sang in the choir; it is down by the canal and has a Tuscan roof, once very high but now lowered, and an amazing gilt interior; I remember they once had a production of 'The Play of Daniel' with W.H. Auden narrating from the pulpit which was terrific; the choir was all boarded over to make a stage; our house, 44-45 Walton Street, was absolutely full of visiting scholars; if we were there the door was always open and anyone could just walk in; the house is still there, opposite what used to be the main gate of Radcliffe Infirmary; I believe the King came to open it at one time and the golden key broke in the lock so it was never opened again; very often my father would bring people home for lunch and my mother used to love to cook for them and was very hospitable; we all learnt cooking from my mother; if there were people at Christmas time who didn't have a home to go to they were made welcome; I didn't know who most of the visitors were though there was a wonderful woman called Betty Withycombe who wrote 'The Oxford Book of Christian Names', who I think worked in the Forestry Department, who used to come round often on Sunday evenings; the Principal of Somerville was a good friend; my mother continued with physiotherapy but was more of a psychotherapist so had a lot of elderly patients to whom she ministered; there was another famous historian, F.M. Powicke, whom my mother found almost gassed because they had turned on the cooker and forgotten to light it; my mother had an amazing collection of friends though I was actually scared of her; she had a very strong character and great force; my trouble with girls definitely started with my mother; she either approved or disapproved of girlfriends and was suspicious of boy friends; I actually caught her out in a lie once which was most uncharacteristic and very surprising; for some reason a friend of mine was looking into his ancestors, trying to establish a family tree; I thought I would do the same, and this caused huge agitation; it turned out the reason was because unbeknownst to me, my father had in fact been married before and his first wife, I think the daughter of his Professor, had died in childbirth; my mother made this big song and dance that your first sexual experience should be with the man you loved and were going to spend the rest of your life with, and this revelation blew the whole theory out of the water; I don't think she told me until I was in my first year at Cambridge; that explained why there were things in cupboards with the name Joyce Twembly, my father's first wife; but they were tremendously humane and good people, very devout but in an understated way; I discovered after they had both died huge correspondence as my father never threw anything away; I found correspondence with the Vicar of St Barnabas about Jan Morris; my father was number two in the Bodleian, the Keeper of the Western Manuscripts, from 1945 until about 1975; Jan Morris was originally James Morris and had changed sex; my father arranged very discretely to have two reader's cards depending whether he was a boy or girl on that particular day; the correspondence with the Vicar showed that he had thought this through very carefully and that there should be no fuss or bother about it

17:17:18 Bizarrely, I actually had a governess when I was about six, and I don't know why; before I went to the Dragon I went to the Oxford Girls' High School; there were not many of us, but my friend John Cook who was here at King's also went there, though I don't think we were in the same class; not having any sisters - the family was three brothers and Dad; the thing I didn't say about him was that he was a man of very few words; he and Kit, his wife, communicated a lot but he wasn't loquacious at all so you never really knew what he thought about anything; I never felt - and I think my brother Sandy would have said the same - that we didn't really feel that close to him; when Kit, his wife, my mother, finally died suddenly a lot of stuff would come bubbling out; there was obviously a store of stuff in him that was generally invisible; somebody wrote a piece about this, how he hated Richard Hunt because he was so quiet and never said anything; I think the thing he loved most - and I have a photograph of this - was the Bodleian childrens' Christmas party; he loved playing "Ring a ring of roses" with the kids, loved to join in; everybody assumes that I grew up in a very middle-class environment but we were actually as poor as church mice; the house was freezing cold; my mother didn't believe in heated bathrooms, and there was no central heating whatsoever; yet there was a governess, and the boys were all sent to the Dragon; I can only assume that some rich relative somewhere must have subsidised this; after about a year and a term of Oxford Girls' High School, which I didn't like very much; there was too much regimentation for me and going to the Dragon was a breath of fresh air, but it was a very confusing because I still remember going into my first class and finding the Latin lesson had started and having no idea what was going on; I would say that the Dragon was the making of me; I can't remember who my first teacher was so I will have to consult 'The Draconian'; I have a complete set as my father collected them and had them bound at the Bodleian, starting from my first term; I think my classroom was in the new hall, down at the bottom on the right; I was a day-boy, as were most of my friends; Bill Nimmo Smith lived opposite in a very rickety kind of establishment because his father had run off; he's now a Lord or something in Scotland, and a very powerful lawyer; Peter Pusey who lived in North Oxford was a physicist; I owe him an awful lot because it was he who really taught me, I was absolutely useless at physics; it is very useful to have people you can compare yourself against; both Peter and I were scientists and very keen cyclists, but Peter was really good at physics, and although I would loved to have been, I wasn't

