NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews

Sam Berry

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/02

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/02

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Berry Title: Professor

Interviewee’s Robert James (Sam) Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Genetics Date and place of birth: 26th October 1934, Preston, UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: dentist Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 13/01/2015 (track 1-2), 03/02/2015 (track 3-5), 17/02/2015 (track 6-7), 16/03/2015 (track 8)

Location of interview: British Library, London

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 8 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 10 hrs. 20 min. 40 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 1 C1672/02 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start then by telling me when and where you were born?

I was born in Lancashire, at Preston in 1934.

And can you tell me as much as you can about the life of your father? This can be combined things that you’ve found out and things that you actually experienced.

My father was a dentist. He was in the first tranche of National Health Service accumulation so he… he’d always had an honorary appointment with the local infirmary one day a week and he became fulltime in the National Health Service, drove him round the bend and – how many years – six or eight years later he committed suicide from the stress of it all. [00:47] Now, my mother had MS and as a result my father and I were thrown together really rather a lot, purely as friends, as it were, and we used to go, well, before my mother got bad, we all used to go on holiday, then my father and I used to go, we used to go up to the Lake District and walk. So he and I were really quite good pals.

[01:18] What do you know of his parents?

His father was a schoolmaster. He ended up as Director of Education for Preston. He died before I was born, I never knew him. He was a local historian; he wrote quite a number of books about the history of Preston, the history of Lancashire. He ran the Preston Guild in 1922 and there’s quite a lot of literature archives on that. I never met him, his widow lived on for many years, I knew her. Nothing very much to say, she was a lady of that generation.

[02:02] Did you, I mean what do you remember of time actually spent with her, did you do things just with her?

No. Much more with my mother’s parents. My mother’s father was a plumber, one of his achievements was that Tom Finney was apprenticed to him as a young lad. He could never understand why, like him, I didn’t leave school at twelve and start earning my living, and I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 2 C1672/02 Track 1 think he was quite tickled with the fact that I actually went on for some time after that. He married somebody of his ilk, as it were. He came from Barrow, he married somebody from Lancaster – I may have it the wrong way round – they moved to Preston, they always lived in Preston in my days.

What then do you remember of time spent with that set of grandparents?

My grandfather smoking a cigar after lunch put it into a tin so I could then take it home and smell the lovely smell for the next few hours, days, whatever. I don’t think we spent… we used to go there every Sunday, I don’t know that we spent time with them as such more than that.

What were Sundays like, as a child?

[03:31] Sundays was lunch with one grandparents, tea with the other grandparents. When I joined the Scouts I was told I had to honour God and the King, so I used to take my father to church in the evening; we sat on the back row and had an awfully dull service in the local parish church.

You used to take your father to church, rather than the other way round?

Yeah. His father had been a church organist and so there was certainly no antipathy, but again no sort of keenness to involve in matters religious.

[04:14] Did you live in the same house throughout your childhood?

We moved when I was the age of about three. I don’t remember the old house, it was literally just across the road. And then we lived in the same house until, well, I went to university. During that time, right at the end of that time my mother died, I moved in very briefly with my grandfather and then as a graduate student moved into a flat in London.

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 3 C1672/02 Track 1

In that case, could you take us on a tour of the house that you moved to when you were three, describing it sort of physically, but also if you, as you go round in your mind’s eye, if you see someone in a particular room can you tell me. So if your mother tended to be in a particular space doing a certain thing, and so on.

Well, it was a bungalow, with an upstairs, just effectively a room and a lobby upstairs. We used to have a maid, an Irish girl, and she lived upstairs. Downstairs you went in the front door, the dining room on your right, my room was to the left, beyond that there was a drawing room, which is the place I also associate with my mother. There was a garage, beyond the garage there was a lawn, which originally I think had been a tennis court, but in my time became a football pitch, a cricket pitch, a croquet lawn and a few other things. Next door was a builders’ yard, beyond that was a garage. It was on a corner, the house opened on to the main road to Liverpool. Great excitements on Grand National day because you used to have all the buses going past with the drunks going to the Grand National. Round the front of the house, as you turned left, as it were, before the door, there was effectively a rose garden, not very well maintained but sort of looked after, so it was quite a reasonable garden. But the lawn was the place I used to play, as it were, as a small boy, and beyond small boy, I suppose.

As a smaller boy, what were you playing on the lawn?

Whatever small boys do. I don’t know.

Do you remember what you did in particular?

No, frankly! [laughs]

You said that you particularly associate your mother with the drawing room. What do you see her doing in there?

Well, because she couldn’t really walk she used to sit there quite a lot, and I mean latterly the food had to be brought in to her, as it were. So she was just – reigning is the wrong word – residing there. And her bedroom, my parents’ bedroom was next door to that, as I say, it was a bungalow so all these things were close together. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 4 C1672/02 Track 1

And where do you see your father? Do you associate your father with a particular part of the house?

No, there was a surgery at the far end beyond the garage, so he in his pre-National Health Service days used to perform there certainly in the evenings. He had another surgery in a rather downtown part of Preston where he used to go in the morning, he used to come back at lunchtime. Whether he was always at home after lunch, I can’t remember, but certainly there was a surgery there. And in the days of the power cuts just after the war, I used to occasionally, used to go and help him. Being a dentist with a drill he had one with a foot pump and you had to sort of use a foot pump to make the drill work, so I used to go and help him on that a bit.

Do you remember conversation between your father and patients on those occasions?

No, no.

Thank you.

I remember that it was five bob to take out a tooth, twelve and six for a filling. But I can’t remember how much it was to take out the whole lot, but some of the older people used to have all their teeth out. Solved a lot of problems.

How did you feel about seeing that sort of thing going on as a child? I mean was it…

It was life.

[08:51] Thank you. Your father went into NHS, what age were you approximately when he went into…

’47 the thing started didn’t it? So I’d be thirteen, fourteen, that sort of age. And because of my mother’s health he reckoned – I was at that stage at grammar school, at day grammar school – and he reckoned it would be a good thing for me to get away from home and so he sent me to boarding school and so I spent five years boarding. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 5 C1672/02 Track 1

Why did he think it would be a good thing for you to get away from home?

Well, because of my mother’s deteriorating condition. Obviously he was rather stressed, which I didn’t appreciate at the time. I think he thought I would have a more normal life there. I mean it wasn’t a thing that was particularly discussed. Again, I was told that if it was horrid after the first term he would take me away. I said it was horrid after the first term, he didn’t take me away and I had five really quite happy years, along with Richard Ingrams, Michael Heseltine, John Peel, the disc jockey. Who else? Oh, a few others of that ilk.

[10:18] Thank you. I realise that your relationship with your mother is going to be unusual compared to other people’s because of this condition, but what, as a younger child, what do you remember doing, if that’s the right word, or just of time spent with her, so that we can get some sense of (a) who she was as a person and (b) your relationship with her.

I think my main memory, when I was a very small boy we used to have a house at Fleetwood and go there for three or four weeks in the summer and play on the beach in the summer. My father’s… I think my mother had probably been deteriorating for a long time because she was always known as ‘lightning’, because she was very slow in walking, and then got slower and slower, you know, got to the stage of a walking stick and then a wheelchair. It was family life. You know, I don’t even think that I can really say anything useful about the time there. In the days in Fleetwood we always used to watch the Isle of Man boat come in, which was always a great excitement. We used to go across the little ferry, across the harbour, these were the sort of things one did.

Any siblings?

No.

At home in Preston, who did you sort of play out with, if you did play out? Who were the children around who you might have played with?

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 6 C1672/02 Track 1

There was the butcher’s son next door but two. I went to the local infant school and there were people there, I suppose. I remember more of when I passed the eleven-plus and went to grammar school, the people I was involved with there. And one fascinating thing: I was, tended to be within the, either the top or second or third in the form and the guy who was always around me and very often ahead of me, left at the same time as me after three years there, he became… went to work for the gas works and I spent the rest of my life in university. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to him. But, you know, he was a mate of mine at that time. Some of the others, I used to play tennis with some of them on the local public courts. My childhood is not one of these things that I’ve really thought back on to and dwelled on.

No, but you’re doing well, this is very interesting. [13:00] What did you read as… when you started to read, what were you reading?

Oh, William. [laughs] Biggles to some extent, but certainly William, certainly Arthur Ransome, because we used to go up to the Lake District, I used to go and try and work out what was what. I remember reading Our Island Story and being very impressed. And at some stage somebody gave me a glossy coffee table type book on, well, effectively on evolution, on life through the ages, which fascinated me. I mean I didn’t know anything about evolution or anything about the connections, but the idea of all these different forms, I remember being excited.

[13:48] Can you give us a rough sense of when that might have been, at what age roughly?

Nine, ten, eleven, that sort of time.

And do you know who gave it to you?

Probably my father, or my parents. I’ve still got it. I can bring it in and show you.

Oh yes please. Who taught you to read?

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 7 C1672/02 Track 1

That again, I can’t tell you. I mean I was never considered backward or forward, I don’t think. Whether I could read when I actually went to infant school, I can’t remember. I had two maiden aunts who were both primary school teachers and so I’m sure that they encouraged me. And I used to read under the bedclothes quite a lot, and I suppose this would be eight, nine, so I could read by then. Well, obviously I hope I could read by then.

Why were you reading under the bedclothes?

Because the lights were out.

What did you play with inside, sort of toys-wise, or craft?

[14:53] I haven’t the faintest idea. Not craft, I don’t think. You know, I was never into model aeroplanes or that sort of thing. I had Dinky Toys. Again, they’ve retreated into the mist of antiquity.

[15:13] You said that your father, although he went to church with you, wasn’t sort of keen to go himself necessarily. What about your mother? Perhaps she couldn’t actually go to church, but what was her connection with religion?

I honestly can’t answer that, I just don’t know. I mean I never remember her going to church, but I don’t think there was any antagonism in the family as such. You know, church was just one of the things in the background. Certainly my, well, in that generation of course, they were married in church, I was baptised, etc. Nothing more than that, really.

[15:57] And at the time when as you say you were sort of thrown together with your father to some extent and became friends, what did you learn about his sort of outlook on the world, his sort of more general thoughts about what was good, what wasn’t good, what was right, what was wrong, that sort of thing, a kind of wider, his wider sort of take on things?

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 8 C1672/02 Track 1

He was very much involved with his professional work, with his colleagues at the hospital, which is now the Royal… well, it was then the Royal Infirmary. I always remember sitting on the edge of Morecambe Bay at Grange-over-Sands with him reading The Lancet and said, ‘Do you realise there’s one bucket of sewage to every four of seawater just in there?’ both of us having just bathed. He was a fairly heavy smoker, sort of a twenty or thirty man a day smoker. As I say, after the seaside holidays we used to go and walk, not very strenuously, in the Lake District. Whether we talked, I suppose we did talk, but I can’t remember what we talked about.

[17:13] What are your memories of your first school, would it have been called a primary school or an infant school?

Well, I went for a term to a school one of my aunts was the headmistress of, an infant school, and then the new school opened and I moved into that. It was a brand new school.

Do you remember, I mean obviously this is a bit of a long shot – I’m not sure that I would – but do you remember anything of the sort of content of teaching and learning at that stage?

Nothing whatsoever.

So your first memories of teaching and learning come at the grammar school?

Well, I went from that school, from the primary school, I then took the eleven-plus, passed the eleven-plus, and then moved to, not the local grammar school, in fact it was two away because it was supposed to be a better school. And that’s when I remember beginning learning, as it were.

[18:22] And what do you remember about that?

I remember being, well we started with French and Latin and I was always rather fascinated with Latin because it was a nice logical language, as opposed to French which was a pain. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 9 C1672/02 Track 1

Biology was a matter of dictation and writing down things. Chemistry was quite fun. So I was doing the normal sort of things that I suppose grammar school boys of that era did.

And do you have particular memories of teachers?

I remember that the biologist was called Stevenson. The Latin man was William Snezzar. Physics was Crane, who was also the physical jerks man, as it were. Headmaster was Norwood, who was an Oxford historian. Who else there? I think they were all men, there may have been one or two women. That’s about it.

Do you have any sense of what the status of science was in relation to other subjects at the school?

Oh, it was taken seriously. It wasn’t a science time as such, I mean we were working towards, in those days, the School Certificate and so one was doing all these subjects fairly evenly, the same level. I don’t think it was actually promoted or relegated in any sense.

[20:20] And when you, before school and after school, what do you remember of relations between your parents? I realise that, again, that they’re affected by this particular condition, but what’s your memory of your two parents?

Not very much in fact. I mean I used to have to go off early to school, you know, two bus rides and sort of ten or twelve miles, and got home, we used to have a high tea in the northern sense, and my father used to go off to the surgery. No, I don’t have any sort of memory of their relationship.

And which one of them would tend to ask you about school or…

Couldn’t tell you. Probably my mother, who would be in when I got home.

Were you involved to any extent in caring for her as a…

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 10 C1672/02 Track 1

No, not really. I mean I helped, but when she was, as it were, deteriorating, I was away at boarding school most of the time.

Okay. [21:32] Could you take us then to boarding school and describe that as a physical place, but also as a kind of social place and tell us about the people that you met and were friends with and so on?

Well, I went there in 1948. I was taken by my father, handed over to the housemaster and his wife. The houses were all separate so we very much lived within the house, as it were. I had done far more science than other people of that ilk who had come up through the traditional prep schools, done far less Latin and no Greek, or French. So I was really rather cross at not having as much science as I would have liked to, although certainly I did have science and I took science O levels. It was a slightly odd situation in that the previous housemaster, who’d been a very successful one, had been promoted to a bigger house, somebody else had just come in. The entrance to the house – the one who’d left took the ones with him who he had entered, so we were a rather ‘job lot’ as it were, and it turned out to be a remarkably good mixture. We ended up by winning all the inter-house things and all the rest of it. And so some of those remained, I’m friends with still. Things were very much based on houses rather than subjects. One knew the people in one’s form, but that was about it. And for the record, I have no memory whatsoever of any bullying or sexual misdemeanours at that time. I mean despite all the things the books say.

Could you describe a typical day at boarding school?

Lessons started at half past seven, preceded by a cold bath. Half past seven to quarter past eight, come back for breakfast, chapel at nine, into school at nine until half past eleven. Break for games until lunch, break for games till about four, four to half past five, more lessons. High tea/supper, prep in the evening, bed.

Could you describe the chapel part of the day? We’ll describe other parts of the day.

Well, at that time it was compulsory chapel every day, apart from Mondays when we met in the assembly hall, and it was a reading, a hymn, prayer. I don’t think there was anything more to it than that. I mean it was very much an introduction to the day, as it were. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 11 C1672/02 Track 1

How engaged in it were you, in the content of it?

I took confirmation seriously, which was sort of eighteen months into my time there. I used to quite enjoy it and it was certainly, it was before adolescent reaction in the sixties, I mean this was the mid fifties. So chapel was fairly seriously part of life. Sunday there were morning and evening prayer and again, compulsory. Varied whoever was preaching, some was good, some was bad, as most preachers.

How was the morning and evening prayer organised? I’ve not been to a boarding school so it’s difficult for me to imagine any of this, but in what way was it compulsory, if you see what I mean, how was it set up?

Well, everybody went. You had a… it was graded from senior to junior at the back, so you had your pew you sat in. You didn’t sit in any particular order, but I mean that’s the pew you were sitting in. The services were fairly straightforward Anglican morning and evening prayer. For the Sunday services there was a robed choir, followed in by the chaplain and the headmaster, Jack Wolfenden. The school monitors, who were called preposters, used to come in just before the choir, it was their sort of privilege to come in late, almost late, as it were, so they used to stalk down and sit in their seats. Good organ, good organist. Not at first when I got there, but latterly the organist was John Stainer, the grandson of Sir John Stainer, the Crucifixion man. That’s it.

[27:23] And what was the, to the extent that you had this, what was the kind of social life of the school like? What did you do with the other boys when you weren’t working, when you weren’t actually directed in some way?

Well, very much centred around exercise. You had to do a so-called change every day, in other words change your clothes and go for a run or a swim or play something. Otherwise one read. It was the days when transistors were just about coming in and a few boys were privileged to have their own radios. At one stage I remember we used to go, a number of us, to the library and read old Punches. Sunday afternoon one could go out on one’s bicycle and you were allowed to go out to tea four miles away from the school, so you had to cycle at Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 12 C1672/02 Track 1 least four or five miles, then have tea and then come back. Very often the spare time was spent either just admiring the view or playing something like French cricket. End of that bit of conversation.

Were there particular boys that you tended to associate with, so if you were going to cycle for four miles on Sunday, are there…

Yes.

Who were they and why do you think you were…

Well, they were my mates. There was Andrew Carlos who’s now ordained, a qualified doctor, took early retirement, lives in Spain. Charlie Aldred, who ended up as a school wicketkeeper and goalkeeper, went into advertising, has now retired, but he was a sort of executive with J Walter Thompson, I think. I mean those were my two particular mates. There were, I think, was it ten of us in our year and these were the people one associated with more than other people. It wasn’t regarded as very proper to associate with people much above or below you, not that one wanted to anyway, but that was the sort of ethos.