23:15:08 I didn't collect things as a boy; we went fishing a lot in the Thames at Sandy Bay; an abiding memory is of my mother and us hopping on our bikes and riding down to Port Meadow to go swimming before supper, and the golden sunlit afternoon; we used to go fishing there too; Bill Nimmo Smith reminded me of something I had quite forgotten; after the Nobel Prize he wrote me a very sweet letter; there was a lead mine in the back of our garden, so the garden stopped with a rather tumbledown shed where the bicycles were kept; beyond that was a little bit of derelict land which once had two or three cottages on it; Dad converted it into a kind of vegetable garden and parking lot; we discovered a lead pipe and we could follow this seam, and would cut off sections of the pipe and melt it down in a home-made blast furnace; we would put green baize on the bottom and then sell it to people as paperweights; we cast it in the trailer of Dinky Toys, which had a lorry which was about the right size; when lead was fresh it looked very nice but it tarnished rather rapidly to a dull grey; so we had Dinky Toys and we used to race them at the Dragon, then there were marbles and conkers, all that stuff; cricket was something I was absolutely mad keen on; we used to reenact test matches and pretend to be Denis Compton; I think I was probably in the second eleven; I was never really very good at anything, actually, that is the truth of the matter and I am very conscious of it; the one thing the Dragon did for me there were these wonderful science lessons and Gerd Sommerhoff was an absolutely inspired and inspiring teacher for me; you learnt all kinds of incidental things from him; he made smells and explosions and explained things very simply and clearly, and that was great; you learnt there was a simple explanation for everything, which is really important I think; he had a little competition on who could build the simplest bridge out of Meccano; the winner was somebody who had the brilliant idea of using a piece that was a plate with flanges and he managed to make a bridge with only three parts and no screws; you looked at that and realized you were not going to be an engineer either; what I learnt was that I was very good at biology because the whole school took the same exam and the results were always public; I was in the middle of the school and came out something like thirteenth in the whole school, and that was basically the biology exam that I hadn't worked for but just knew how things worked; that was the way my mind worked, and it was a fabulous lesson to have at such a young age, about twelve; from that moment on I knew where my future lay; it was an amazingly valuable gift because I have seen so many people, very much more talented than me, who just can't decide what they want to do and get terribly lost and upset; I had only one thing that I could do and that was to be a biologist; you had to pass exams but that was the easy bit, unlike knowing what you wanted to do; there were no biology books at home; I did not like drawing buttercups; a little bit later I did get fascinated; famously, when my brother's pet rabbit died I took it into school and dissected it; lovely to have something fresh and vibrant, to cut it open and see what all the parts were; up until then we had had to dissect the seventh cranial nerve of a dogfish which was just a ghastly chore, very smelly because of the formaldehyde, and you just don't really get the point of it; that is a reflection on my schooling where I was bored because I didn't get the point; I think chemistry I understood fairly well, physics was terribly difficult, and I was useless at maths; the only exam I failed was something called Additional Maths at 'O' level; I was always completely lost with mental arithmetic and gave up after just two steps, because, again, other people were much better at it than I was; everyone says that you have to know lots of maths for science, but in my experience it is not true; it helps to be able to add, multiply and divide, and there are certainly things that are totally closed off from me; one of the sadnesses is that I shall never understand quantum mechanics; today, physicists are all for solving biological problems, but most biological problems don't lend themselves to the kind of mathematical analysis that physics does; it is a quite different kind of activity; maths is very simple, linear things work very nicely, but the minute you get chaotic it is pretty useless as far as I can understand

31:30:19 I hated football, it was only cricket and a bit of tennis I was keen on; I enjoyed cricket throughout my schooldays, and even after I played for a team called College Servants in Oxford; you didn't have to be a college servant to play; there was one famous match where I made it to the Oxford Times because I got fifty runs and took five wickets; in the Gilbert and Sullivan at the Dragon I was Nanki Poo in 'Mikado' in my last year, and had been in the chorus of 'Pirates of Penzance' and 'Iolanthe'; I played Olivia in 'Twelfth Night' and Hippolyta in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' - I have played every female role in that play; my first acting experience was with Nicky Bullock and Chrisy De Wet; we were fairies, and I was the "one alone stands sentinel"; this was in St John's College gardens, an OUDS production so my most distinguished acting experience; acting was another part of the making of me; I am a timid person by nature but whenever I had actually gone through the ordeal of having to perform I always came out much stronger and full of confidence; it must be said that for many years afterwards, hearing the overture to 'Mikado' used to make me almost vomit with stage-fright; I went on in Magdalen College School to do quite a lot of acting as well, and then graduated to Titania, Queen of the fairies; I enjoyed fiddling around, and was much better at taking things apart; I think everybody of my generation used to take old radio sets and TVs apart, we weren't so good at building them; I liked playing with Dinky Toys and racing them; blowing things up; I very nearly blew my eyebrows off once because we were trying to make fuses; I discovered that a mixture of sodium chlorate and sucrose made a very effective explosion; in order to facilitate the drying of the fuse that had been soaked in the liquid I put it under the grill; this was a mistake; at Magdalene we were always distilling volatile organic solvents which occasionally would catch fire so you became very good at putting these fires out; you learnt what you could and shouldn't mouth pipette if you were sensible; you didn't mouth pipette viscous concentrated sulphuric acid because if you got it in you you would probably die; we used to do analytical chemistry and if it was blue it was probably copper sulphate, but if if was white you would have no idea what it was; so you had to go through an analytical routine with tests at every stage; you burnt it, sniffed it, dissolved it, reacted it with this and that until you could tell what it was, and that was awfully good fun; it was simple and you did it, not on an ipad but actual, you had it in your hands; I think that is very important; with computers, practical maths is now possible in a way that was not possible when we were growing up; I always dreamt of a computer, and Dick Tracey had what we would now called an iwatch on his wrist; all of that has come to pass but all the other hands-on stuff has gone; I often think of the time you could take a telephone apart and make it again; it was clear what made the difference between an ear-piece and a mouth-piece and you could make your own if you wanted to, and devise the circuits and it worked; with an iphone, who knows how it works; my daughter asked me a peculiar question a couple of weeks after I had had a call from Hans Jörnvall in Stockholm to tell me I was a Nobel Prize winner; Celia was seven and I was putting her to bed when she asked me why the ceiling was opaque; I think she was only asking for a definition of opaque which struck her as a funny word, but I looked through her window and wondered how photons got through glass; I had been reading Einstein's famous 1905 paper about the photon; we had measured the refractive index of glass in school and wondered whether there was enough room between the atoms for the photons to get through..it doesn't sound plausible; what kinds of things are translucent...gases, liquids...well glass is a frozen liquid so it must have something to do with that; mercury is a liquid and you make mirrors out of mercury; then I started asking people, physicists, and everybody gave a different answer; I had a solid state physicist friend at Clare called Volker Heine; I asked him if the photon that hits the window is the same as the photon that comes out the other side; he smiled at me and said it was a meaningless question; it culminated, sitting next to Aaron Klug in the British Laureates' lunch in Stockholm given by the British Ambassador; I asked him to explain how light gets through glass; he said I needed to understand Schrödinger’s equation; then I knew I was doomed; if you have ever looked at Schrödinger’s equation it starts off with the square root of minus one which I knew from my youth was a difficult concept, and that is where I came unstuck; on Schrödinger's tomb in Alpbach the sculptor had made an error with the equation which made it meaningless, so a physicist went to the local hardware store and bought a pot of black paint and removed the right-hand dot which had made it meaningless, so now it is correct; I read Schrödinger's biography because of this and because I had to give a talk at Alpbach; I decided to reread 'What is Life?' which is the famous book that is said to have inspired Francis Crick and Jim Watson, trying to explain life in terms of simple chemistry and physics which I guess was my ambition too; Schrödinger had actually given these lectures in Dublin in the very month in which I was born; when I first read Schrödinger's little book I thought it was nonsense, what does a physicist know about biology; but when I read it fifty years later I was actually very impressed because I realized he had a very much deeper subtext which I had completely missed on first reading; on the problem of photons and glass, every so often I get a little revelation; for example, I was on a panel in Singapore earlier this year with André Geim, the discover of graphene; somehow the subject came up about water and the abyssal depths of the ocean; I realized that although light does get through glass, not 100% of it does; similarly with water, which looks translucent but why are the ocean depths totally black? The photon actually has a certain probability - this is deep quantum mechanics, it has a probability of being absorbed; it may be very small, as in the case of glass, or very large, as in the case of the ceiling; what that really means is that what they don't understand is when the photon reacts with the electron and the wave function collapses, this is a complete and deep mystery; I think that the interesting thing about this is that such an interesting and obvious question is not talked about in schools, the reason being that it is so difficult to understand; to understand it as proper physicists understand, the Feynmans of this world - I have read and reread his little book 'QED' where he tries to go into this; basically it reduces into an equation which isn't actually an explanation it is just a description of what goes on; this is I think is the deep difference between Aristotle's approach to science, looking for causes with a god-like figure in the background, to Galileo and Newton who said don't lets worry about causes, just describe what actually happens; these equations describe that with high precision, thus Volker’s point that it was a meaningless question as you can't tell one photon from another; it gets very philosophical and I am not clever enough to grasp it; if my maths was better I would probably grasp it at a deeper level, but that is not the point; I think it is important to ask those kinds of questions and to encourage kids to ask them; I have had fun grappling with this and have read a lot to try to understand; my memory of the Dragon was that it was mostly about learning irregular verbs in Latin, Greek and French, but I think Bruno's lessons, which in my case encompassed history and English, he was always asking questions; in the 'Draconian', pointed out to me by Bill Nimmo Smith, it was noted that mysteriously it was illegal to kill people unless you were at war with somebody, in which case you were encouraged; what I took from the Dragon, having oscillated over whether it was a good thing to learn Latin or not, and you realize that a lot of education is like that, but somehow a deep respect for the truth was inculcated, and that was the one guiding principle; that there was a truth and you should always respect it and never try to obscure it, let alone lie; it is terribly important for science because you are always trying to get to the bottom of things, and nature is always trying to trip you up, giving you false clues