And in what ways were you like people around you and in which ways were you unlike people around you? Did you have a sense of that?

Well, I was a rough lad from Lancashire and my first term I was, my name changed from Robert to Sam, you know, Sam, pick – you’re too young for this – Stanley Holloway and ‘Sam, pick up thy musket’ and ‘Albert and the Lion’. And Stanley Holloway was the stand- up comedian of that generation with these long monologues. He was the dustman in My Fair Lady. Anyway, because of, he was the archetypal Lancashire man, my study monitor at that time called me Sam and I’ve been Sam ever since. So I was always a slightly… I was going to say an outsider, that’s the wrong word, different to some of these more normal middle class types. Part of the reason this guy Charlie Aldred who ended up in advertising, he had a scholarship from some school in Derbyshire, so he and I were the outsiders in that sense, but I don’t think we were ever really regarded as outsiders. In a sense we were just part of the gang, but we were slightly different. I had my adolescent spurt just about the time I got there, so I was more or less my present height as a new boy. So I wasn’t… and I was always Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 13 C1672/02 Track 1 slightly clumsy, I was never particularly athletic, but I used to enjoy playing games, and I did play games.

Did you speak with a Lancashire accent when you were…

Yeah. I don’t know how acute it was, but certainly it was there. And I can relapse into it when I try hard.

[32:30] And when you were reading, you said this was one of the activities that you might do in leisure time, what by this age were you reading when you were reading, apart from Punch?

Oh… not very serious things we were reading. I mean I never really got down into all the classical books that one is supposed to read. It was just leisure reading, filling in the time, as it were.

Did you read fiction or non-fiction or do you not remember strongly either way?

Mainly fiction, I think. I mean one was, there was always the titillating books. I’m trying to remember who the chap was. There was Dennis Wheatley, who was very popular among some of my cohort. I never really warmed to him, but I certainly read some of his. There was a house library which, you know, we used to call upon. I can visualise the library but I can’t remember what was in it.

Thank you. And how did you communicate with your father over…

We used to, I mean this was the days before regular telephone calls. I think a weekly letter both ways, more or less. Whether it was absolutely every week, that I can’t remember, but it was certainly most weeks.

Do you remember what your father might tend to write about in those letters to you?

No. What had been happening, which was pretty trivial.

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 14 C1672/02 Track 1

And it was at this time that he’d moved into the NHS?

He moved into the NHS just before I went away to school.

[34:21] What do you remember sort of actually physically or in reality that move to NHS? You said at the very beginning that it became too much to bear, but while he was involved, what did you see?

Not very much, I mean he was involved in more travelling because he was attached to a number of different hospitals, rather than just the surgery he had before and he used to, I think, get slightly frustrated with the administrations in some places, but it was never anything that really rubbed off on me.

[35:01] So holiday, could you give me some memories of holidays at the time you were at boarding school but you were going back home in the holidays.

Right.

What then are you sort of confronting in terms of family life when you go home?

Playing games with friends. Playing tennis on the public courts. In the summer going off on holidays, sort of bed and breakfast, boarding house type places with my father. We once got to Scotland, which was a big excitement. I mean we’re only just recovering from the war. Because my father had a slightly, had a practice which extended into rural areas we were never particularly short of things like eggs or hens, so I think we had quite a comfortable war as opposed to what many people did. What else did we do? What I did? I used to go, cycle around by myself, I used to walk, used to go down by the river, I remember that. I had a newspaper round for quite a long time – this was before I went away to school. Once or twice I stayed with people I was at school with. That’s about it, I think.

Thank you. [36:40] Can you tell me about the development then of your interest in science at school? You mentioned that you focussed to some extent on science. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 15 C1672/02 Track 1

Well, as I say, I began by doing science. My father said I could be anything I wanted to be in life except being a dentist, which is what he was. And I tended, because it was a quasi- medical life I was brought up in, that I was going to be a doctor, and in fact I had a place at Cambridge to read medicine. So I went, having done School Certificate, I was the last cohort that did School Certificate, I then went on to the science side and specialised in the sciences, which I used to enjoy doing. My last year – this was after my father had died – I decided I didn’t really want to be a doctor and I told my housemaster I couldn’t stand people. So he sent a telegram to Cambridge saying ‘Berry reading biology’, which is why I read biology. That’s the sort of thing that happened in those days, I suppose. Well, it did happen in those days. [laughs]

Why did you… can you expand on why you think you said that you couldn’t stand people, at that age, stage?

I think I was just more at home with what I… my school life, my concepts, my imaginings of Arthur Ransome, rather than having to deal with the nitty-gritty of people who weren’t reacting as I liked them to react. I don’t know, but…

Did you have certain people in mind or certain experiences of people in mind?

Don’t think so. Don’t think so. [38:48] I mean at a later stage, and I mean presumably you may want to get on to this, when I was coming towards the end of university life and what was I going to do afterwards, and I went on a two-week course run by the church Pastoral Aid Society really to test out how one would envisage being a clergyman, and one of the clear decisions, conclusions I came to, was that I’d be an absolutely disastrous parson. So that was, as it were, a door closed very firmly. One of the few things that was being clear to me.

We needn’t necessarily stick to a chronological order, so could you tell me now why you came to that conclusion on that course?

Well, I mean slightly to go back, I read biology at Cambridge as I say, I was involved with the Christian Union and the pecking order of all keen Christians in those days were if you Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 16 C1672/02 Track 1 were really holy you went abroad as a missionary, if you were pretty holy you got ordained as a clergyman, if you were fairly holy you taught, and then there was the riff-raff who did everything else. I didn’t have any particular desire or calling to go abroad, so the clergy side was something to try out. That door having closed, I still hadn’t got anything to do, so I started applying for jobs as a schoolteacher, and nobody would give me one, so the line of least resistance was to stay where I was in the university world. But I mean at that stage one doesn’t know anything about career prospects, pecking order, all the rest of it. I was interested in how genes actually did things and there were two people in this country who were leaders in that, one in London, one in Edinburgh. I wrote to the guy in London, said, you know, any chance of doing a PhD with you. He had one studentship which he’d already offered to a girl and been accepted, then the day I wrote to him he’d had a letter from her saying she was getting married and he could stuff his PhD. So I went to see him, he accepted me as a PhD and the rest is history, literally.

Thank you. Okay, great, we’ll come back to that. [41:33] It might be difficult, but I wonder whether you could tell me how you came to know that your father had died and then your response to it personally, because it happens at a sort of, well I suppose any time would be significant, but this seems to be…

Well, this was… I was in the sixth form, two years before leaving, and my housemaster called me out of a lesson and said my father had died, hadn’t I better go home. So I said, well I suppose so. So I went home, I didn’t know anything about how he died until I got home and was told that he’d committed suicide. And I remember at the time going for long walks – I was home for about a week – there was an inquest and then the funeral. Just asking why, not really prayer in any sense, it was, you know, what was the meaning of all this, was there a meaning behind it. As I say, I went out on walks, I was living at home with my mother. Then there was the inquest, which I didn’t attend, but the verdict was suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed as a result of overwork, that was the actual decision. Fairly soon after that, perhaps I shouldn’t have done, but I deserted my mother, went back to school to live normal life again as far as I could. As I say, that was in my next to the end of the time at school. Because I didn’t have things to do in the holidays I was, one of the masters at school invited me to a Christian house party, which again I didn’t know anything at all about, but I mean I knew him through the Christian Union at school, for what it’s worth - it was hardly a Christian Union – Christian meeting. So I went off on that and that’s when I really Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 17 C1672/02 Track 1 committed myself as a Christian, because it all made sense, it was from my point of view a logical answer that Christ had died to provide answers to the why I’d been asking. So in no sense was this a mystical experience or an emotional experience, it was straightforward, this is the answer to questions I’ve been asking.

The questions you were asking about why your father had…

And what was all the purpose of life and why we’re… again, I don’t think I’d formulated the questions properly, but asking the questions about the meaning of life, as one would now call it, I suppose.

[44:39] Could you tell me a bit more than about what you’ve described as the Christian meeting at school, what did that consist of?

It was about half a dozen – well, there were two meetings in fact, the Chaplain had one and the Assistant Chaplain had another one – and we used to meet on Sunday afternoons once a month or so and either read something or be told something or there was a visiting speaker. Very much a Christian ethos over and above the more formal nature of chapel.

Were there things that you were told or read in those meetings that were particularly striking so that you can remember them now?

No. No. What I do, I mean one of the few things I can remember, it’s nothing to do with the meeting, was the Sunday I was ordained - not ordained - confirmed at school and the assistant chaplain who had been taking the confirmation class in my house – as I say, all these things were done by houses – he actually preached on the Sunday before the confirmation on the text in Revelations 3.20, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock, if any man open the door I will come in to him and sup with him’. And I remember at that time following through exactly what he was saying and being very impressed and taken by it, as one was, being hyped up for confirmation. So in a sense that was my introduction I suppose to the Christian meeting. I don’t know whether he sensed anything in me, or what. I spoke at his funeral just before Christmas, age ninety-four. But the Christian meeting was a pleasant thing, a good thing and you got a good tea. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 18 C1672/02 Track 1

[46:59] So was it when you went back to school, your father having died, that your housemaster invited you to the party, the Christian house party?

Oh no, no, he wasn’t the housemaster, it was the chaplain, the assistant chaplain.

The chaplain, okay.

Yes, it was after that. Because I didn’t have anything to do in the summer holidays. You know, what are you doing? Well, come down to Dorset for a fortnight.

Okay, could you describe that, holiday would you call it?

Very much a holiday, yeah. Lots of games. I mean one of the slightly more senior people there was David Sheppard, you know, and one sort of looked agog at him. He was certainly playing for Cambridge in those days, whether he was actually in the Test team, I don’t know. But there was, he and John Dewes who used to open for Cambridge and then England, and we had an excellent time in the Dorset countryside, talks morning and evening that meant something.

And this might be a naïve question, but it would be all boys, because it’s linked to the school.

Yes.

Okay.

I mean the only girls were those who served us in the kitchen. [laughs] With the help of, my wife came as a helper. Years later she was absolutely horrified, refused to have anything more to do with it afterwards.

Why?

Because of male dominated world. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 19 C1672/02 Track 1

And so what did you do in the Dorset countryside, what were the activities?

We went sailing, we went up on the hills, we played lots of games on site, it was a boarding school so there were plenty of facilities. Went to the Tank Museum at Bovington. Bovington? Anyway, wherever. Any stately homes about the place. I mean it was a mixture of education, fun and some fairly solid Christianity.

And when in the day did the fairly solid Christianity happen?

We used to have an evening talk and I think a morning talk, and the rest of the day was games or expeditions.

What might have been the content of the talk, the talks?

Oh, the talks were straightforward Christian gospel: why are we here, what is sin about, what is the Bible about, can you trust the Bible, how do you respond to God, what has Christ done? I can probably give you an outline of the whole talks if you’re really…

I would be interested, yes.

I mean leading up to what was always called ‘The Way’ and The Way was the accepting of Christ as your saviour, and then after that, which would be rather more than halfway through the camp or the house party, would be the follow-up of prayer, Bible reading, coping with boredom at school and so on. But I mean these house parties still go on and they still have the same pattern of talks. I’m sure the actual talks and the illustrations have changed.

So these are sort of interpretations of the Bible with sort of quotes from the Bible?

Quotes from the Bible and more up-to-date quotes. I mean topical examples.

Thank you. [50:48] You said that when you first went to boarding school it was awful, but then after a while…

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Well, just being away from home, I mean. You know, pure homesickness.

What did you miss particularly?

I suppose… can I really answer that? Being able to settle down in my own room by myself. You know, you were in a dormitory with eight or ten other people. Difficult to get away by yourself. It was always more formal than at home, almost by definition. I mean why is one homesick? It is something that one’s sick for, whether one can identify it or not, I don’t know. It’s a change.

Thanks. [51:40] Could you then take us to Cambridge and describe your sort of initial impressions, first days at Cambridge, studying as we now know, biology rather than medicine.

I went up, as I say, to a college which had a strong medical tradition, in fact I shared a room with a medic. One soon got into the hang of the lectures and practicals and all the rest of it. Inevitably when one starts one has all sorts of ambitions of games one’s going to play. I used to play football, I played fives, played a bit of cricket in the summer. I joined the Christian Union. What else did I join? Can’t remember anything else I joined at that stage.

For those, this kind of life might be unfamiliar, when you say you shared a room, can you describe the room that you’re sharing?

This was Cambridge, so we had a sitting room and two bedrooms. And the chap I was sharing a room with was a very keen bridge player and he very often used to go off and play bridge somewhere else, and of course everything gets locked at ten so he couldn’t get back, so he’d be playing bridge all night. I had a very nice room actually, overlooking the marketplace in Cambridge, so you could look out and see what the world was doing.

And what was sort of… we get an impression of student social life now, what constituted student social life then, what did young people at university do when they weren’t working?

[laughs] Everything. I didn’t. I suppose one was a bit of a prude and one was a Christian, therefore one didn’t drink. I remember getting very drunk at the dinner for freshmen in Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 21 C1672/02 Track 1 college on port, which was vile. I mean not the port, being sick was. I don’t think I did socialise much in the modern sense, but as I say, I played games a bit, never very seriously. I mean the fives I could have been better at, but all the university matches were on Sunday and at that time was a thing one didn’t aim to do, you know, Sundays were not for games. Did I play anything else? I don’t think I did, but the days were full enough doing things and of course one had quite long practicals, more than some subjects do.

What were the students doing that you weren’t doing? When you say that they were doing everything and you describe yourself as a bit of a prude, what were they doing that you weren’t, if you like?

Well, I wasn’t doing it, so I don’t know. Dancing, politics, various intellectual pursuits, I suppose. But I can’t really answer the question because it’s what they were doing and I wasn’t.

But did you have any sense of what the politics that they were doing involved?

No, because being university there was a complete span from being on the right of Maggie Thatcher to the left of Aneurin Bevan.

[55:46] Thank you. We’ll come back to the Christian Union at Cambridge, but could you tell us about the sort of academic content of the first year, who was teaching you and what seems to stand out in your memory as being the sort of striking elements of…

One did three subjects. My first year I did zoology, botany and biochemistry. Zoology – I’m trying to sort out the first and second years – I think most of the first part was taught by a man called John Ramsay on the physiological approach to the lower animals. There was a fair amount of taxonomy, going through the animal kingdom, and the same in the botany. Biochemistry I used to get completely lost with. There was a man called Webb who taught us, who used to quack like a duck and his final lecture of the course, he was just retiring, somebody brought a duck into the lecture theatre and it quacked down at him at the front of the lecture theatre. That was it. Second year I got really fed up of doing practicals, the choice really was to do geology which meant remembering a heck of a lot of names. And so Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 22 C1672/02 Track 1

I did a half unit in the history and philosophy of science. Philosophy left me absolutely cold. I mean it was intellectual masturbation. The only reason I got through the philosophy bit of it was Jonathan Miller was also doing the course and he used to come in ten minutes late to all the lectures, park his bicycle halfway down the lecture theatre and then take the mickey out of the lecture. So it was worth going to the lectures for that. The history really opened my eyes. We had a basic history of science course and then there were specialist courses, depending on your discipline: you were in physics, biology and all the rest of it, and the two biology ones I did, one was on the history of cytology and about learning about how people learnt about cells and so on. The other was by Charles Raven, who by that time had retired, but had been Regius Professor of Divinity. But I think he was actually a better birdwatcher than theologian. But he talked about the history of biology and the influence of observation as opposed to the formal biology of the Middle Ages, the bestiaries and the, what do you call them, florals – herbals. And I mean he had a theory, not a theory, his story was that the Reformation was brought about by the Medieval craftsmen, the people who did the carving in the Medieval cathedrals who were very good observers of nature and if you actually look at some of the carving in the cathedrals you can actually recognise species and so on. And his attitude was that this attitude to reality forced itself upon the clergy as such and leading to retract from the formalism of the Middle Ages religion, in fact leading on to the Reformation, and through that to the Industrial Revolution, etc. I mean that was his line. Also the idea that experiments didn’t have an agreed solution as one had always been brought up with in school science, you know, you did an experiment and you’ve either got it right or wrong, but very often you got half right and half wrong and you then had to re-evaluate and so on and so on. So I learnt about science from Raven. And so, I mean that in a sense was one of the most educational things I certainly did in my time at Cambridge. So that was the first two years.

[1:00:47] Can you say more about what you didn’t like about the philosophy?

It was just dull. And I mean one was going round and round in circles about things that didn’t matter, you know, these concepts and axioms and all the rest of it – so what?

I’ve not studied philosophy and for the listeners who haven’t, what might be discussed in a lecture, what sort of concept, what sort of…

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What is reality? What… how people’ld approach it, people like Plato and unchanging realism, one of the biggest disasters that ever hit his science. Scientific method; how science evolves and develops, without the reality of the history. One can learn the philosophy through the history, but I think to do it the other way round to me would be the wrong way of doing it. I believe in teaching by examples rather than by general principles and drawing out the principle from the example, which I think is a much better way of learning. Certainly for me it is. So I mean the philosophy certainly didn’t fire me in the slightest.