49:05:00 I don't fully understand why I went to Magdalen College School; we all took 11+ and on that basis I was admitted but I didn't go there until I had graduated from the Dragon; I was regarded as a rather special case for reasons I really didn't understand at the time; I was put into a class two years above where I should have been at the age of thirteen; that was rather disconcerting because I found myself with much older boys which is quite significant at that age; indeed it turned out that you could have passed 'O' level Latin straight out of the Dragon, probably French too; English was the subject I really liked but history I did not like; my impression of history at the Dragon was that we were beginning to struggle with the post-imperialist world, but the education was so anglo-centric, Europe was the Daily Mail caricature, and as for China and Japan or any of the rest of the world...the stereotypes I received as a child were absolutely appalling; I remember being terrified the first time I went to Germany because I was convinced there would be Nazi hoards, likewise, the first time I went to Japan; cartoon characters in comics really infected your ideas of who you were going to meet; the power of propaganda is just extraordinary; this is something that I have learnt relatively late in life; I can remember seriously thinking that one could not question the Virgin Birth of Christ, or the possibility of virgin birth, because it was an article of faith; as such it was unquestionable; how amazing is that; now of course we have other strong prejudices that are unrecognised as prejudices, and this is just the human condition; everyone says you have got to be evidence-based, but we are not evidence-based creatures; we have to live by assumptions and those are usually misguided

53:00:22 The period between thirteen and eighteen I regarded as a kind of marking time period; of course I learnt a lot of science and that was good; I had to do 'A' level chemistry and physics; I think I managed to get out of doing maths, but did biology; I went on acting, played in the school orchestra, sang in a lot of choirs, which carried on when I came to Cambridge; I managed to scrape my way into CUMS and sing under David Willcocks which was an education in itself; I must have sung all the great choral works - the B minor Mass, Matthew Passion, John Passion, The Messiah; one of the very first things we sang in CUMS were a piece of Schoenberg De Profundis "Out of the deep...", very atonal; David played it on the piano to illustrate that actually it was a waltz; one of the funny things about music is that I used to be bereft it I didn't have my little tape player and a collection of tapes to take on long plane journeys; now you can have your whole music collection on a memory stick which I once would have been overjoyed at, but I don't really have this need for constant music in the background; when I am working I often have Radio 3 burbling in the background; when we were in the lab, Test Match Special was a really good thing, because if people had music that wasn't to your taste, that was apt to be disruptive; at one time we wired up the place and had Wagner, singing through the lab, and Bruckner symphonies; at school there was a chemistry teacher who was absolutely wonderful, he was a military man called Colonel Simmons; I think all the other ones had Ph.D's and I suspect he didn't, but he was a wonderful old-style chemistry teacher who was very plain-speaking and made everything beautifully clear; we got a young biology teacher who had done a Ph.D and worked at Rothamsted for a bit, but was a manic-depressive and really wanted to be an artist; later he apprenticed himself to Michael Ayrton the sculptor and worked with him for a long time; he became a great family friend and he introduced me to craftsmen potters; it was a tiny class and we all turned into biochemists/molecular biologists; we used to go out into the school fields and look at things, count the nettles in patches etc.; he was a real friend and an inspiring teacher, whereas his colleague, old Smoky Summers, Smoky because he had nicotine stained fingers, would say "we just don't know", and I got cross at that; although I went on with music and acting, many of the classes I found boring; in the end they ran out of things to teach me so I did bookbinding and discovered marbling, and I bound lots of things for the church, psalters and so on; I wonder if they still exist; I wasn't very good at bookbinding but it was very therapeutic; I have always been much better at doing things with my hands - asking questions and doing things with my hands

Tim Hunt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7th July and continued 28th July 2015
Minor corrections by TH, 3 October 2015

0:05:06 Born 1943 in Neston on the Wirral; my father was a lecturer in palaeography at Liverpool University and my mother was a physiotherapist; they met because my father had a bad back; it is said that my first words were uttered in a broad Beatles accent which was quickly beaten out of me because we moved to Oxford when I was two; my mother's parents lived in Parkgate, Cheshire, which is by the sea, and they make potted shrimps there; I took the girls back there recently just to have a look and it was totally unchanged; the only difference is that the Dee estuary is now totally silted up so what had been a little fishing village is now just salt marshes; I can remember as a child going back to visit the grandparents, having fun making dams in the channels as the tide came in, being slightly scarred that we might be trapped like the poor Chinese cockle pickers who perished; I always wondered what my father did in the war; it turned out that he wasn't working in Liverpool but at Bush House in London; there are letters from him at Bush House asking how I was doing; what was amazing was that he never spoke of it and I had never plucked up the courage to ask him; even his own brother did not know that he was working in Bush House; according to my mother she did mention once that when the Italian campaign came to an end he came home, so I suppose he was in some kind of intelligence role; I don't know what was going on in Bush House in 1943-44; I suppose there must be records of everybody who worked in such things; on my mother's side of the family I can't go back at all; Harry Rowland [grandfather] was an importer of hardwood, a timber merchant; my mother was very fond of him; when she was a student at St Thomas's Hospital in London he would occasionally show up and take her out for a treat at Lyon's Corner House, which was regarded as a tremendous thing in those days; so she came from a commercial background and in contrast to the academic life it was based very largely on trust; my father's father, Sidney Hunt, had been the Medical Officer of Health for Derbyshire; they lived in a place called Spondon; they had a house with a big garden, and I remember a huge lawn and the sound of lawnmowers, playing cricket, a pile of rotting grass cuttings in a corner and a sandstone wall round it; it would be interesting to go back but it is probably a housing estate now; one of his sons was also a medic, a daughter, an almoner, and there was a teacher; before him you can go back to a chemist's shop in Winchester which until recently bore the family name of Hunt; I think at the beginning of the nineteenth century we run into the peasantry; so there was a medical bent in my background, but the idea of being a doctor did not appeal to me at all because having the power of life and death over others struck me as appalling; I suppose I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time I came to that conclusion; my father was an academic and his greatest triumph was when he recognised the marginal comments in a manuscript as being authored by Petrarch; he and my godfather, a medieval historian called Dick Southern, used to tour around the libraries of Europe; R.W. Southern wrote 'The Making of the Middle Ages', and I recently read his 'History of the Medieval Church' because I got very interested in the Great Schism of 1054, after a trip to Serbia; he was a Fellow of All Souls and I remember him telling me when they elected their first scientist, an expert on butterflies; this would have been E.B. Ford whose studies of industrial melanism did much to promote the cause of Darwinism; he was a very nice man and eventually became the Master of St John's; he gave me a copy of the Bible in Greek when I was about eleven or twelve which is still unread; however my daughter makes up for me as she has spent the whole of the last year properly learning Greek at Oxford

9:07:24 I think the most salient feature of my parents was that they were both very devout Christians and I was steeped in it; church every Sunday; roast goes in the oven before we go to church and is brought out when we come back, and cider bought at the little corner shop that was open on Sunday; my mother in later life was very nearly "received into the arms of Rome"; the church was called St Barnabas and I sang in the choir; it is down by the canal and has a Tuscan roof, once very high but now lowered, and an amazing gilt interior; I remember they once had a production of 'The Play of Daniel' with W.H. Auden narrating from the pulpit which was terrific; the choir was all boarded over to make a stage; our house, 44-45 Walton Street, was absolutely full of visiting scholars; if we were there the door was always open and anyone could just walk in; the house is still there, opposite what used to be the main gate of Radcliffe Infirmary; I believe the King came to open it at one time and the golden key broke in the lock so it was never opened again; very often my father would bring people home for lunch and my mother used to love to cook for them and was very hospitable; we all learnt cooking from my mother; if there were people at Christmas time who didn't have a home to go to they were made welcome; I didn't know who most of the visitors were though there was a wonderful woman called Betty Withycombe who wrote 'The Oxford Book of Christian Names', who I think worked in the Forestry Department, who used to come round often on Sunday evenings; the Principal of Somerville was a good friend; my mother continued with physiotherapy but was more of a psychotherapist so had a lot of elderly patients to whom she ministered; there was another famous historian, F.M. Powicke, whom my mother found almost gassed because they had turned on the cooker and forgotten to light it; my mother had an amazing collection of friends though I was actually scared of her; she had a very strong character and great force; my trouble with girls definitely started with my mother; she either approved or disapproved of girlfriends and was suspicious of boy friends; I actually caught her out in a lie once which was most uncharacteristic and very surprising; for some reason a friend of mine was looking into his ancestors, trying to establish a family tree; I thought I would do the same, and this caused huge agitation; it turned out the reason was because unbeknownst to me, my father had in fact been married before and his first wife, I think the daughter of his Professor, had died in childbirth; my mother made this big song and dance that your first sexual experience should be with the man you loved and were going to spend the rest of your life with, and this revelation blew the whole theory out of the water; I don't think she told me until I was in my first year at Cambridge; that explained why there were things in cupboards with the name Joyce Twembly, my father's first wife; but they were tremendously humane and good people, very devout but in an understated way; I discovered after they had both died huge correspondence as my father never threw anything away; I found correspondence with the Vicar of St Barnabas about Jan Morris; my father was number two in the Bodleian, the Keeper of the Western Manuscripts, from 1945 until about 1975; Jan Morris was originally James Morris and had changed sex; my father arranged very discretely to have two reader's cards depending whether he was a boy or girl on that particular day; the correspondence with the Vicar showed that he had thought this through very carefully and that there should be no fuss or bother about it

17:17:18 Bizarrely, I actually had a governess when I was about six, and I don't know why; before I went to the Dragon I went to the Oxford Girls' High School; there were not many of us, but my friend John Cook who was here at King's also went there, though I don't think we were in the same class; not having any sisters - the family was three brothers and Dad; the thing I didn't say about him was that he was a man of very few words; he and Kit, his wife, communicated a lot but he wasn't loquacious at all so you never really knew what he thought about anything; I never felt - and I think my brother Sandy would have said the same - that we didn't really feel that close to him; when Kit, his wife, my mother, finally died suddenly a lot of stuff would come bubbling out; there was obviously a store of stuff in him that was generally invisible; somebody wrote a piece about this, how he hated Richard Hunt because he was so quiet and never said anything; I think the thing he loved most - and I have a photograph of this - was the Bodleian childrens' Christmas