And Jonathan Miller turned up ten minutes late, parked his bike in the lecture hall and then in what way would he interact with that?

Well, I mean the sort of lecture that the lecturer would ask a question and he would come back with some sort of repartee and get a sideshow in the middle of the lecture, which was instead of a monologue.

Thank you. [1:02:37] And over those first two years, aside from this developing interest in the history of science, were there parts of botany, or perhaps other sciences that you were covering, that appealed to you in particular or that interested you in particular?

Well, I got more and more interested in actually how genes worked. And I mean, to go back into school in a sense, biology to me was always rather fun; all the animals and their insides and how they worked, but nothing connected together until in the sixth form we came on to evolution and things began to connect up, things change into, A change into B and so on and why they did it and natural selection and mechanisms. And that became more and more fascinating. We had an evolution course as part of our zoology, which again was one of the best parts for me. Palaeontology, the fossils, we were actually lectured to not by a person on the staff who was supposed to be very dull, but by a visiting lecturer called Alfred Romer, who was a world famous authority on fossils, a visiting American. And, you know, he finished up his time in Cambridge with one of these grand lectures with all the Vice- Chancellor and people dressed up in red and the guy giving the vote of thanks said, ‘But don’t you normally finish up by singing it all?’ [sings] ‘It’s a long way from amphioxus, it’s a long way to us, goodbye fins and gill slits, welcome teeth and hair. It’s a long, long way from amphioxus, yet we came from there’. There’s about ten verses. But, you know, that was fun. And it was in a sense, you know, part of the evolution and what made me more and Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 24 C1672/02 Track 1 more interested was how genes actually worked. At the end of my second year I was then having to choose what happened for my final year and one could in fact go off and do something completely different, you could actually get the qualifications for a degree in two years, but you’d got to be there for three years, and the then Dean of the College tried to persuade me to do a bit of the theology course, which some people did, for a third year, but I resisted that. I couldn’t do a final year of zoology because in those days all the zoology involved drawing and I can’t draw. The botany involved lots of little flowers whose names I couldn’t remember, and so there was only genetics left, so I did genetics, because that was straight. That was easy, you just had parents to children, you draw a straight line.

[1:05:49] And if we could just hop back then to sixth form, how was evolution taught at sixth form?

It was part of the biology syllabus. Our schoolmaster, who was a very bright guy and I suppose he was about three-quarters of the way through his teaching career at that stage, he did his normal thing, produced detailed notes, examples from the past. It was the days before lots of visual aids, I suppose we had textbooks and so on. Nothing very special. I’ve still got his notes on gelid, what do you call it? I mean before photocopying in the modern sense. And the different mechanisms of how things can be. Lamarck – does Lamarck mean anything to you? Yeah, well you know, Lamarck was out of the window, Darwin was in. As I say, Darwin went to the same school so by definition, well, our science building was called The Darwin Building.

Was there, I mean perhaps there wasn’t, but was there any discussion of relations between evolutionary biology and religion at this stage at school?

I don’t remember any, don’t remember at all. You know, it was just what biology did.

[1:07:19] And then how was evolution taught in the first two years at Cambridge? I think you said it was part of the zoology…

There was actually an animal evolution segment in zoology. There was nothing particular – oh, in botany there was cytogenetics, chromosomes and how they perform, which obviously Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 25 C1672/02 Track 1 links together. Rather dull, but that was a thing one did and one actually looked at chromosomes, did practicals involving them and so on. But it was the zoology that actually looked at the processes much more than the botanists.

And let’s take the first thing then, looking at chromosomes, how was that done at this time in botany practicals?

You take a, well in that case of course, a plant, and take cells which are dividing and look at, separate the cells out, stain them with something or other, colchicine – well, colchicine stops them dividing - so that you then have a snapshot and then you can stain them and look at them and see the different stages of how cells divide. In zoology we had an introduction to a lecture on microscopy given by Lord Rothschild and the thing that we all did was to look at bulls’ sperm, because they were things you looked at down the electron microscope, nothing more reason for that.

And how was the – in zoology – how was the actual sort of process of evolution taught, as in what was sort of shown to you or what did you handle or what did you read?

A lot of it was fossil fish and coming on to land, the processes of adapting to life on land and obviously then in flight, what was involved in flight, how mammals developed. And what were the mechanisms behind it; adaptation, natural selection, and so on.

Was there, sort of among the students or the staff, any discussion again of sort of relations between evolution and faith or…

I remember nothing whatsoever about it. The first time I came up against it was a friend of mine who I’d actually been at school with and who I used to talk with, as one did in those days, about Christian things, and he said to me once, ‘You know, I can never become a Christian’. So I said to him, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘Because I’d have to give up believing in evolution’. I said, ‘Get stuffed’ or whatever one said in those days, you know, ‘What on earth has belief in evolution got to do with faith in the son of God?’ And I can’t remember what I said, but that’s what made me start thinking and realised there were quite a lot of people in the Christian world to whom evolution was anathema. And I started reading round part of the history of it, I started looking at actually what the Bible says about it, or doesn’t Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 26 C1672/02 Track 1 say about it, which is very little, and by the time I was a postgraduate I was occasionally giving talks to church youth groups and that sort of thing, always, ‘Sir, do you believe in evolution?’ And so I had to develop an argument about it. And then it really crystallised when I was – and this was several years later – I went to Macquarie Island, which is the only colony of Tasmania, I went to catch mice, Antarctic mice, and I gave a talk to a group of Christian doctors in Melbourne before I went out and they said to me, they were fascinated by what I did, where can we read more about it? I said well, I don’t know you can. Oh, you’d better write it down. And that’s where Adam and the Ape came from. So that was an attempt to focus what I’d been thinking and studying about. [1:12:16] There had been – I mean this is a by-line, as it were – during probably my second year at Cambridge I think it was, it may have been a bit later, there was a book written called Evolutionary Theory and Christian Faith by a man called David Lack, who was probably the leading ornithologist, certainly of that generation, probably of the century, I mean he was very much a leader. It wasn’t a very good book, but it was very much a pioneering work, certainly by somebody of that calibre, because most of the stuff written at that phase by Christians was very tentative about evolution, I mean either rejecting it or putting all sorts of caveats in. But the David Lack thing, you know, stayed with me and I’ve just written more about that, that’s another story, as it were.

[1:13:26] Thank you. Do you have a view on why you think it is that in the church groups that you were giving talks to, you said that you’d always have someone putting their hand up and saying, ‘Sir, do you believe in evolution?’, why do you think it was at that time that that was what they would be like?

They’re still doing it. It’s where does God fit into the world. I mean if the world is entirely mechanism, you know, you can describe everything, which is exactly what Richard Dawkins and co are saying, why believe in God, where is God, there’s no room for God. And evolution par excellence is how do you fit God into the system.

I sort of mean that these groups that you were talking to were likely to have included people who had no more science background than just a general school science, so why would that question… I mean was there a sort of wider, in the sort of popular media or was there a sort Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 27 C1672/02 Track 1 of wider sense that that is the question that you might ask someone who’s talking about science and religion?

I think that the thing is that if you actually come from some sort of church religious background, you’re brought up on the Bible for what it’s worth. The Bible begins with God and six days of rather hard work by God, and how does this fit together with billions of years of natural selection. You know, the whole thing doesn’t make sense, doesn’t gel together in any way. That is it and I mean we’ve still got it with ID – what’s it called? Intelligent Design, you see, which is an attempt to smuggle back, God back into the process and it’s a God of the gaps argument, again is something one might talk about, an unnecessary import into the system.

Thank you. [1:15:44] Could you tell me much more about the Cambridge Christian Union, in other words, your first encounter with it and then what being a member of it involved, and so on?

Well, some of the people involved were people I’d met on the camp I’d been to and I then went to for a number of years afterwards, who were undergraduates ahead of me. So I was sort of welcomed into a group and we had a College group, which used to meet for Bible study, talk and the Central Christian Union, which met, the normal pattern was a visiting speaker who would come down for a weekend, give a Bible study on the Saturday night in the Union and then preach an evangelistic sermon on the Sunday. That was the normal pattern. So one had the College and the university-wide links and one had one’s Christian friends within that group.

And so within the College group where did you meet, when you arrived what did you do?

We used to meet in somebody’s room, a dozen, twenty, that sort of number. I suspect that we had coffee or something, and a bun, and very often a theological student would come and give a talk, give a Bible study, perhaps we’d go through a book through the term, so week by week you’d be doing slightly different things.

And were academics involved in the Unions or was it students only?

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Mainly students, but certainly junior academics, certainly graduate students. And there were one or two, I won’t say notorious, senior members who were very much associated with the Christian Union. But I mean the Christian Union was always regarded as with suspicion by a lot of the senior members. I mean again, jumping ahead, in my final year we had a university mission from Billy Graham, which was regarded with great suspicion by the powers that be, and he knew this and apparently he was very dubious about coming. The day before the mission started he had an open meeting for academics in the Senate House in Cambridge and spoke to them about his approach and all the rest of it. They came very suspicious and ended up by sort of more or less putting their arms round him. Bob Runcie, who at that time was Vice-Principal of one of the Cambridge theological colleges, stood up after the couple of days of the mission, stood up in his theological college and said to the students, ‘I’m supposed to be giving a course on preaching to you, go and listen to this man Graham, you’ll learn far more from him than me’. Now, their theology would be very different, but the approach of Billy Graham and what one might call more informed evangelicalism was entirely acceptable. But as with all these things, you have a complete span from rabid fundamentalism to rabid Dawkin… well, whatever it is, neo-atheism, as we call it nowadays, new atheism.

The powers that be that were initially suspicious of Billy Graham coming to give the sort of Central Christian Union thing, who were the powers that be?

People like the college chaplains. I mean my own college chaplain was Hugh Montefiore at that stage, who became Bishop of Birmingham, and he was very dubious about it, but then came round to it and latterly, in his later years, he and I were really quite buddies. But at that time, you know, he was very dubious about me and all this fundamentalism stuff. It’s not what I would call fundamentalism but it is regarded as fundamentalism from outside, you actually believe the Bible. What do you mean by believing the Bible, well again, there are all sorts of nuances on that.

Sorry, so how would your college chaplain’s approach to Christianity have differed from yours as an undergraduate in the college?

Very much more liberal in his approach to behaviour, to the Christian doctrines. I mean Hugh at one time suggested that perhaps Christ was a homosexual, which got him in a lot of Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 29 C1672/02 Track 1 hot water with the powers that be. I mean nothing to do with the Christian Union. But exploring in ways which I would regard as going beyond the actual data. You know, it’s like a scientist becoming a mystic. How are you faithful to God’s revelation of himself without being too hidebound by the details of the stories in the Bible, if you like.

And would your college chaplain have been… how would he have viewed the Christian Union as a whole?

Dubious. And not really going along with his people, because the Christian Union was always rather suspicious about the organised religion of the chaplain, of the chaplains, not particularly our chaplain, their emphasis on formality and when did the form of religion actually become real religion as opposed to something that you just turn the prayer wheel and think you’ve done it.

So on what grounds were the Christian Unions suspicious of the chaplains, the organised…

That they would be not holding on to the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. I mean the whole of the Christian Union movement began effectively somewhere about the end of the first war, when there was a split within the student Christian world which effectively led to the Christian Unions on one side and the Student Christian Movement on the other, based on their understanding of the work of Christ.

Was the Student Christian Movement represented at Cambridge?

Yes. But that’s completely, not completely, it’s almost died now. I mean it’s really not more than a publishing house nowadays.

At the time you were at Cambridge what did it consist of?

There was a college group that had its meetings and did its own things. You know, I went to it once or twice but never really threw in my lot with them.

Why do you think that you… is it the continuity from school to university that explains why you were more likely to be joining the Christian Union rather than the… Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 30 C1672/02 Track 1

The continuity, I think, was the people I’d met at the house party, because I mean I knew them and they were welcoming and friendly and to me were talking sense.

[1:24:38] Just some things to tie up. I was wondering who was looking after your mother after you’d gone back to school and…

We had a live-in housekeeper. Called Ivy.

And how did your relations with your mother develop from the point that we sort of left it of you going back to school and…

I don’t remember very much about it. As I say, in retrospect I have a slightly guilty conscience that I left her, but I mean I think she was apparently happy in her own world and was being looked after and I was just on the outside. So in that sense I was, I had a slightly clear conscience.

Did you go home in the holidays?

Oh yes. I mean that was home, until she died, which was actually when I was at Cambridge, and then I went rather briefly to live with my grandfather.

This might be a difficult question to answer, but you were in quite an unusual position of having no parents at a reasonably early age, what was the… I suppose how did you feel about that is a bit of a naïve question, but what was the effect of that on you, do you think, or what thoughts and feelings did it lead to?

You know, I can’t remember it leading to anything. I mean on the one hand one wasn’t tied to anything, which gave you a certain amount of freedom. On the other hand, one needed a base. As I say this was, my mother died when I was – when was it? I think it was in my later days at Cambridge, and so when I left Cambridge I then moved to London, I was fulltime in a flat as a research student. So I mean home therefore began to recede anyway as a necessity.

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Thank you. [1:27:02] The third year then where you focus on genetics, could you give us as much detail as possible on the content of that third year?

Well, in those days the Cambridge department, which was the oldest in the world, it celebrated its centenary last year or the year before, reckoned it didn’t have the ability to teach a whole year. So gentlemen – they were gentlemen, you didn’t have any ladies in those days – gentlemen were required to do a cognate course for something like a third of the year. Most people did cytogenetics with the botanists. I did, because of my interest in what genes did, I did embryology with the zoologists. So, as I say, two-thirds of the course were genetics, one third was something else. The genetics, the professor of genetics was Ronald Fisher, who’d more or less invented genetics. And he wrote – does the neo-Darwinian synthesis mean anything to you?

Yes, but it may not to the people listening, so assume… yeah.

I mean there was an absolute hiatus in evolutionary theory, which started in 1900 when Mendel’s results were rediscovered and people started actually breeding things and looking at gene action. And this seemed to be completely different to how evolutionary processes, natural selection were supposed to operate. And there was a split between the evolutionists and the geneticists which really went down until the 1930s. It was technically, came to a head with a book by Julian Huxley published in 1942 on evolution, The Modern Synthesis, and therefore we have this idea of the evolutionary synthesis or the neo-Darwinian synthesis as it’s called. Now, in fact, the bringing together of the geneticists and the evolutionists can really be put at the feet of three major works: one by Ronald Fisher, published in 1928; a book by Jack Haldane, JBS Haldane, published in ’32; and a long, long paper by an American, Saul Wright, published in 1930. So in this sense Fisher was the grandparent of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and what he showed was that the genes that are studied by geneticists are in a sense artefacts of the experiments that you’re doing and once you’ve started looking at genes in the natural world, they’re not as cut and dried as some of the genetics, or most of the genetic experiments show. And I mean, just as a footnote to that, this is one of the reasons that made me get interested in genetical processes in the natural world, as opposed to in the laboratory. Anyway, that was, as I say, 1928 was Fisher’s book. Fast forward to the mid fifties, he was within a few years of retiring as Professor of Genetics at Cambridge. The genetics course was very specialised. It was actually given to Part II Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 32 C1672/02 Track 1 geneticists, people like me, all three of us, and Part III mathematicians, which is what you are when you become a wrangler. It was accepted that us poor geneticists wouldn’t understand all this and the second-in-command in the department used to sit in the front row, take notes and then transcribe them for the rest of the audience. But it was said a mark of respect to the professor to turn up to his lectures, so we faithfully did so. So that was the Fisher course. [1:31:35] We had a course from George Owen, who was the second-in-command, on ecological genetics, which absolutely fascinated me and I learnt about natural selection in moths and so on, which led to me spending some time in the vacations working with a man called Bernard Kettlewell in Oxford, of which more below. [1:32:02] And, as I say, I did the embryology which introduced me to how the genes actually transmit their information into what happens in a developing organism. Remember this is the time before DNA. Francis Crick was actually in the same college as me, arrogant sod, and people were speculating about what genes were and how they did it, but nobody knew at that time. Although Watson and Crick were beavering away in the Cavendish. So that that was the genetics course, that was my third year at Cambridge, and that was the time that I was casting around with what was I going to do when I finished at Cambridge, and presumably I had to do something, I had to earn my living somehow. And having failed to get a job as a teacher I then did a PhD.

[1:33:11] When you say that Francis Crick was in your college and was an arrogant sod, can you give a sense of where that description comes from? What did you observe of the way that he acted?

He was an older man and I think, I mean I never knew him really, he used to stalk about a bit and slightly look down upon us new scum at the bottom of the college. I mean he’d been, I think, in the navy in the war and he’d come back to finish his physics in the Cavendish Laboratory, so I had no contact with him academically. He was just being arrogant as a young man, so he was what he was. I used to tell my contemporaries that DNA was an artefact in the mind of God. Don’t think I’d get away with that nowadays, particularly with Francis Crick next door. [laughs] And Jim Watson has ended up, my son has been writing books with Jim Watson. Still, that’s another story. So, you know, the Watson Crick.