party; he loved playing "Ring a ring of roses" with the kids, loved to join in; everybody assumes that I grew up in a very middle-class environment but we were actually as poor as church mice; the house was freezing cold; my mother didn't believe in heated bathrooms, and there was no central heating whatsoever; yet there was a governess, and the boys were all sent to the Dragon; I can only assume that some rich relative somewhere must have subsidised this; after about a year and a term of Oxford Girls' High School, which I didn't like very much; there was too much regimentation for me and going to the Dragon was a breath of fresh air, but it was a very confusing because I still remember going into my first class and finding the Latin lesson had started and having no idea what was going on; I would say that the Dragon was the making of me; I can't remember who my first teacher was so I will have to consult 'The Draconian'; I have a complete set as my father collected them and had them bound at the Bodleian, starting from my first term; I think my classroom was in the new hall, down at the bottom on the right; I was a day-boy, as were most of my friends; Bill Nimmo Smith lived opposite in a very rickety kind of establishment because his father had run off; he's now a Lord or something in Scotland, and a very powerful lawyer; Peter Pusey who lived in North Oxford was a physicist; I owe him an awful lot because it was he who really taught me, I was absolutely useless at physics; it is very useful to have people you can compare yourself against; both Peter and I were scientists and very keen cyclists, but Peter was really good at physics, and although I would loved to have been, I wasn't

23:15:08 I didn't collect things as a boy; we went fishing a lot in the Thames at Sandy Bay; an abiding memory is of my mother and us hopping on our bikes and riding down to Port Meadow to go swimming before supper, and the golden sunlit afternoon; we used to go fishing there too; Bill Nimmo Smith reminded me of something I had quite forgotten; after the Nobel Prize he wrote me a very sweet letter; there was a lead mine in the back of our garden, so the garden stopped with a rather tumbledown shed where the bicycles were kept; beyond that was a little bit of derelict land which once had two or three cottages on it; Dad converted it into a kind of vegetable garden and parking lot; we discovered a lead pipe and we could follow this seam, and would cut off sections of the pipe and melt it down in a home-made blast furnace; we would put green baize on the bottom and then sell it to people as paperweights; we cast it in the trailer of Dinky Toys, which had a lorry which was about the right size; when lead was fresh it looked very nice but it tarnished rather rapidly to a dull grey; so we had Dinky Toys and we used to race them at the Dragon, then there were marbles and conkers, all that stuff; cricket was something I was absolutely mad keen on; we used to reenact test matches and pretend to be Denis Compton; I think I was probably in the second eleven; I was never really very good at anything, actually, that is the truth of the matter and I am very conscious of it; the one thing the Dragon did for me there were these wonderful science lessons and Gerd Sommerhoff was an absolutely inspired and inspiring teacher for me; you learnt all kinds of incidental things from him; he made smells and explosions and explained things very simply and clearly, and that was great; you learnt there was a simple explanation for everything, which is really important I think; he had a little competition on who could build the simplest bridge out of Meccano; the winner was somebody who had the brilliant idea of using a piece that was a plate with flanges and he managed to make a bridge with only three parts and no screws; you looked at that and realized you were not going to be an engineer either; what I learnt was that I was very good at biology because the whole school took the same exam and the results were always public; I was in the middle of the school and came out something like thirteenth in the whole school, and that was basically the biology exam that I hadn't worked for but just knew how things worked; that was the way my mind worked, and it was a fabulous lesson to have at such a young age, about twelve; from that moment on I knew where my future lay; it was an amazingly valuable gift because I have seen so many people, very much more talented than me, who just can't decide what they want to do and get terribly lost and upset; I had only one thing that I could do and that was to be a biologist; you had to pass exams but that was the easy bit, unlike knowing what you wanted to do; there were no biology books at home; I did not like drawing buttercups; a little bit later I did get fascinated; famously, when my brother's pet rabbit died I took it into school and dissected it; lovely to have something fresh and vibrant, to cut it open and see what all the parts were; up until then we had had to dissect the seventh cranial nerve of a dogfish which was just a ghastly chore, very smelly because of the formaldehyde, and you just don't really get the point of it; that is a reflection on my schooling where I was bored because I didn't get the point; I think chemistry I understood fairly well, physics was terribly difficult, and I was useless at maths; the only exam I failed was something called Additional Maths at 'O' level; I was always completely lost with mental arithmetic and gave up after just two steps, because, again, other people were much better at it than I was; everyone says that you have to know lots of maths for science, but in my experience it is not true; it helps to be able to add, multiply and divide, and there are certainly things that are totally closed off from me; one of the sadnesses is that I shall never understand quantum mechanics; today, physicists are all for solving biological problems, but most biological problems don't lend themselves to the kind of mathematical analysis that physics does; it is a quite different kind of activity; maths is very simple, linear things work very nicely, but the minute you get chaotic it is pretty useless as far as I can understand

31:30:19 I hated football, it was only cricket and a bit of tennis I was keen on; I enjoyed cricket throughout my schooldays, and even after I played for a team called College Servants in Oxford; you didn't have to be a college servant to play; there was one famous match where I made it to the Oxford Times because I got fifty runs and took five wickets; in the Gilbert and Sullivan at the Dragon I was Nanki Poo in 'Mikado' in my last year, and had been in the chorus of 'Pirates of Penzance' and 'Iolanthe'; I played Olivia in 'Twelfth Night' and Hippolyta in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' - I have played every female role in that play; my first acting experience was with Nicky Bullock and Chrisy De Wet; we were fairies, and I was the "one alone stands sentinel"; this was in St John's College gardens, an OUDS production so my most distinguished acting experience; acting was another part of the making of me; I am a timid person by nature but whenever I had actually gone through the ordeal of having to perform I always came out much stronger and full of confidence; it must be said that for many years afterwards, hearing the overture to 'Mikado' used to make me almost vomit with stage-fright; I went on in Magdalen College School to do quite a lot of acting as well, and then graduated to Titania, Queen of the fairies; I enjoyed fiddling around, and was much better at taking things apart; I think everybody of my generation used to take old radio sets and TVs apart, we weren't so good at building them; I liked playing with Dinky Toys and racing them; blowing things up; I very nearly blew my eyebrows off once because we were trying to make fuses; I discovered that a mixture of sodium chlorate and sucrose made a very effective explosion; in order to facilitate the drying of the fuse that had been soaked in the liquid I put it under the grill; this was a mistake; at Magdalene we were always distilling volatile organic solvents which occasionally would catch fire so you became very good at putting these fires out; you learnt what you could and shouldn't mouth pipette if you were sensible; you didn't mouth pipette viscous concentrated sulphuric acid because if you got it in you you would probably die; we used to do analytical chemistry and if it was blue it was probably copper sulphate, but if if was white you would have no idea what it was; so you had to go through an analytical routine with tests at every stage; you burnt it, sniffed it, dissolved it, reacted it with this and that until you could tell what it was, and that was awfully good fun; it was simple and you did it, not on an ipad but actual, you had it in your hands; I think that is very important; with computers, practical maths is now possible in a way that was not possible when we were growing up; I always dreamt of a computer, and Dick Tracey had what we would now called an iwatch on his wrist; all of that has come to pass but all the other hands-on stuff has gone; I often think of the time you could take a telephone apart and make it again; it was clear what made the difference between an ear-piece and a mouth-piece and you could make your own if you wanted to, and devise the circuits and it worked; with an iphone, who knows how it works; my daughter asked me a peculiar question a couple of weeks after I had had a call from Hans Jörnvall in Stockholm to tell me I was a Nobel Prize winner; Celia was seven and I was putting her to bed when she asked me why the ceiling was opaque; I think she was only asking for a definition of opaque which struck her as a funny word, but I looked through her window and wondered how photons got through glass; I had been reading Einstein's famous 1905 paper about the photon; we had measured the refractive index of glass in school and wondered whether there was enough room between the atoms for the photons to get through..it doesn't sound plausible; what kinds of things are translucent...gases, liquids...well glass is a frozen liquid so it must have something to do with that; mercury is a liquid and you make mirrors out of mercury; then I started asking people, physicists, and everybody gave a different answer; I had a solid state physicist friend at Clare called Volker Heine; I asked him if the photon that hits the window is the same as the photon that comes out the other side; he smiled at me and said it was a meaningless question; it culminated, sitting next to Aaron Klug in the British Laureates' lunch in Stockholm given by the British Ambassador; I asked him to explain how light gets through glass; he said I needed to understand Schrödinger’s equation; then I knew I was doomed; if you have ever looked at Schrödinger’s equation it starts off with the square root of minus one which I knew from my youth was a difficult concept, and that is where I came unstuck; on Schrödinger's tomb in Alpbach the sculptor had made an error with the equation which made it meaningless, so a physicist went to the local hardware store and bought a pot of black paint and removed the right-hand dot which had made it meaningless, so now it is correct; I read Schrödinger's biography because of this and because I had to give a talk at Alpbach; I decided to reread 'What is Life?' which is the famous book that is said to have inspired Francis Crick and Jim Watson, trying to explain life in terms of simple chemistry and physics which I guess was my ambition too; Schrödinger had actually given these lectures in Dublin in the very month in which I was born; when I first read Schrödinger's little book I thought it was nonsense, what does a physicist know about biology; but when I read it fifty years later I was actually very impressed because I realized he had a very much deeper subtext which I had completely missed on first reading; on the problem of photons and glass, every so often I get a little revelation; for example, I was on a panel in Singapore earlier this year with André Geim, the discover of graphene; somehow the subject came up about water and the abyssal depths of the ocean; I realized that although light does get through glass, not 100% of it does; similarly with water, which looks translucent but why are the ocean depths totally black? The photon actually has a certain probability - this is deep quantum mechanics, it has a probability of being absorbed; it may be very small, as in the case of glass, or very large, as in the case of the ceiling; what that really means is that what they don't understand is when the photon reacts with the electron and the wave function collapses, this is a complete and deep mystery; I think that the interesting thing about this is that such an interesting and obvious question is not talked about in schools, the reason being that it is so difficult to understand; to understand it as proper physicists understand, the