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[1:34:30] Could you then tell us in more detail about the ecological genetics course, in particular why this fascinated you?

Because one was dealing with real organisms, not animals in the laboratory. Fisher’s experimental material was largely breeding mice and he had all sorts of experiments about how genes were linked together. I got interested in a particular gene which actually affected the length of the tail, the size of the kidneys, and I wanted to know what was happening. And I was allowed to dissect the mice on Thursday afternoon when the professor went to the meetings of the Royal Society. So he was out of the building, you could actually cut up a mouse rather than counting it. And that was how I wanted to follow what I was doing in Cambridge afterwards, and which I did. I went to another mouse laboratory in London. [1:35:38] As far as ecological genetics was concerned, the fifties saw a realisation that a lot of species, something like a hundred species of moths had acquired dark or black forms and a man called Bernard Kettlewell, who had actually been a GP, a very keen amateur entomologist, then went on as a research fellow at Oxford to study how this blackness spread. And he showed that it was in fact as a result of predation by birds. The birds would take the more visible organisms, in this case moths, that they saw, so it was an advantage to be black in an industrial, smoky, dirty background, where it wasn’t in the traditional country, nice, open, speckled background. And he did some classical experiments on this, which were described to us in the course, and I was fascinated by this, wrote to Kettlewell and went in my last vacation on fieldwork with him. This was just at the end of the work he was doing on peppered moths. We went to a place in Yorkshire where the local GP, a man called Wilfred Pickles who ended up as the founder of the Royal College of General Practitioners, had been GP for years and years and years, and it was known in the medical world as valuable having records over several generations. The Department of Medicine in, I think, Sheffield, had been doing research on the causes of bronchitis and chest disease generally, and they’d been looking at their own city population, they wanted a rural population away from all pollution and so on, and they’d chosen to look at the health of this place in West Yorkshire, at Aysgarth where Pickles had been GP for years. Rather to their horror, they found that the incidence of bronchitis in rural Yorkshire was lower than in Sheffield, but far, far too high for their theories. And they asked Kettlewell to go and look at the amount of pollution there as measured by how dark the moths were. And it turned out that, I can’t remember the figures, but something like ninety per cent of the moths were black. Now I always remember leaning Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 34 C1672/02 Track 1 over a gate in Aysgarth with a local and you could see the smoke haze coming over on the prevailing wind from Manchester. And he said, ‘Oh, that’ll be the evening coming’. And, you know, this was the muck coming on and providing the background for the black moths. So, I mean that was the first bit I did with Kettlewell. [1:39:08] And then we went up into rural Perthshire to look at non-industrial melanism. Then I spent four summers up in the Shetland Islands working on moths with Kettlewell later on.

[1:39:28] In that last vacation as an undergraduate, could you describe in detail what you did with Kettlewell, I mean what you did in the field?

Well, in Yorkshire, and again, a place just outside Glasgow, what we did was to leave traps with female moths in which would attract male moths. And they’re sort of, if you like, lobster pot type traps, so the moth would come in to the female but couldn’t get at her, so you were collecting them. So we left one in Aysgarth, we left one in Yorkshire. And that was really a matter of just finding a site to leave the traps and go away and come back, see what was happening later. In Perthshire the species we were working on there, the one that Kettlewell was working on, was in part of the relic Caledonian Forest and this meant lumping a great generator that produced, generated electricity for a trap to attract the moths. And this was left in the Black Wood of Rannoch and we used to go every morning and see what was in the trap.

And what did you learn about, at this stage, learn about Kettlewell as a person from presumably driving about with him and walking about with him?

He was an enormous extrovert, he was – and I’ve said this in print – the best naturalist I’ve ever met, and one of the worst scientists. Because he was a typical medic; he used to decide what the diagnosis was and then you had to respond to the diagnosis and make the facts fit and, you know, if the facts didn’t fit that was a problem. And later on when he and I were publishing together, I used to have to be very tactful in introducing ideas to him. As I say, he was a very good naturalist. He had been catching lepidoptera since his schooldays. He’d been a great mate of Peter Scott when he had been an undergraduate at Cambridge and the two of them used to go off shooting and then Peter Scott went off into his ducks and geese, Bernard went more into his lepidoptera. He was also always a person to be good to be Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 35 C1672/02 Track 1 around in the field because he saw things that one didn’t see. I wouldn’t say I was a naturalist, I’m not, he was an excellent naturalist. And he was good company; he had lots of stories, catching moths is a very gentlemanly pursuit in that you don’t have to get up early in the morning and once the trap is set you can just leave it and go back to see next day.

[1:42:49] And do you remember what you observed, you know, I wonder whether you got to the sort of findings of the work or whether this was help with fieldwork and then…

As far as I was concerned, I was purely slave labour. The peppered moth – sorry, not the peppered… sorry, the mottled beauty in the Black Wood of Rannoch, the story there was fascinating because this is no question of pollution and there are two forms: there’s a light and a darker form of the moth and they sit on the tree trunks in the old forest and they’re very often disturbed by ants walking up the tree trunk. When they fly, the dark forms are almost invisible in flight, when they’re sitting the dark form is more visible. So that the dark forms are at a disadvantage at one stage and at an advantage the other. So you have a balance of advantage and disadvantage, which is fairly typical of so many genetic situations. I mean it’s the, if you like, a less extreme form as you get in the industrial business where there is a black trunk or a light trunk. And what has happened in the industrial area, since the Clean Air Act and the countryside has got very much more cleaner, the black forms have decreased enormously. There is a classical study done by Cyril Clarke, Cyril Clarke was a medic together with Kettlewell when they were undergraduates, he went on to be President of the Royal College of Physicians, latterly he took up lepidoptery again. He used to catch these moths in his back garden on the Wirral and showed the decline in the black form in the Liverpool area from something like ninety per cent down to under twenty per cent in the years following the Clean Air Act.

What did he talk to you about when you weren’t talking about setting traps and moths and evolution?

His experiences in different parts of the world catching moths, his experiences in different parts of Britain driving around in a great old Plymouth car that he used to have, his life in the rural Oxfordshire which he used to live in. Anything that came to mind, it was a very relaxed existence we lived in. At a later stage we worked in Caithness and he spent a lot of time Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 36 C1672/02 Track 1 fishing, he was a very keen fisherman. So I mean as with all fishermen, the problem with how you catch fish and what sort of fly to use, etc, etc.

[1:45:54] Could you then tell me about the embryology third of your third year?

A lot of it was concerned with the development of amphibia, because it’s a lot easier to do experiments on amphibia than certainly on mammals and to some extent with birds. And what stimulates one organism, one organ to become another organ. I mean you start off with a single cell, then you get a ball of cells, how does that ball of cells become liver and skin and bone and all the rest of it. One of the key things, which is what I went on to study in my PhD, was how the primary long axis, the notochord, then generates vertebrae, spinal cord and so on. So this was the, as it were, the theory that was being put over to us in the embryology.

What then was the theory of how that sort of axial form developed?

Well, I don’t think people really know still, whether this is some chemical that percolates out, whether there’s a, there’s certainly some sort of gradient. Probably it’s more a sort of physical chemical gradient rather than an outside substance. But there was a lot of talk about ‘the organiser’ and what the organiser was and could one identify what this was, could one isolate it and experiments to do this by transplanting bits into other bits, and so on.

[1:47:55] And you say that your PhD was a topic developed out of…

Well, what happened with the man I went to do a PhD with in University College, he was working on mutants of mice and what he used to do with PhD students was to give them a mutant and say work out how this mutation is affecting, working out during the life of the animal. Now, he started off by giving me a mutation which is caused in hydrocephalus, in other words, water on the brain in mice. And I worked on this for the better part of two years without getting really very far in understanding what the mechanism was. I mean I could go back, and this was going back before birth, collecting embryos from pregnant animals, to show when the thing first became manifest, but there was obviously something going on in the cells which was beyond anything I could do, beyond the techniques available at that time. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 37 C1672/02 Track 1

So he then gave me another mutation to work on, which had been found as having a short or a kinky tail. It was a mutation called pintail. Now, it turned out that these mice are born with normal tails, but when they start to grow up and move around and are weaned they bash their tails and a kink develops. When you start looking at the embryology, the notochord, the thing that stimulates the formation and outgrowth of the tail in one sense and the vertebrae is very much smaller in the mutant mice and when you have the homozygote, the double mutant, it’s smaller still. In fact, in the double dose ones, it is so small that you don’t really get the kidneys developing properly and very often these mice die of kidney problem rather than anything else. So the homozygote, the double dose, suffers not so much from a short tail but from kidney defects. So very few homozygotes actually survive. So this was a nice story about the relationship of the notochord and the tail and you could show that there’s a relationship between the contact of the neural tube which lies above the notochord and the notochord itself, how much contact there was and how much cell division there was, and the less cell division, the less notochord and the less tail. So that became a nice story. I then went back to hydrocephalus and my PhD was actually the study of both mutants, with a better story from the pintail rather than the hydrocephalus.

Thank you. [1:51:27] When you say that you looked into this and studied this, could you give a sense of what that involves practically at this time? How do you attempt to see the things you’re seeing, okay failing to some extent with the first one, succeeding with the second one, what is involved in actually doing the work. So if you’re standing at a lab bench, we might imagine, what are you doing?

Well, go back from the lab bench. You’ve got some live mice, some of them have a mutation which is causing a problem and their brother and sister doesn’t have that mutation. So you can mate up a pair of mice and you expect that a proportion of their children, if you do it properly, fifty-fifty, are going to carry the gene or not carry the gene. You then can kill off pregnant females, normal gestation in mice is about eighteen days, so you then start looking at sixteen days, fourteen days of pregnancy to see if you can see a difference between the embryos at that stage. So in fact you’re looking at the target organs earlier and earlier in embryology. Nowadays one can go back into gene action and really get back into very early embryos. In my day you were talking about nine or ten days as about the earliest you could go back to find any effect, some morphological effect.

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And so how do you do the actual studying, the looking into these?

Well, you collect the embryo, you then kill it and you fix it and effectively, well you can do one of two things. You can actually look at the whole embryo by making some sort of clear preparation of it to see how far the bones have developed, or you can put it in wax and then serially section it, so you’re looking at the organ through in-depth, along the length of the embryo. So a lot of my practical work in PhD was making serial sections of mouse embryos and then looking at them.

And waiting, or trying to identify the point at which the mutated gene results in a difference in the way that the embryo develops?

Yeah, yeah. I mean let’s say you get to twelve days, you can say that’s an abnormal, that’s a normal, eleven days, I don’t think I can do it. So it must be something that’s happening at that stage.

And why is it that with the pintail rather than the hydrocephalus that the technologies available at the time, that that was a more visible structure or change?

Because what is happening in the hydrocephalus is you’re talking about the movement of fluids across various barriers and you could vaguely see that there was something wrong with the tissues there, but you couldn’t see what it was. With the pintail you’re actually counting the number of cell divisions.

[1:55:09] Thank you. And over the period that we’ve been talking about, which is your sort of final year of undergraduate and your PhD, how is your involvement with the Christian Union developing and any other sort of Christian organisations?

Well, I mean there’s a break, if you like. I come down from Cambridge, I come to London to do my PhD. I actually move into a flat as a result of somebody I’d known at Cambridge and somebody who was moving out of his flat, he was a medical student, so I moved in with him. He was a member of the local church, I joined the local church and I mean that was, you know, my church life, as it were. As, you know, you might be anywhere. So I mean that was Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 39 C1672/02 Track 1 the end of my Christian Union life, as it were. [1:56:07] Now, what happened at the same time - I was only reminded of that earlier today for some reason - the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship had been set up, what, ten years, fifteen years previously, and the man who set it up, Oliver Barclay, had known me as an undergraduate at Cambridge and he co- opted me, or shanghaied me, whatever language you want to use, to be a member of a study group in London preparing papers for the annual conference of the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship. His attitude was that there was a duty on Christian scientists, or scientists who are Christian, to learn how to write and talk and think rather than just superficially think, you know, that’s fine. And so it was him that introduced me into reading about science and faith and so on and I became a member of this group which each year was preparing a paper for the annual conference. And that was, if you like, in parallel with normal church life.

How had he known you – Oliver Barclay that is – how had he known you as an undergraduate?

I can’t remember. Can’t remember. I mean he was travelling round universities; he used to visit – he himself was a zoologist, so he probably had some sort of interest in the biologists and at some stage he’d obviously got his claws into me.

[1:58:04] Thank you. First of all then, can you tell me about what you call your normal church life in London? What do I mean by tell me about it? Well, you know, the sort of routines, practices, people, you know, what it involved?

The church was in South Kensington, which in those days was still very much a student area. The church I went to, which was just round the corner, as it were, had a lot of students, a lot of students from Imperial College, because Imperial College was on the doorstep. There was a chap called Barrie Wetherill who was doing his PhD in statistics, who I was friendly with. There was a group of young people, we had a Young People’s Fellowship, we used to have talks, very often go out to coffee afterwards, etc. So, normal morning and evening services and the Young People’s Fellowship. That was church life. As I say, very much student orientated because it was that area.

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Morning and evening services daily?

No, no, no, weekly. I mean pure weekly.

[1:59:30] And do you remember the people in the church giving the sermons in particular, or leading the…

I knew the vicar and I knew the curate who had been at theological college in Cambridge when I was there, and he was the first curate they’d ever had, so he and I were quite matey.

And the Young People’s Fellowship, what did it… when you said you went for coffees after the discussions, what were the discussions?

Oh, any topic with any Christian bearing, be it music, be it ethics, be it relationships. I mean that’s probably where I gave my first talk on science and religion. There was a man in the congregation, Alan Parks, who became President of the Royal College of Surgeons. And I know he gave one or two talks. And then visiting preachers, perhaps they would come and speak to the Young People’s Fellowship afterwards.

Do you remember what you would have said in this first talk on science and religion to the Young People’s Fellowship?

No. But I’m sure that I said there’s no barrier between them, that you can be a Christian and a scientist and in fact the two complement rather than contradict each other, but what I said, don’t ask me.

[2:01:11] Okay. And how then did the study group, the London study group differ in its approach to religion and to the Bible?

I don’t think it differed at all, except that one was talking about a subject, for example, and the thing I was thinking about this morning was effectively why is there so much misery and disease in the natural world, I mean I’m not talking about the human world, and how does it Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 41 C1672/02 Track 1 fit in with our understanding of a loving God. Now this is not, you might touch on this in a church situation, but this was getting, digging much more deeply than you would in church.

Digging much more deeply, meaning?

Into the meaning, the problems, the possible solutions, what people have suggested, what the literature is. I mean in a church situation you’d be given a prescription and then you might discuss it for quarter of an hour or something. When you’re sitting round a table for an hour and a half at a time you’re getting down to it, as I say, digging much more deeply into it.

Who else was in your London study group?

That I can’t remember. It was led by Oliver Barclay, because we used to meet in his office, who was the secretary of the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship. I’m fairly certain that one of the other members was Gareth Jones who was doing his PhD with JZ Young at University College and had just retired as Professor of Anatomy in Otago in New Zealand. But beyond that I can’t, I mean I know who was around at that time, whether they were actually in the group, in particular groups, which changed from year to year, I mean you didn’t have the same membership, that I can’t tell you.

[2:03:12] And how did graduate students, researchers in science who might have wanted to join an organisation such as this who weren’t kind of, I think you said Oliver got his hooks into you, and so he sort of picked you, but if you wanted to join this organisation, how would you find out about it? Were there posters in departments or did it advertise itself? How would you know that it existed so that you could say, ooh…

That’s a fifty dollar question right at the moment, how do you get these things known in the student world. Very often students will have a talk on science and faith. I mean there’s a girl from Royal Holloway at the moment who’s got very keen and is trying to set up a group of Christians in Science in London and she started within her own department. Discovered two or three of them were Christians and so they put up a notice and had a meeting and got, you know, a whole lot of people turned up. But it’s very random how this develops and it varies Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 42 C1672/02 Track 1 from, obviously, from university to university. It’s a lot easier, probably, in a residential university than a community one like London.

But as you say, you had the meetings in Oliver Barclay’s office, so the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship was an established sort of organisation. I wondered how it at the time attempted, if it did, to advertise itself, to grow, to attract members?

It had an annual conference and it had occasional evening meetings and the evening meetings there would be posters about the place. I never knew where they were exhibited because I wasn’t really interested because I was on the other side of it, I knew the meeting was going to be. But there was always a problem of how you did actually advertise these sorts of things, because I mean there’s no obvious medium to do it that everybody reads. I mean whether you ought to do it through Twitter or something, I don’t know.

But at this time when new members joined, did you have any sense of how they’d heard about the organisation or why they’d joined or that sort of thing?

Very often it was through Oliver who was travelling a lot in universities. In a Christian Union whether you have a keen scientist, they might start asking questions as to how they could learn more about it and then be put in touch with something like the RSCF. But certainly no formal sausage machine to get from A to B. I mean it would be a lot easier if there was, but how you get in touch with these people, you know, you go to a lecture and probably find that – a normal university lecture – there may be half a dozen Christians, how do you know? You don’t stand up and say, ‘Praise the Lord’ or ‘Allahu akbar’ or whatever.

Okay, thank you. [2:06:36] And at this time, how was this group viewed by other scientists, perhaps in your field, who weren’t themselves Christians? So when you told colleagues who weren’t scientist Christians that you were a member of this group and you were in the study group and you were going to conference, how was it viewed?

I don’t think the group as such was regarded, you know, you were known as a person who went to church or you may be known as a person who went to church. Whether you were involved in other things only came at another stage of the conversation. I mean, put it this way, I am now known in parts of the academic world as a Christian who’s been involved in Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 43 C1672/02 Track 1 these issues, but that’s only after a long time and writing things that people know about and so on. At that stage my guess is that it wouldn’t be known.

And so your supervisor, for example?

Who was an Orthodox Jew. And the senior person in the lab was a Methodist who used to go to church sometimes, and so that was Sam, he’s one of these religious people. But it wasn’t, I don’t think, either looked down upon or thought how wonderful. It was just something that, you know, this was your social life.

Were there other research students, if not working under the same supervisor, in the same department that you were?

No, because it was a very small department. I mean there were only two of us who were research students and that was it. And one of the problems, yeah, problems if you like, was that the departments were so isolated in their own bits that I never really got to know many people outside the department. And it was one of the reasons later on that I actually changed from University College to another institution where I could meet more people across the board.

[2:08:55] Could you describe your first conference of the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship? In the London study group you were preparing papers for the annual conference, which means presumably you went to the conference?

The idea was that the papers were pre-circulated and the conference itself was devoted to discussing the papers, so the author of the paper or somebody who prepared it would then give a five or ten minute introduction and the rest of the, well, a typical conference would have four, five papers, would be spent in discussion with something that had been read and presumably thought about beforehand. And that was the value of it, rather than just sitting down at somebody’s feet and hearing something for the first time.

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And can you give me your sort of impressions of the event, I suppose, the first time you went to one of these conferences; the sights, the sounds, the people you met, the thoughts you had, and so on?

I can’t put them into order, as it were. Very… for a long time we used to meet at the old Bedford College in Regent’s Park and meet from, let’s say half past nine to twelve, and then have a long lunchtime to wander round Regent’s Park talking to people and meeting people, and then another afternoon, another session in the afternoon. At times people said, oh, we ought to meet people of a like mind to us so that [coughs] people would say, oh we’ll sit all the biologists together at lunch and all the physicists together, and that sort of thing. That varied. I mean purely, usually it was just ad hoc, who you happened to know, to meet and oh, nice to see you again, what are you doing, type of thing.

At the first or the first number of conferences that you went to, who seemed to be sort of leading the organisation sort of intellectually or who sort of stood out because of their personality or seniority?

Well, Oliver Barclay, who I’ve already mentioned. Donald MacKay, who was a physicist, he became the first Professor of Communication at Keele, when Keele University was invented, and was very much into brain circuits and analogies between brain and computers and so on, and he was always very sharp. There was a man called Gordon Barnes who was a biologist at what was then Chelsea College. Douglas Spanner, who was Professor of Botany at Bedford College, Colin Russell who had just become at that stage I think the first Professor of the History of Science at the Open University, which again was being invented about that time and who was much more of my generation than the others. I think those are the people, you know, that I remember.

And I wonder whether you could say something in particular about the kinds of discussions and arguments that took place in these first national conferences that you went to?

Well, there’s a list of the conferences, the paper I gave you. Miracles, animals, evolution, the fall, environment, what difference does it make to be a Christian who’s a scientist, are there limits to the sort of things, what science ought to be doing, are there limits to science. I mean Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 45 C1672/02 Track 1 there are a whole lot of things one can think of and I suspect most of them were talked about at one time or another.

[2:13:30] Having finished your PhD, what was your next sort of career step and why was it that?

My immediate step was my then boss got interested in natural radiation causing mutation and there was a very… there is a very high area of natural radiation in southern India where radiation gets up to about a hundred times normal background from thorium. His idea was to go and catch mice there, then he discovered there were no mice, or very few, and so it turned into catching rats. And he mounted, with Medical Research Council support, an expedition to catch rats there and he signed me on to run the fieldwork with another young chap who was just finishing his degree and he himself, the three of us went out and spent something like four months in India catching rats and catching, I mean the actual fieldwork involved the better part of a year, I suppose, and then working up the data also was another six months or so and I at that time started getting interested in natural populations of mice. The laboratory had been studying all sorts of minor variations in mice which occur in wild mice, I wanted to know what was determining the frequency of these things in wild mice, so I began catching wild mice first with the help of people from the Natural History Museum and the Ministry of Agriculture, who’d been working on control and therefore were looking at populations of mice in the wild. And then I got, as a result of this I wanted a population I could sample year by year, and started on catching mice on one of the Welsh islands. And all this effectively took three years; I had a postdoctoral three years in the same department. At the end of that I was actually offered, I was sent a contract to work in the Radiobiological Research Unit at Harwell, the MRC Unit, which would be a continuation of the work we’d been doing in India, but I wanted out and because of the smallness of the department I was in, to be somewhere where I knew people, I got a lectureship at the Royal Free Hospital, which is where I was for the next fourteen or fifteen years.

[2:16:48] Okay, thank you. I’m going to take you back over a few of those things, starting with the fieldwork, sorry, the expedition to catch rats. Could you sort of tell that as a sort of expedition story, if you like?

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 46 C1672/02 Track 1

The rats, the radioactive area was a long seashore strip. The radiation was mainly thorium eroded from deposits up in the mountains come down the rivers and then deposited on the seashore. So you have a long area along the seashore, and in fact there was a canal behind it. So you have an island, a radioactive island. The idea was to catch mice… to catch rats at a number of sites along here, and then control ones from areas where the radiation was much less. So we ended up with something like 1,000 rats: 500 from the irradiated bit; 500 controls; thirty, forty, fifty from different villages, so they’re in discrete groups. We used to catch the rats, kill them, dissect them, weigh the organisms, take the measurements of the animals themselves, and what we were particularly interested in at that time was the skeleton, so make the skeletal preparations, and that used to take up most of the day, we’d finish up at sort of late teatime, having gone out first thing in the morning to go round the traps. And what, we used to buy traps in the bazaar and then distribute them to houses in villages, we had an interpreter who used to go round with us, leave the traps in a house and go back to the house next day. This worked very well in most places. In one village we were getting very few rats, there was one or two a day, we couldn’t understand what was happening, it seemed to be no different to any of the other ones. Then it turned out it was a communist village and the local communist newspaper had an article about these Americanos, you know, British people don’t do daft things in India, they must be American. These Americanos were stealing our rats and exporting them and beating down the poor Indians as a result of all this. And so what was happening, they were catching the rats and then just letting them go again. When we discovered this we managed to sort of smooth them over a bit, but that was local communist politics.

[2:19:42] How do you make a skeletal preparation of a rat? Or how did you at this time?

You use the enzyme papain, which is extracted from papaya. This was a technique that was used in a big way in the laboratory in London. So what we used to do was to take the rat skin and gut it – as I say, we used to weigh the organs and so on – take the corpse of the rat, boil it up for half an hour or so, and then put it into a solution with this enzyme, papain, which dissolved the meat. It’s just a meat tenderiser, it’s the same that you put on steaks to soften them up, but if you leave it there it dissolves all the flesh off and you end up with a soup with the bones in. And so the hard work, if you like, is to pick out the actual bones, which is what Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 47 C1672/02 Track 1 you want, from this soup, and then you’d dry them off. We used to bleach them in peroxide so they looked pretty and put them in a tube.

And then, what would be done with them?

Brought home to this country. We had problems because there were all sort of in a great chest to be exported and the Indian customs wouldn’t let us export them because there’s nothing in the regulations to say you could export rat skeletons. So this was eventually cleared up with the Ministry in Delhi, got them back to London. And basically, two things: one was actually measuring the length to compare the irradiated with the unradiated; and then there was another sort of variation that we, the lab, was particularly interested in, whether you have small variations, whether you have two holes or one hole, whether you have a process or not process, and this is an all or none thing, so that was scored as well, so you have a lot of data. Having got whatever it was, forty measurements on a thousand rats, this was the early days of computing, you couldn’t do it on your fingers, so we signed on a Professor of Statistics to sort out the data. And he put it in the computer and it went up to 999 million, or whatever computers do. Didn’t seem to be working so he re-programmed it. This time all the computer would say in computer language was ‘sexless, sexless, sexless’. I said this was frightfully intelligent, this was the effect of the radiation, no, no, must be something else. So reprogrammed, got a lot of data out, turned it into tables, published it. Whether it’s right or not, I don’t know, but that’s my first experience of computerology.

[2:22:51] And what other examples do you have of evidence that you were viewed in one way or another by the population during this rat expedition? In other words, how were you viewed by people in the villages? I know you had an interpreter, it’s difficult to judge, but in the non-communist villages, for example, how were you viewed?

I think it was probably rather esoteric – not esoteric – exotic, odd, white people do these things so you agree with them. And this was way before the tourists, I mean this apparently is now a tourist, quote ‘paradise’, but I mean we were unusual Europeans down there. There were the tea planters and so on. We used to go and play tennis in the local club and drink there, which was very pleasant. Very civilised occasionally, used to go at weekends a bit. But my boss would never go because it was the relict of the Raj and you mustn’t support Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 48 C1672/02 Track 1 them. I mean he was a German Jew who’d come out of Nazi Germany in 1933, he had very strict ideas about authoritarianism. But interestingly, when after independence for India, the local Europeans who ran the club felt, you know, they couldn’t carry on being just white, so they brought in, opened the club to anybody who’d like to join, presumably you had to pay for it, and after two years the Indians that came in treated the servants so badly that it was agreed that it should become again a European club. So it was a delightful bit of the old Raj as far as we were concerned. But we met some of the local Indians, we used to go and have meals with them, and absolutely delightful. The sort of people who’d obviously been in the club, were literally outside the pale.

[2:25:07] Thank you. Could you then describe, in a similar way that you described the rat expeditionary work, could you describe your, in more detail, the actual fieldwork, the actual doing of the work on the mice, which is back in the UK?

Well, it started with, the Ministry of Agriculture were looking at the dynamics of the population increase and so on in corn ricks. You know, you build your corn rick and then in the spring you thrash it. Nowadays you combine the whole thing. And they were going out and looking at corn ricks which they’d treated with various sorts of poisons and what this boiled down to was they had to catch all the mice that came out of a particular rick, so they’d put a barrier round the rick and catch the mice that came out. So I would go and collect mice from these different ricks and treat the mice rather exactly the same way as we did with the rats; we’d skin them, all the rest of it. And then compare mice between different ricks. And there were clearly differences between different ricks, even in a small area, question is, why were these differences there? Which meant that the only way to get at this was a population where you could actually sample the same genes over a period, and that meant effectively an island. And the Ministry of Agriculture had been working on a place called Skokholm, which had the highest identity of rats – sorry – of rabbits in western Europe, and they’d been using this as a rabbit laboratory. But they also knew there were mice, which they told me, so I went there to catch mice and I worked on the island for ten years, going once, twice, three times a year. And in fact I had a student who effectively lived on the island for three years. But originally it was to just sample them, bring the corpses back and look at them. But then we got interested, I got interested in how the population increased and decreased, how it was affected by weather and other sort of factors, so we then started doing marked release Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 49 C1672/02 Track 1 experiments. We then, when the techniques became available, we began to bleed them, when I say bleed them, take a drop of blood out of the mice, to look at the genes in a mouse which is then released, you look at its further survival to see if those genes were affecting that particular survival and so on.

Yes, could you give us more of a sense of how the sort of intellectual aims of this work fitted into current debates in environmental evolution? So what were you responding, fitting into, challenging, investigating further?

What I was investigating was how genes affect survival. I mean when you look at mice or primroses or mosquitoes or whatever, they all look the same. In fact there’s a tremendous amount of variation within them and it’s a matter of identifying different sorts, different genetic sorts, and looking at the survival, how that’s affected. And I mean if you like to come to modern debates, how is climate change going to affect different populations, different genotypes. So it’s laying down the ground level for that sort of work.

When you, you took some blood from a mouse and then used that blood to determine its genetic constitution and then release it and observe its performance, if you like. How do you – it’s a very simple question – but how do you recognise the same mouse again, how are they tagged?

In those days we used to toe clip them, just literally take the end of a toe off, which was the way that was traditionally used in mice in laboratories. Nowadays, what you do is put in a… not a radioactive, a…

A sort of chip, microwave?

A chip thing. That was before the era of chips.

And you determined its, presumably its length of survival by trying to recapture it and then if you failed to recapture it for a certain amount of time you think it’s probably dead or…

And then you think it’s dead and you go back three months later and you find it again, so you know it’s not dead. So I mean you’ve got this built-in error, or potential error the whole Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 50 C1672/02 Track 1 time. So you’ve got to keep going and using the same techniques time and time again and getting very good measures of survival as a result. You find that they’re very easy to re-trap, I mean I’ve had a mouse in a trap twenty days out of three weeks, sort of thing. You know, they come in for the warmth, the comfort and the food. And on an island, and this island was a hundred hectares, you could get a pretty good idea of most of the mice in the island. And the numbers fluctuated enormously from probably a hundred, just above a hundred up to several thousand.

Did you look at these populations in the same way that ecologists were looking at population in terms of the sort of dynamics and the sort of stability?

Well, this is what I got on to. This is where I became an ecologist. I mean I started, it used to be pure genetics, but it turned out that you couldn’t be just genetics because you were part of a living organism, and that’s when one starts looking at survival, the factors that lead to survival. And as I say, I had a student on the island and he was actually measuring their respiratory ability, how they cope with putting them in cold chambers and see how they reacted to cold.

Depending on their genotype?

Yeah, yeah. I mean what it boils down to is that they have a high survival during the summer and they breed, and a high death rate in the winter and they’re very susceptible to cold, so if you have a cold winter you end up with very many fewer mice. The population then in the summer increases almost to the same extent in any year, depending on how long breeding goes on for, but if you start from a small group you obviously end up with fewer animals at the end of it.

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[Track 2]

[0:00:00] At a time when you are working as a research student, and presumably still attending the same local church?

Mm.

How are you viewed by members of the congregation as a scientist? Because presumably the congregation, although a lot of students is mixed…

Well, I think the very fact that there were a lot of students, particularly Imperial College students, a high proportion of scientists, you know, you were just normal. And I mean, one was doing the normal things that students did. I mean I picked up a wife within, what, a year of that, eighteen months of that, and we got married. And that was happening all the time – all the time – you know, it was happening.

How did you meet your wife?

That is a good question. We’ve never agreed. Either it was in the church in the young people’s group, of which we’re certainly both members. She was a medical student and the chap I was sharing a flat with was also a student at the same hospital, at the Middlesex, and I occasionally used to go in lunchtime to their hospital services. So either I met her there or in the church.

And could you describe your wedding day?

I can’t remember much… It was on Friday the thirteenth, it was regarded by people who attended as the shortest service – sorry – the longest service and the shortest reception we’d had. We departed in a Rolls-Royce from South Kensington, told the chap to go along the line of the Piccadilly line, got out at Green Park, got on the tube, the Piccadilly line, and left the car at the end of the Piccadilly line, and we got in the car and went off on our honeymoon. The reception was at, was it 23 Knightsbridge? Somewhere up… it doesn’t exist nowadays, Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 52 C1672/02 Track 2 it was next to the National Farmers’ Union. Anyway, my in-laws paid for all that. It was very pleasant. Can’t remember much about it.

Do you remember much about the decisions made on the constitution of the service?

It was a fairly standard, well it was the standard service. I think Caroline promised to obey, but that was the only decision. The bit that did slightly get, I don’t know about wrong, one of the hymns we had was Father, Hear the Prayer we Offer, Not for ease this life shall be, but by steep and rugged pathways. Well, I misread the proofs and it was ‘by sleep and rugged pathways’. The Lord answered the prayer. [laughs]

[03:12] Thank you. Yes, then after your research on the rats and the mice as a postdoctoral student, you said that you took up a lectureship in a….

At the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. I was actually the first lecturer in genetics in a medical school as a… I mean there were geneticists in medical schools, but I was the first actually appointed as a lecturer in genetics, in the Biology Department there.

Which year was this that you…

’62.

Could you then sort of describe your area of work, physically, to start with, at the Royal Free Hospital?

Well, it was the Biology Department, we were teaching, our main bread and butter was, well, it was teaching first MB biology. We were also involved in teaching an MSc in radiation biology and physics, and we were doing the biology bit of that. So that was part of the teaching, or those were the parts of the teaching. And I mean I obviously taught the genetics, which was a very small part of the course, and taught also genetics to post first MB, in other words the pre-clinical years, in genetics. And tried to increase that as time went on, and as always, one has resistance from one’s colleagues. And in the first MB, I mean I was teaching fairly basic biology: circulation of the blood and the nervous system and so on. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 53 C1672/02 Track 2

[04:57] How did you teach genetics?