Feynmans of this world - I have read and reread his little book 'QED' where he tries to go into this; basically it reduces into an equation which isn't actually an explanation it is just a description of what goes on; this is I think is the deep difference between Aristotle's approach to science, looking for causes with a god-like figure in the background, to Galileo and Newton who said don't lets worry about causes, just describe what actually happens; these equations describe that with high precision, thus Volker’s point that it was a meaningless question as you can't tell one photon from another; it gets very philosophical and I am not clever enough to grasp it; if my maths was better I would probably grasp it at a deeper level, but that is not the point; I think it is important to ask those kinds of questions and to encourage kids to ask them; I have had fun grappling with this and have read a lot to try to understand; my memory of the Dragon was that it was mostly about learning irregular verbs in Latin, Greek and French, but I think Bruno's lessons, which in my case encompassed history and English, he was always asking questions; in the 'Draconian', pointed out to me by Bill Nimmo Smith, it was noted that mysteriously it was illegal to kill people unless you were at war with somebody, in which case you were encouraged; what I took from the Dragon, having oscillated over whether it was a good thing to learn Latin or not, and you realize that a lot of education is like that, but somehow a deep respect for the truth was inculcated, and that was the one guiding principle; that there was a truth and you should always respect it and never try to obscure it, let alone lie; it is terribly important for science because you are always trying to get to the bottom of things, and nature is always trying to trip you up, giving you false clues

49:05:00 I don't fully understand why I went to Magdalen College School; we all took 11+ and on that basis I was admitted but I didn't go there until I had graduated from the Dragon; I was regarded as a rather special case for reasons I really didn't understand at the time; I was put into a class two years above where I should have been at the age of thirteen; that was rather disconcerting because I found myself with much older boys which is quite significant at that age; indeed it turned out that you could have passed 'O' level Latin straight out of the Dragon, probably French too; English was the subject I really liked but history I did not like; my impression of history at the Dragon was that we were beginning to struggle with the post-imperialist world, but the education was so anglo-centric, Europe was the Daily Mail caricature, and as for China and Japan or any of the rest of the world...the stereotypes I received as a child were absolutely appalling; I remember being terrified the first time I went to Germany because I was convinced there would be Nazi hoards, likewise, the first time I went to Japan; cartoon characters in comics really infected your ideas of who you were going to meet; the power of propaganda is just extraordinary; this is something that I have learnt relatively late in life; I can remember seriously thinking that one could not question the Virgin Birth of Christ, or the possibility of virgin birth, because it was an article of faith; as such it was unquestionable; how amazing is that; now of course we have other strong prejudices that are unrecognised as prejudices, and this is just the human condition; everyone says you have got to be evidence-based, but we are not evidence-based creatures; we have to live by assumptions and those are usually misguided

53:00:22 The period between thirteen and eighteen I regarded as a kind of marking time period; of course I learnt a lot of science and that was good; I had to do 'A' level chemistry and physics; I think I managed to get out of doing maths, but did biology; I went on acting, played in the school orchestra, sang in a lot of choirs, which carried on when I came to Cambridge; I managed to scrape my way into CUMS and sing under David Willcocks which was an education in itself; I must have sung all the great choral works - the B minor Mass, Matthew Passion, John Passion, The Messiah; one of the very first things we sang in CUMS were a piece of Schoenberg De Profundis "Out of the deep...", very atonal; David played it on the piano to illustrate that actually it was a waltz; one of the funny things about music is that I used to be bereft it I didn't have my little tape player and a collection of tapes to take on long plane journeys; now you can have your whole music collection on a memory stick which I once would have been overjoyed at, but I don't really have this need for constant music in the background; when I am working I often have Radio 3 burbling in the background; when we were in the lab, Test Match Special was a really good thing, because if people had music that wasn't to your taste, that was apt to be disruptive; at one time we wired up the place and had Wagner, singing through the lab, and Bruckner symphonies; at school there was a chemistry teacher who was absolutely wonderful, he was a military man called Colonel Simmons; I think all the other ones had Ph.D's and I suspect he didn't, but he was a wonderful old-style chemistry teacher who was very plain-speaking and made everything beautifully clear; we got a young biology teacher who had done a Ph.D and worked at Rothamsted for a bit, but was a manic-depressive and really wanted to be an artist; later he apprenticed himself to Michael Ayrton the sculptor and worked with him for a long time; he became a great family friend and he introduced me to craftsmen potters; it was a tiny class and we all turned into biochemists/molecular biologists; we used to go out into the school fields and look at things, count the nettles in patches etc.; he was a real friend and an inspiring teacher, whereas his colleague, old Smoky Summers, Smoky because he had nicotine stained fingers, would say "we just don't know", and I got cross at that; although I went on with music and acting, many of the classes I found boring; in the end they ran out of things to teach me so I did bookbinding and discovered marbling, and I bound lots of things for the church, psalters and so on; I wonder if they still exist; I wasn't very good at bookbinding but it was very therapeutic; I have always been much better at doing things with my hands - asking questions and doing things with my hands

[continued in part 2]