Well, part of it’s straightforward lecturing, obviously. We tried to do as many experiments as possible. We did an experiment with drosophila to measure the effects of radiation. I used to take the cultures of drosophila down into the X-ray department and X-ray them. We did sort of rather crude experiments with the students about what blood group they had and what their parents were, could be a bit embarrassing. Whether they could smell freesias, which apparently is a genetic defect, whether they could taste phenylthiocarbamide, which you’re not allowed to do now because it’s dangerous. Those were the sorts of things.

Could you describe the smelling freesias experiment?

Some people can and some people can’t. And what were the frequencies of this and could one learn anything from it. I mean it’s a very crude thing. Another thing was whether your ears are attached or not. Just looking for genetic differences within a group, that was basically the message one was trying to get over.

Having sort of identified the frequencies, were you then able to sort of do any sort of analysis of…

No. I mean theoretically one could do all sorts of correlations or attempt correlations, but this was really purely a lesson in looking for characters that weren’t obvious that might differentiate people and therefore might affect their resistance to different drugs. I mean some people are resistant, some people are hyper-sensitive and so on. I mean these were the sort of lessons one was trying to get over.

[07:07] And to what extent was evolution a part of this teaching of genetics?

It wasn’t. I mean in the first MB course I gave a bit of evolution, but I also, I was asked with Steve Jones, who I appointed in the department when I became head of it, he and I were asked to run an evolution course at University College and I always used to end up - and I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 54 C1672/02 Track 2 think I used to at the Free too – end up with a lecture on objection to evolution and bring in the religious bit at that stage, and there were always one or two students who used to come and ask questions after that.

What would they ask?

You know, how does this fit in with Genesis and, you know, I’ve never believed this and what was God doing, type of thing.

The people who were, the students who were asking those questions, did they tend to be Christians asking about evolution or…

I think so. You occasionally got the odd Muslim, but in those days there weren’t all that many about. Nowadays they seem to be about ninety per cent Muslim.

And did they tend to ask particular questions, Muslim students?

I don’t think so, no, no. They have a very similar approach to many Christians on, you know, how do you interpret the texts.

[08:48] And by this time, the early sixties, what tended to be your response to questions such as those? You’ve had, I don’t know, I suppose half a decade’s experience of working in the Research Student’s Christian Fellowship, you’ve got an interest in this area, I suppose what I want to know is how far had your thinking developed by this point?

I think the basic thinking was straight at that stage and really what we know about God from how he reveals himself, whether it’s the Koran or the Bible or whatever, is that he is in charge but he doesn’t tell us how he does things. So mechanisms, if you like, are the business of science. The purpose is the business of religion. And the question is, are they the same things, do you need them both or not. I mean you can deny that there is any purpose at all, but then you come back to the sort of questions that I was asking when my father died, you know, why. And there does seem to be some pattern behind it all.

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[10:15] At this point what kinds of patterns were you seeing then, that pointed to a kind of purpose rather than a…

Is life purely purposeless, are we sort of here as reproductive machines or are we here for a purpose, where does love fit into it, if you like, where does community, is it purely self- survival or are we part of a created universe with a god who is actually in some way potent.

[10:58] And in this final lecture on the objections to evolution, what were the objections that you discussed and which then…

Well, some are scientific objections, the questions that I talked about earlier about the difference between so-called Mendelists, the geneticists and the evolutionists, and then you get the moral questions about do we need to bring God into this, how can we resolve the questions about God and the Bible. I haven’t given that lecture for many years, so I can’t…

[11:45] Thank you. And while working as a lecturer in this Royal Free Hospital School, what was your research?

Well, it [laughs], what happened was, we got married and Caroline had two years to do to finish her qualification as a medic and I had my research career planned out in a particular mouse that I wanted to do the research on. In fact, I got the actual mice; they were in the animal house for years, but I thought I would take time out and have a couple of years doing other things before I got down to my life’s work and started looking at these wild mice, and I never got really back to my life’s work and spent my time looking at wild mice and various things for years after that.

What was your life’s work going to be?

Studying the effects of interaction of notochord renal tail, etc, in a particular mouse, Danforth’s short tail, which had been used as an experiment in the modification of Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 56 C1672/02 Track 2 dominance, which was one of the characteristics which led up to the… that Fisher sorted out for the synthesis. I’ll explain that if you want, but I don’t suppose you want.

I’d like to know why you think you didn’t return to that as your life’s work and in fact…

Because it was rather fun going out to islands and catching mice. Period. And also it was fulltime, there was no time to do anything else.

[13:39] Did Caroline share your interest in relations between science and faith?

She’s a Christian, yeah. Not particularly interested in science and faith, but being a medic, having to think about some of these questions, yes. I mean she was very much latterly involved with a Christian medical fellowship and she chaired their so-called study group for quite a number of years.

At this time as a training medic, was she involved in…

Don’t think so. Don’t think so. She was a trainee medic, they don’t have time to think much about these things.

[14:18] You said that when you were at university you tended not to be involved in politics. Could I get a sense though, as a young man, a young scientist, of your more sort of general political outlook?

Completely apolitical. I mean stupidity of so many of the politicians of whatever ilk they are, some more than others, but I’ve never involved myself fanatically.

And what, okay, but what evidence of their stupidity were you noticing as a young man?

Difficult to think back to that time. The way that various monies were put in place, how money was allocated, how one dealt with various disadvantaged groups, if you like. Nothing much more than that, really. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 57 C1672/02 Track 2

[15:18] In the 1960s, I wonder whether, if you like, the external questioning of relations between religion and science changed to any extent? I notice that in the accounts surrounding the sort of anniversary conference of Christians in Science, in one account there was a sense that in the post-war period there was concerns about a kind of humanism that might be developing and I wondered whether the sixties are different from the fifties, or the fifties are different from the forties in terms of the sort of external intellectual environment that the organisation was working in?

I think there was a phase that it went through that one was being very defensive, to actually establish the credibility of any supernatural at all. I think we’re through that phase and I suspect it was beginning to, the developments were beginning in the sixties and seventies, that there is something that the faith science boundary has something to offer, rather than something that’s got to be defended. In other words, that there is a purpose beyond the science, beyond the mechanism that one is living daily. And I think we’re coming more and more into that era in terms of, we’re now beginning to realise that we’re doing major things with the environment and the decisions that have got to be made, when you come down to it, are basically ethical decisions, you know, can we afford to do something about climate change or not. Now, that starts as a political decision, but beyond that it’s an ethical decision, what about children and grandchildren. You know, you and I are alright, but, they aren’t. And so I think we’re coming into that area, I think.

So you’re suggesting that the sixties were the beginning of a defensive phase or the beginning of the end to that?

Beginning of the end of it. That rather than proving that evolution is happening, we’re saying that evolution is happening and there is a future for mankind, and what is that future going to be. It’s not a future determined entirely by mobile phones, which were around, of course, but you know, how we treat money possessions, relationships, etc. I never thought of it as a progression, but I think that is right, you’re right there, that there is, well, there certainly has been a change in that. And I think we need to be more proactive nowadays. I mean one of the analogies I’m very fond of is of God writing two books, which in fact Darwin quotes from Francis Bacon in the title page of The Origin, that God wrote a book of works and a Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 58 C1672/02 Track 2 book of words, creation and the Bible, and we need to study both of them and not just one of them. And the trouble of course, religious people tend to, for obvious reasons, tend to focus on the book of words. Same author but a different language.

[19:25] To what extent was science and faith being discussed at this time, 1950s, early sixties, in the sort of mainstream media, in newspapers that you might have read, in radio programmes you might have been listening to or on television programmes?

Well, people like Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell were still around. I mean there’s a well-known symposium produced by Julian Huxley on The Humanist Frame, it was called, in which a number of leading thinkers, I suppose you would call them, put forward their vision of humanism, which was effectively a non-religious version. I mean certainly in the environment field, which I am particularly familiar with professionally, Max Nicholson, who was the Director of the Nature Conservancy for a long time, was a very vehement humanist and not atheist, but certainly anti-religion, I would say. And was very influential in that sector.

Is this someone that you knew personally, Max Nicholson?

Yes, not at that stage, I knew him later. I mean he died what, eight or nine years ago at the age of ninety-odd.

But The Humanist Frame then was something you were aware of…

Well, when it came out I reviewed it for something or other, so I’ve still got my review copies sitting on the side.

And what were your, what was your response to it, what were your impressions of it as a set of arguments and your response?

It’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. There is more to… humans are more than machines, more than copulating animals, naked apes. That’s somebody else I knew, Desmond Morris, who invented the name - well, he didn’t invent it. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 59 C1672/02 Track 2

Yes, his book would have been published quite soon after this period in the…

Somewhere round about there, yes.

And do you remember your, do you remember reading that for the first time?

Oh yeah. Great fun. The sort of problems you solve after two bottles of port, or two glasses of port.

What do you mean?

Well, you know, you can think of, you know, why do you have buttocks? Oh well, you know, they’re this, that and the other. You know, the sort of thing you’d do in a pub. Not much science in it, but it’s a nice story.

And so Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell and other people who were scientists, of course, talking about science – were they appearing on TV and on the radio?

Oh yes.

And were these things you listened to?

Yes, I wouldn’t have made an effort to, but they were the sort of routine things one heard occasionally. And there was a famous programme called The Brains Trust, which Julian Huxley – did he chair it? He was certainly a member of it routinely. That was before the Dimbleby era.

And Max Nicholson’s influence on the sort of environmental movement in Britain, establishment of nature reserves and this sort of thing, his, what you call his sort of, I don’t know if you did say aggressive humanism, but you said sort of very strong humanism, if you like, or not atheism, but anti-religion. Was this something that you noticed at the time or something that you’ve analysed…

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Oh, later on, I think. Well, you know, I don’t know if I registered when I read The Humanist Frame, because I certainly didn’t know Max in those days, but I mean he is on record as saying that the worst pest on this earth is humans and the sooner we get rid of the idea that we have anything to do with dominion, the better to reform humans. You know, you’re back to how we treat the environment.

[23:46] If the environmental movement was part of this beginning of the end then of a kind of defensive period, what other factors are responsible for it, do you think, this change?

I can only presume that there are limits to it. You know, it’s self-destructive. I think Richard Dawkins is self-destructing himself now because he’s becoming so extreme with what he is saying that people are taking him much less seriously than they were doing five, ten years ago. All this is nice and glossy and fine on the earth, you know, we all like nice cars and nice women and nice wines, but then you realise there’s a bit more to life than that. Richard Branson is not my favourite man. That’s completely irrelevant. [laughs]

And yet these views come not from a particular political position, because as you’ve said, you’ve…

Oh no, they’re entirely a religious position as far as I’m concerned. This comes from my understanding of creation and of God.

[0:25:17 – end of Track 2]

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[Track 3]

[0:00:00] Could you help me to understand something and therefore perhaps help the listeners to understand something, and that’s, you said that when you went to the Christian house party and learnt about, more about the story of Christ, you said that it made sort of logical sense to you rather than being an emotional experience. Now, your father had committed suicide, you’d been obviously thinking why, what’s the meaning of it all, and so I think the listener would perhaps more easily be able to understand that Christianity was a kind of emotional, helpful accepting sort of thing to someone who’d had this trauma, they might not understand what you mean by the fact that it was logical and rational, it provided a sort of, it struck you sort of intellectually as well, so can you help us to understand that?

I think what happened at Iwerne, where we were, was explaining why Christ came, who Christ was and how his death on the cross actually solved – didn’t solve problems – but made possible the solving of problems through setting one’s feet on the right way. So it was, as it were, directing one in the right path, but showing that this was actually God who had done this for you, so one could enter into it rather than making a great effort oneself. It showed me there was a way forward, rather than a complete blankness in the future. And that’s what I mean by the logical side of it.

Okay. So am I right in saying that it didn’t directly answer the question, why did my dad commit suicide…

Oh no, no. But it showed that things were not random and meaningless, it showed there might be a purpose forward as far as I was concerned, that there was a meaning to life, as opposed to just being at the mercy of anything that happened.

And just to spell it out, the meaning of life revealed by that was, was what?

That there was a God, which I didn’t doubt, but that God had actually taken action to do something to make possible life in a non-random fashion, that he had a purpose for the world and therefore, because I was part of the world, he had a purpose for me. And that was, I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 62 C1672/02 Track 3 think, why it was answering the question of why about my father, didn’t ask the question of why, what he’d done, but it did answer the question that there was a purpose.

[03:06] Thank you, yes. The Christian house party, you mentioned last time that it was all-male. Is there an obvious reason why that was so?

Well, it was, all the recruits, as it were, all the boys were from all-male public schools, as they virtually all were at that time. At a later stage there was a parallel organisation started for girls’ schools, and they’re now co-ed, but in that generation it was all-male, all the leaders were male and the people in the kitchen were female.

[03:50] Thank you. The ecological genetics course of George Owen, I wonder if you were aware of his and his wife’s research interests in sort of, I think, I don’t know if paranormal is the right phrase, but (a) were you aware of it and (b) if so, what were you aware of?

I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I learnt later, because George Owen disappeared from view, that he’d given some talks on Woman’s Hour on paranormality and some, apparently, Canadian millionaire had offered him a lifetime’s salary to work on this in Canada. But at the time I just didn’t know. He, as far as I was concerned, he was a rather elite mathematician and he was talking about things that I could understand in terms of ecology.

[04:50] Thank you. Oh yes, I was wanting to ask a bit more about your description of your recruitment into the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship and in particular your reasons for using phrases like, ‘Oliver Barclay got his hooks into me’ and there was another expression where you, it wasn’t pressganged, but it was something like that.

Hi-jacked, perhaps.

Yes.

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 63 C1672/02 Track 3

No, I think that’s overstating it. I mean I’d obviously met him when I was still at Cambridge before I came to London and he contacted me when I was in London and said come and join this group. So it was a matter, perhaps of being in a strange environment, because I was living in London, completely different. It was a familiarity, it was following up on the, it was a Christian interest, if you like, and the scientific Christian interest that I was developing.

Because it almost implies a kind of an active recruitment that Oliver was involved in. Or, you know, the connotations are sort of predatory aren’t they, got his hooks into me.

Yeah. Predatory, I think, is too strong a word. It was certainly active recruitment. He was seeking to involve people like me as possible… as a person who could be developed into thinking, reading, speaking about science and faith. So yes, it was an agenda he had. Predatory’s too strong a word for it.

[06:36] Thank you. Yeah, that makes sense. Could you give us a sense of how novel the field of sort of genetics in the field was at the time you’re taking it up?

It was small, I think is the word. But on the other hand, when one is just a new graduate you can’t balance up the different parts of one subject. It had been developed particularly in this country by EB Ford at Oxford, by Dobzhansky in the States, and they were looking at genetic processes in the field, which is the bit that I found fascinating. Was he the only person doing it at the time? I think he was almost the person… and people at Oxford working with him on butterflies. Oh, there was also the work parallel on snails by Arthur Cain and Philip Sheppard. Philip Sheppard then moved to Liverpool, Arthur Cain went to Manchester, and then Liverpool.

[07:53] And is there a logical reason why butterflies and snails were the first two organisms…

Because they were, as has been said, they wear their genes on the outside. The butterflies have different spots on the wings and all the rest of it, the snails have different colours, different stripes.

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 64 C1672/02 Track 3

So you were working with a more challenging organism in that you had to catch it and kill it and look at the skeleton.

Right. But, the thing was that the basic genetics was already being done in the laboratory where I was in London. So the genes were being studied, it was a matter of looking at them in a different situation.

[08:43] Thank you. Could we then go from where we’d got to last time, which was your research as a lecturer in genetics at the Royal Free Hospital, ’62 to ’78, and we’d got to the point where you’re working on the island, which is also being used by the Ministry of Agriculture for rabbits. If you could take us from that point onwards. You’ve given me a list of sort of key parts of that work, which I don’t know if you want to refer to, but the first one for 1964 is, you describe as the ‘founder effect’.

In a sense that was, that was a rather important byway. I wanted to find out why the animals on the island were so different. My immediate thought, having been brought up that natural selection rules everything, was that this was a result of selection, but when I compared the animals on the island with almost certainly the population they came from on the mainland of Pembrokeshire, they were very different. I then wanted another island to see if the same thing was happening. And the nearest island I could find was the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, which is about the same size, it has rabbits, it has mice, it has birds and it has a lighthouse – the lighthouse bit’s irrelevant. And it turned out that the Isle of May mice were just about as distinct from their nearest mainland as the Skokholm mice in Pembrokeshire were, but when I compared the Skokholm mice with the Isle of May mice, the two island populations, they were about, in terms of the characters I was looking at, almost as different as they could be. There was no convergence between the two. When I looked then again at the Skokholm mice, they had this rather odd character of a very high frequency of a mild form of spina bifida, which was also found on the mainland, and when one starts thinking about how these island populations can occur and developed, there’s a small group of animals that are going to get to found the population in the first place, and that population is almost certainly not going to have all the genes in the same frequencies as on the mainland, as the parental population. So that overnight, as it were, they’re going to be different, and this is the founder effect, this is the founding population. But I believe this is a major factor in island Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 65 C1672/02 Track 3 differentiation, because so many island populations are distinct, I mean whether you’re talking about Hawaiian honey catchers, whether you’re talking about Galapagos finches, or whatever, you have this differentiation which is moulded by natural selection but has a, as it were, a running start, because of being different from the word go, the founder effect. But as I say, from the original reason of looking at the island mice was a rather important sideshow, because the studies that developed were on the ecology that the animals themselves on their length of life and the factors that caused them to die, on whether these factors which turned out largely to be winter cold, was affecting the genes, whether there’s different survival. And that’s the route we went down. And with a colleague of mine at the Free we talked about looking at the cold tolerance of mice and if one could relate this to the genes. And I had a PhD student who lived and worked on the mice, testing their cold tolerance, and at the same time looking at their genetic constitution. There was another thing, when one thinks about it, it was slightly before that. The technique of being able to look at genes as opposed to the original characters that I was using, skeletal, looking at biochemically determined genes in blood. We took blood from animals, you know, just a drop of blood, and found that there was big changes in the population between summer and autumn and autumn and the following summer. Too big changes to be purely random, so this was natural selection acting in a big way. And it was this that then made us ask what the actual factors were that the selection was acting on, because the genes we were looking at were presumably just markers of processes that were happening.

What did you discover about the processes that were happening as a result of the difference in the genetic material that was causing this selection?

Well, this is why we started looking at cold tolerance. We also looked, we tried to look at the actual properties of the blood, the haemoglobin, because these were the haemoglobin genes we were looking at, but certainly at the time we were doing it, the techniques of looking at the blood weren’t developed enough and that ran into the sand.

So that technically you weren’t able to examine cold tolerance in the detail you needed to, sort of blood-wise, in order to follow it up?

It needed following through more than we were able to do it. There came the time in 1968 when the owner of the island decided we were vivisectionists and threw us off the island. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 66 C1672/02 Track 3

Now, it was the stage where yes, we wanted to carry on the work there, but we also wanted to see if it was going to be possible to get the same effect somewhere else, and having already looked at this other island, we then moved all our effort up there, because we were thrown Skokholm in the first place, to work on this new island. And the problem there, which took us some time to realise, was there’s almost no inherited variation in the population. So although the population was fluctuating in the same sort of way, we didn’t have the levers to get on to the connection between cold tolerance and genetics, because there’s no genetics.

[16:06] Okay. Could you tell me a little bit more about the fieldwork on May, including the reasons for choosing it and the process of choosing it, because you were looking round for another island. You said it had these sort of characteristics, but where else did you consider and how did you end up being…

There are not many islands with house… I wanted to stay with house mice because that was the species we started with, and there was also the bigger question that house mice are used so much in the laboratory, that if we could use all this information from the laboratory in a field situation, we had much better background than if we were just starting from scratch on pandas or polar bears or something. So I wanted to stay with house mice. There are very few islands in fact where house mice are common, because if there are field mice there, Apodemus, there’s interaction between the two, and this was another side track I went down, to look at the interactions between field mice and house mice, because on St Kilda, which is the iconic desert island, as it were, there had been the two species and in fact the house mice on St Kilda had been described in classical late Victorian times as a separate species, they were very distinct. But the house mice died out some time after the humans left in 1930. On two other Scottish islands, again, in a sense slightly parallel to St Kilda, one was Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland, and the other was Foula, which is out to the west of Shetland, you have both species living. So I went to both the, all three of these islands to look at the ecology of the different species and why they might be surviving, why they might not be surviving. There was, at much the same time, an experiment done by a friend of mine in one of the islands in California, off the Californian coast, and he’d been studying a population of voles, and – sorry – he’d been studying a population of mice, which is why I was interested, and voles happen to get on to this island and within a couple of years the mice were dead, or Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 67 C1672/02 Track 3 disappeared. So there’s obviously interactions going on here which was important, obviously, to get a complete picture of the life of the mice.

[18:58] Could you tell me then more of the story of being thrown off Skokholm island?

I wish I knew.

I mean your experience of it, what you saw.

What we were doing, looking at cold tolerance, was catching the mice, putting them into a metabolism change overnight, and you could vary the temperature of the chamber, so it was cold, mild, very warm, and measuring their oxygen consumption. And they were confined for twenty-four hours or so and then released in the place you’d caught them. The boatman who used to take us out told the owner of the island, who I don’t think had ever been on the island, that we were doing all these cruel things to the mice and we were vivisectionists. He was a very odd guy. Anyway, he decided we were vivisectionists and not fit people to have on the island. At the same time, the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford, the bird people, were using our chambers, our mouse chambers, to look at the cold tolerance of shearwaters - there was a big population of Manx shearwaters around the island - in terms of their migration capabilities and that sort of thing, and that was stopped. In fact, all bird ringing was stopped on the island, this guy. Have I told you the story about almost having a compulsory purchase order on it? I don’t know if it’s very relevant, but, you know, we were rather narked about being stopped. The bird people were being stopped. David Lack, who was the head of the Edward Grey Institute in Oxford, called a group of us together to see whether it was worth putting a compulsory purchase order on the island so that the work could continue. And we had a meeting in Oxford, we had the birdie people there, The Daily Mail were there, who were delighted to be able to have a splurge on this. The Nature Conservancy, as was, and they were prepared to put on a compulsory purchase order, which would have been the first one they’d actually ever used. But after two hours we decided that it wasn’t worth going down this route, because if a compulsory purchase order had been put on – oh, and David Lack reckoned he could raise the money for the purchase from Oxford Colleges within a couple of months – if the compulsory purchase was made, the old so-and-so who owned the island could actually put on a restrictive covenant in perpetuity to restrict anything that was Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 68 C1672/02 Track 3 done on the island. And so the last state would have been worse than the first. So all we could do was pray that the old boy wouldn’t last too long.

And what did happen?

Well, he lasted for some years, then he died, then there was arguments among his descendants and people who inherited about the island and so on, and it’s only literally in the last three or four years, it’s now been bought by the… what’s it called? It used to be the Wales Naturalist Trust, and it is now owned by the Naturalist Trust, and this year only they’ve got their status back as a ringing station. So, you know, what’s that? Twenty, thirty years almost. And I’d love to go back and see what was happening. I don’t suppose I ever will do, but the mice are still there.

[23:04] Was there anything in your relationship with the boatman who took you out that might have… gave you advance warning that this…

Oh no, no. He just… a local who liked stirring things. No, I don’t think there was anything specific in that way.

Did you have other interactions with people on Skokholm that are memorable?

There weren’t many people there, frankly. I mean there was the bird - we used to stay in the old farmhouse which became the bird observatory - and that had a warden, an assistant warden and a cook. They were the sort of people who lived there over the summer. There was the lighthouse and we used to go and drink cocoa in the lighthouse. And the only, in those days, way of communicating with the mainland was through the Trinity House wireless network via the lighthouse. So I don’t think you’d call them notable contributions. We were certainly very friendly with some of the wardens. Mike Harris, who was there for some time, I still – I don’t send him Christmas cards – but we’re friendly.

[24:24] Thank you. And I wonder, at this time in this work, in the actual practical doing of this work, whether you thought about Christian faith while doing your science, or whether Christian Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 69 C1672/02 Track 3 faith was helpful in some way. So I think we can follow arguments about the way in which a scientific way of looking at things helps with the reading of the scriptures and therefore… but what about the other direction, how is faith contributing to science at this time, early in your career?

I don’t know that it did very much. I mean there were questions, were we doing cruel things that we shouldn’t be doing to the animals, you know, what is the proper way to look at animals? Probably, and I’m guessing now almost, that at that stage these were two different things; I had my faith, my faith obviously extended into science because faith and science were not distinct, but my actual practical work was like washing up or going to bed. It was a different component. Which is, I suspect, as far as many people get, they keep them in separate compartments. It’s only later when they start coming together.

When did they start coming together for you?

Well, one of the key things that happened to me was I was asked by IVP in 1970, and this was when international conservation ideas first began to bubble, and I mean there’s a whole story behind why they did and the Duke of Edinburgh got involved, and I was asked to write a small book on ecology and ethics. And there were sort of horror stories about the damage we were doing to the environment at the time, it was the time of the Aswan Dam and killing off the fishing, killing off the agriculture because the silt wasn’t coming down. These sorts of stories, it was the time of Rachel Carson and poisoning wildlife. How did this affect one’s faith? So I basically did a bible study and tried to find out what was the connection between the two and came up with the notion, which wasn’t new, but it was fresh to me at that time, that we’re put here to actually look after the environment, that we are stewards. And that was the result, if you like, of that little ecology and ethics book I wrote. And I then became almost the instant expert on science and religion from that point of view. [27:38] Now, completely independently of all this, in 1970 the Church of England revised itself and synodical government was invented with the laity, the clergy and the bishops all sitting together and making joint decisions. And I was suggested that I stand for the Synod. And I was elected by the diocese and the first year or so I was on, they put me on a commission on evangelism, and then they asked me to go on the Board for Social Responsibility, and this in fact for all my time in the Synod was where I reckoned I could contribute mostly, because social responsibility was concerned with, if you like, the non-religious part of religion – all Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 70 C1672/02 Track 3 the ethical questions. So as a scientist I actually had something that I could contribute rather than more on clergy pensions or on church architecture, that sort of thing. So that was 1970 I was elected to the Synod, 1972 was the Ecology and Ethics, when it was actually published. After I got involved in questions of gay and homosexuality, again because of the genetics of it all, then one of the bishops, who eventually became the Chairman of the Board, was Hugh Montefiore, who moved from Kingston to Birmingham, and he was very keen on the environmental questions. And he set up an Environmental Issues Reference Panel, and I was chairman of that. And so we were looking at various questions that were coming up nationally, or for that matter, internationally and how it related to the Synod, or to the Church of England, if you like. There had been a, well it wasn’t a synodical… it was previously the Church Assembly, which was then replaced by the General Synod, had produced a report under Gerald Dimbleby – not Gerald Dimbleby – yes, I think it was Gerald Dimbleby, who was a professor at School of Archaeology. And that was a very good report and that set almost the environmental agenda for the Synod. Then the group that I was chairing, we produced another one, fairly major report, which was supposed in a sense to be a response to the world conservation strategy, but it turned out much wider. And that’s still a document that is around. [31:16] Now the committee that I was chairman of, I mean the members were all selected by Hugh Montefiore. I mean we had the Head of the Radiation Biology Unit at Harwell, we had Ruth Harrison who’d been responsible for a lot of farm welfare, we had David Goode who was the Chief Scientist for the GLC, as then was, people of that ilk. So I mean, it was a knowledgeable group and it was a fun group.

[31:55] What relations did these groups, all of these groups have with what you might call the mainstream or secular environmental movement in Britain, the sort of Nature Conservancy Council and the, I don’t know, Field Studies Council, that sort of national movement?

Only, well I mean theologically one would hope they would have an impact. I mean I was involved with the Field Studies Council from Skokholm days, because Skokholm was actually run by the local Field Centre, Dale Fort. I think the real connection that blew up was when I was on the Board for Social Responsibility and the Brandt Report was published, which was a United Nations document, and there are two pages in the Brandt Report about – I mean it’s mainly about economics, about the need for taking into account long term care of the environment if one was going to really utilise money properly. And this seemed to me to Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 71 C1672/02 Track 3 be a way in that the secular conservation bodies should take account long term factors rather than the short term firefighting things that so often happened, and through the board they convened a group which included the Nature Conservancy, which included, I don’t know if it was the Department of the Environment in those days, but effectively the government and World Wildlife, those sort of people. And putting the argument that money should be put to sustainable uses, which is now so much accepted, and we were completely floored by the government who said well, the money we give is always dependent on the beliefs… not the beliefs, the practices of the places it’s given to. We can’t do anything about it. End of argument, as it were. Now, fairly soon after this, the World Conservation Strategy was published and – have we talked about the World Conservation Strategy? And this was a document which was produced jointly by World Wildlife Fund, International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Programme, and because of the United Nations involvement, any member of UNEP had to respond to the conservation strategy. It was when Michael Heseltine was Secretary of State; he welcomed it with open arms, tremendous thing, you know, Her Majesty’s government endorse everything, then deafening silence. Nature Conservancy, who were the operation body who had to do something about it, then began to say, well what the hell do we do. First thought was to hire the Albert Hall and Guards’ Band and the Duke of Edinburgh and have a great jamboree, and then it was decided well, that would be nice for three days, but so what. So they then decided to set up a series of working parties to different areas which the Conservation Strategy related to us: trade, countryside, urban, education… I can’t remember them all, six or seven. And Max Nicholson at that time was the Director-General of Nature Conservancy and he said there is one missing, we need an ethics group. Now there was nothing in the Conservation Strategy about ethics – not quite true, there was one paragraph in fact – and he laid it down there should be a working party on ethics. Because of my rather dud involvement with the Conservancy beforehand on the Brandt Report I was then asked, well I was asked to bid for the contract to do this. I didn’t know about that language, anyway they appointed me as ‘rapporteur’ of a group on ethics to provide that part of the UK response to the World Conservation Strategy. The Chairman of the group was Eric Ashby, Lord Ashby, who was, at that time he’d just stood down as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Clare, he was Master of Clare Hall, but he was also the first Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which was the, as you will know, the only standing committee on a scientific subject, and, you know, he really clued up and was a professional botanist. And we had a committee. The committee met once and was an absolute dead loss; it was completely Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 72 C1672/02 Track 3 divided between the greens on the one hand and the practitioners – the farmers and the manufacturers – on the other. Of course we take account of the environment, but there were other factors. It seemed very unlikely that committee was going to get anywhere. So it boiled down to Eric Ashby and me and I wrote the report with lots of input and education and information and correction from Ashby, I used to go to Cambridge and have lunch with him. And the actual UK response to the World Conservation Strategy has an ethics section in it. And I mean I won’t go through all the details at the end, when the draft, it was produced, it then went out to consultation, all sorts of people, and was eventually published together with an oversight document which somebody was commissioned to do that, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with it, but eventually it appeared, by a man called Stanley Johnson who is the father of Boris. [39:17] Anyway, at this stage of course, I became the expert on environmental ethics. That was a secular document, but because of my involvement both as a Christian and the opportunities on the board, we had a motion before the General Synod – it was actually an anti-hunting motion – but the way things were it managed to be transformed into a request to look at the sustainable treatment of the environment or something. And I, again with some help, but I mean it was mainly me that wrote it, produced a Christian statement on the environment which went to the Synod, which was really a Christianised version of the UK response document. Because I was involved in this document there was also the IUCN – International Union for the Conservation of Nature. They did a post-mortem on the reception of the World Conservation Strategy and one of the things they identified, apparently largely as a result of what we’d done in this country, said this was the thing that was missing from the original World Conservation Strategy and they set up an ethics working group under a man called Ron Engel from Chicago and I became a member of that group. I wasn’t one of the original members but I joined them fairly early on and took part in some of their discussions. The most important discussions were concerned with the Covenant, International Covenant on Environment and Development. Now, just again to backtrack, one of the Secretary-Generals of the UN, and I can’t remember who it was at this moment, had said in his annual report to the United Nations, we have the United Nations Charter, we have the Charter for Human Rights, we need a charter for the environment to balance human rights, and he threw this out. This was taken up by the International Environmental Law Commission who then were very enthusiastic about producing a charter which would put together a lot of soft law into hard law, very much a legal document. They got on with their work and suddenly realised that actually there was quite a lot of science concerned with the environment, as opposed to legalities and all the things that the lawyers find somewhere Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 73 C1672/02 Track 3 down the line. And they asked the Environment Working Group of IUCN - well they were tied in with IUCN anyway – to help them and I was a member of, four or five of us, who met with the lawyers to try to put some good science into their document. Now, their document was fine, but an awful lot of legalese about what you do when you have different administrations, different countries, cross-boundary disputes, that sort of thing. But they started off with a statement of fundamental principles and I argued with them that you could actually take out the fundamental principles and make that as a, I can’t remember, is it a treaty? You sign up to your treaty and then you go down and work out all the legal details of the charter afterwards. And that was much more likely to get through internationally than to produce this great wad. The lawyers wouldn’t have it, but I still think that was the way forward. And I put – now there’s another input here now. The G7, as was, the international nation... Britain, States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan… have I said Germany? Anyway, they had a series of consultations on bio-ethics and apparently this was started off by the Canadians who were worried about donation and how you sorted out donation, that sort of thing, and they got quite enthusiastic and used to have these annual conferences on bio-ethics. And it went in alphabetical order of the countries of the G7, they’d had five of these and the next one in line was the UK, the last one was going to be US. Now, the blessed Margaret Thatcher wasn’t very keen on all this thing, as you might know, about other nations, but there was somebody in Brussels in the European Commission who was very keen that this actually happened and that this would be not so much concerned with the human bio-ethics but with environmental bio-ethics, a man called Philip Bordeaux, and he talked with the Chief Scientist’s office in Whitehall and so on. And Maggie accepted that the UK would be happy to go along with a conference that was concerned with the sciences of environmental ethics and this in due course took place in Brussels and there were three delegates from each of the G7 countries and the three from Britain were a guy called Lord Nathan, who’s one of these incredibly intelligent Jewish lawyers, he was an environmental lawyer, Jim Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia – will probably mean something to you – and me. And we met in Brussels, I contributed a paper to it, which is there in the proceedings. Towards the end of the proceedings John Kendrew, who was a, I suppose, a biophysicist, he got a Nobel Prize for protein chemistry, who was there representing the International Union for the Conservation of Nature… International Confederation of Scientific Unions, ICSU. He said where is this all going, we ought to have a code of practice. Now, the general feeling, you couldn’t have a code of practice, it was far too complicated. But I happened to be chairing the session – I mean this wasn’t a big meeting, thirty, forty people – I happened to be chairing it so I said oh, Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 74 C1672/02 Track 3 we’ll set up a working party. And I got lumbered with chairing a working party of this group to produce a code of environmental practice. Code of… that’s right. A code of practice on environmental issues. Didn’t even know what a code of practice was. Anyway, the European Commission funded a little meeting we had in Cambridge with Eric Ashby and a few others – the Bishop. And then a group of us got together to actually set out a code of practice, and rather to my surprise, we produced a code of practice which then went back to the members of the people who’d been on the consultation in Brussels, and then went to the heads of state and was actually approved by the heads of the G7 states at their next meeting. [48:35] Now, that again was a secular document and that really was the document that I Christianised for the General Synod, which to me meant that you could actually produce a lot of convergence between the secular concerns about the future and, if you like, the biblical teaching at a rather crude level. And that’s on the table, it’s there. But it meant that I got more and more involved, if you like, on the environmental conservation/Christian side of things, in the way that things are, you know, you become the instant expert and everybody turns to you. And I’m glad that things have developed far beyond that, you know, I could say I’m not needed – I don’t think I was needed, but at least one was a sort of stimulus at that time. So I mean that was a fairly major track that I went down which, I mean going back to your question about how does this relate to the major conservation bodies, it does.

[49:48] Thank you. You talked in that account of two occasions where you ‘Christianised’ a document. Can you say what that involved, the first…

It in fact, actually it was the same document, when I go back to it.

Okay.

A little report called Christians and the Environment, which became a General Synod paper. It is taking the concept that, the secular concepts and said do these have a Christian basis in any sense. What is the Christian argument, theological argument? I mean going back to the thing I did on ecology and ethics, we’re talking about stewardship, who is stewardship, how should you be a steward. There’s been, a couple of years ago, Richard Bauckham, the theologian, gave a series of lectures going beyond stewardship saying that is inadequate in its own right and I would certainly agree with him. But I would argue that there is common Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 75 C1672/02 Track 3 ground to be made by Christians, by the Church and the secular world because we have an interest in the future and we were talking about where our children and grandchildren. You then of course run up against some of the odd bits of eschatology from American in particular, you know, the sooner we make a mess of this world, the sooner the Lord will come and sort it out, so you know, we must make a mess. And anyway, God’s given us the world to do what we want with it. So one is fighting these arguments. Not the whole time, but they’re there in the background.

And so practically, in the writing of it, how do you Christianise it, how do you change it from the secular document to the document that the General Synod are going to be sort of familiar with? How do you change the language or…

Well, you’re talking about the concepts and what is the theological basis of these concepts, do they have a theological basis. I mean one gets down to it, what is the purpose of human life here on earth and really going back to the beginning of Genesis, God created the world and he then made human beings responsible for it, so we’re responsible to him for the world. We’ve screwed it up, but I mean it doesn’t reduce the fact that we are responsible.

[52:42] Was there an opportunity to talk to James Lovelock about presumably a slightly different vision of the future for earth?

Yeah, I mean he doesn’t agree with me, but we’re great mates on this. There was another thing that happened. In 1985 the World Wildlife Fund had their twenty-fifth anniversary at Assisi and when they were there – I don’t know why they chose Assisi, but obviously it’s a fairly sort of religious type place – and they asked the world’s religions to produce statements on the environment and ecology. I suspect what they thought they might get was the world religions are committed to the outlook of WWF. Anyway, they got one from the Jews, they got one from the Islam, they got one from the Baha’i, and they got one from the Christians. And the Christian one was actually written by the Franciscans of Assisi and it’s, the Assisi Declarations are all published and the Christian one is really one of the weakest, if not the weakest. Anyway, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was the then International President of World Wildlife Fund, thought this needed sorting out, and as his wife runs the Church of England, he then convened a whole series of consultations at Windsor, I think there were Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 76 C1672/02 Track 3 something like a dozen of them, on the Christian attitude to nature. And that was absolutely fascinating. The pattern would be, have one or two papers and then discussion it, and I was there at most of them and Jim Lovelock was there at most of them, so I mean we used to talk about the Christian attitude. He, Jim doesn’t accept the notion of stewardship as such. In fact I at one stage produced a fairly major symposium of statements on stewardship from Christians and non-Christians and he wrote an article about it and he regards stewardship being a shop steward, you know, you’re there to make sure the rules are obeyed, as opposed to stewardship in the Christian sense. He’s certainly not non-Christian, but he’s certainly not a practising Christian.

What do you mean when you say that he’s certainly not non-Christian?

Not agin religious ideas. I mean he gets very cross – I don’t know if he still is – with the way that Gaia ideas are hijacked by so many Christian groups, you know, Mother Earth and the soft belly and the feminists love it. He regards it as, the whole idea of Gaia, and he’s a physical chemist, he’s talking about feedback mechanisms and so on. I think he rather hunts with the hares and runs with the hounds, that he goes along with some of these people, but his vision is of a chemical machine, as opposed to the way that some of the deep greens would take it.

And what’s your view of his view of the fact that feedback could operate in such a way that the earth corrects, he sometimes says sort of with or without humans, on it, what’s your…

Well, I think there’s a lot to be said for it and the question is, how stabilising is this? I mean he’s now really gone beyond it. He’s got to the stage where there’s a tipping point and it won’t stabilise, it’ll go into a new set of systems. I mean there is feedback, there is certainly a lot of nonsense talked about how fragile the earth is, it’s really very robust. But having said that, it is damageable and has been damaged.

[57:27] Thank you. Well, thank you for that. Yes, that came from a question that I asked about the extent to which your faith has helped with your scientific work and I think you said that in terms of the practical scientific work on mice, not, it hasn’t necessarily, but the Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 77 C1672/02 Track 3 environmental and ethical work that you’ve done offered you an opportunity to bring the two things together in your actual work, okay.

I mean there’s another completely different tack where the mouse work is much more relevant in a sense, in that basically the mouse work started from embryology and how these things develop. One of the things that I did on the Board of Social Responsibility was to chair a working party for the board, if you like, for the Church of England, on the reaction to the Warnock Report on test-tube babies, assisted reproduction and so on. One of the most fascinating exercises I’ve ever been involved in where two professors of moral theology, both of them Regis Professors from Oxford who would not agree about anything, but would never say the other fellow was wrong. Anyway, we had these two moral theologians, we had a social theologian, we had a cell biologist from Guy’s, and me. And we produced a report for the Synod which was then a public document, called Personal Origins, and we know that that helped the government considerably in drawing up the human fertilisation and embryology act, because they were completely stymied. They had two White Papers about ways forward and got so much flak from on the one hand the people, we must on with these scientific things, all these poor sterile women on the one hand and, you know, this is God’s plan, God creates embryos and all the rest of it. On the other hand they didn’t know the way forward. So the document we produced gave them a modus vivendi. That became part of the law of the land and it has been copied literally all round the world. Now that started, if you like, from a Christian look at the nature of the fertilised egg. I mean are we fully human from the word zero, or not. Which is really the argument because, you know, if the fertilised ovum is holy you’re responsible for God at that stage and nothing else. If there is a development phase and then you start asking what is the soul, where does the soul come in, and the official Roman Catholic version of course is that you get ensoulment, and actually they don’t say it at conception, but some time in the early stages, and they start getting vague at that stage. Anyway, I chaired this group, I wrote a paper on the theology of DNA. I’ve been very cross this last week with this wretched man, Brendan McCarthy, stating on behalf of the descendant of the old Board of Social Responsibility which is now Mission and Public Affairs Committee, about the mitochondrial replacements and we need more work, blah, blah, blah. Absolute nonsense. There’s a letter from Jean Mayland in today’s paper saying get on with it. Jean Mayland was on the Synod with me. She used to get on my goat a lot, but anyway. She’s saying sense in today’s Times.

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[1:01:42] Could you tell me then much more about the discussions of, was it the four of you in the Board of Social Responsibility, preparing the response to the Warnock Report. I mean how did you come to a decision about the holiness or otherwise of biological material at different stages?

We agreed right from the word that we were going to have no complete and utter agreement, but we equally agreed that there must be limits within which we could practise. And what is the status of the fertilised egg. Is it a human being in every sense? Now, there are a number of arguments that suggest it might well not be. One of the most telling is the whole fact of twinning, because you can have a fertilised egg splitting into two to form identical twins and this can happen up to seven or ten days after fertilisation. Now, are they incomplete humans because they weren’t there from the beginning, or what? And this is a thing that concerns the theologians. What is the status of a group of cells, what are the interactions within it? If you have literally a ball of cells which can disintegrate and then reintegrate, and in fact most of the cells that are formed early on don’t form the embryo, they form the amnion and all the rest of it. The balance seems to be that it is difficult to maintain that everything happened at the moment of fertilisation. Now, when it happens is open to question. Some people would say that it happens when the developing embryo implants into the mother seven or ten days later, because that is the first time there’s a relationship formed of the developing thing. Some would say it’s when the heart starts beating and there’s connections all the way round the embryo, or when the nervous system starts, which is probably about six or eight weeks. We’d all agree that – well, not all – but most people would agree that the later you go, the more near a human you’ve got. But it is difficult to maintain that that humanness starts at day zero, or day one or whatever. So that’s really the argument, that there’s sufficient uncertainty to accept the legitimacy of a degree of manipulation. We’re not talking about experimentation, we’re talking about manipulation. In other words, fertilisation outside the womb, and so on.

[1:05:36] The sorts of questions that you’re raising there are all scientific. I wonder whether there were insights from the Bible itself about this?

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There’s remarkably little in the Bible. There is one verse in the Bible which says that abortion is forbidden, in the middle of Exodus. And what that says, and it’s apparently very difficult in the original and it may be a corrupted text, but it says if you hit a pregnant woman and she aborts, if the embryo is without form – and that’s apparently what they mean – if it’s without form, you’re subject to a penalty. If it has form or it is formed, it is murder. So there is the suggestion that if it is without form it’s serious, but not drastic. And that’s literally the only text that is directly relevant. Now you have of course the whole tenor of, never mind the Christian faith, a lot of faiths that human beings are all special, but when does that specialness occur, that is the question.

[1:07:03] Thank you. Could you then continue to tell us about your research career – we’ve got the exclusion from the island, could you tell us what comes next. I know something that comes soon after that involves dog whelks, but you’ll be able to take us from one to the other.

Well, after we were excluded from the island we then moved to the Isle of May and carried on with very similar work, but as I said earlier, it ran into the sand because there was no variation, no genetic variation at the time. I got interested in looking at founder effects on different islands and sampled a lot of islands in Orkney and Shetland and showed the same sort of things, that there were enormous differences between different islands. As a sidekick of this – and this is where the Viking mice came in – I looked at samples of as many islands as I could of field mice. Now, field mice are rather better at living on their own than house mice and in the early years of the last century a lot of different forms were described on the Hebridean Islands. And what I did, I collected on a few of these islands myself, but also used a lot of museum material to compare skeletal characteristics on the Hebridean, mainly Hebridean Islands, also Shetland, how related different islands were, how close they were. I mean one was looking at morphological rather than genetical characters, but these were inherited morphological characters so the argument gets a bit woolly. Anyway, it turns out that all the islands are more closely related to another island than they are to the mainland or Scotland. So you can trace a series of relationships and when you trace them all with each other, they all end up back in Scandinavia. When you think of colonisation of these islands, and the whole of Scotland, most of England and Wales was wiped clean of biology in the Ice Ages, and so these are post-Ice Age colonisations, so we’re talking about founder effects of small groups going to islands. The first people with decent boats swanning around the North Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 80 C1672/02 Track 3

Atlantic were the Vikings. They had their raping and pillaging, but they also had their colonisation voyages and certainly the West Coast of Scotland is Viking territory. And I suggested that these Hebridean mice, field mice, were all Viking mice. And I wrote this up in the scientific literature. I then wrote an article in New Scientist and I was picked up by the BBC and gave a talk in the Third Programme in the middle of a Beethoven concert. Extraordinary, the number of people who listened to me on Viking mice on the Third Programme, and that’s the thing that went to the Queen. [1:10:58] So that was, may feel like a side issue, but supporting the whole founder effect idea. The same sort of thing occurred with Orkney voles. Now, in Orkney you have a form of vole which was discovered by John Millais, one of the sons of Sir John Millais, the painter, the son was a painter as well. But he caught one of these voles and described it as a new species and great excitement, you don’t have new species of mammals in Britain. And when you start looking at these voles in detail they are in fact a species of vole which is widespread on the Continent but is only found elsewhere in Britain on Guernsey. So to me this suggested very strongly that the Orkney voles were introduced at some stage. And so we did the same thing about comparing the Orkney voles with Continental voles. And this was stimulated to me, or supported by the then Head of the Mammal Section at the Natural History Museum who said to me that he was very surprised that the Orkney voles in the Museum collection were much more like southern European voles than the German voles which they had there. I said that was quite simple, because the reason they got to Orkney, they were relics of the Spanish Armada which got wrecked around the north. And, you know, this was my working hypothesis. Almost got to the stage of publishing it when I discovered that there were sub-fossil voles in Skara Brae, 2000 BC. So we had to change the argument rather. But I still think, well they must have been introduced and they just came at an earlier stage by some of these early voyagers. Now, the Orkney vole situation is very complicated because there was a theory that they were a relict when Orkney got cut off and then they, mainly the Scottish voles were another wave of immigration, different to the English voles. So there was a scientific argument about how all these things related. But what it boils down to is that all the mainland voles are related to each other, but the Orkney ones are different. So that was another side issue. [1:13:52] Dog whelks. This was in a sense parallel – when did it start? Late sixties, I think. Because of our work on Skokholm, because of my interest in genetical processes in the wild and how selection was actually acting in the wild – and people talk about selection acting on human beings or hens or whatever – and selection just doesn’t act like that, it depends on the stress that is being produced by the selection. So I wanted an animal, or a plant for that matter, but Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 81 C1672/02 Track 3 being a zoologist, an animal, that was exposed to different stresses, which in principle could be measured. Now, what the marine biologists do is to grade seashores in terms of exposure to wave action and so something living on the shore, you could say that, depending on the exposure, it is suffering exposure to different actions. Dog whelks vary enormously in their shape in different shores. On sheltered shores their problem is being predated by crabs and they have much thicker shells. On more exposed shores the problem is hanging on, and so they have big mouths. And with a friend of mine, who was a marine biologist, we collected on different shores with known exposures and correlated the amount of variance lost during life, which is a measure of selection, with the exposure and came up with very high correlation of selection with environmental stress. Now that continued for many years, and again got into the physiological component and I collaborated with the head of the Marine Lab in Plymouth and we had a series of students looking at different physiological characteristics of the whelks. Then we got on to the genes of the whelks, looking at different genes, and again, the same sort of thing in a less marked way as we had in the mice on Skokholm. But, again at the same time and if you like a complication of all this, and it occurs in both whelks and in mice, you get Robertsonian variation of chromosomes. Now, the chromosome is a sort of threadlike thing and it has at some point a centromere, which is where it attaches during cell division. Sometimes you get chromosomes which are joined together at the centromere, so you lose a bit of chromosome but not very much. It was discovered by a nice German called Alfred Gropp, looking at mice in an alpine valley, that instead of having the normal number of chromosomes of a mouse, which is forty, they had twenty-six. And when you actually compared the chromosomes, the twenty-six and the forty, almost all the chromosomes were there, but they were just joined up. And this was against all the rules because chromosomes are supposed to be rather important. And there were then other groups of these mice discovered with different variances in north Italy. And it seemed worth looking at some of our British mice. And rather to our surprise, enormous surprise, we discovered that some of the mice from Orkney had thirty-four chromosomes, and then another lot had thirty-six. And so we again put quite a lot of effort in, well, to sample different populations to find out how they were, these were on different islands, and then to try and find out what it was that causes this reduction in chromosome number. And I mean this has been a fairly major interest of the mouse fraternity over the last ten, fifteen years. It certainly happens in these mice. It happens in Caithness in the top right-hand corner of Scotland where the frequency of these fusions, these Robertsonian fusions falls off as you get down further south or west in Scotland. So there’s a mouse story and you have a rather Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 82 C1672/02 Track 3 similar story in dog whelks, that dog whelks on exposed shores and sheltered shores have a different number of chromosomes, again, a fusion type thing. But the trouble with whelk chromosomes, they’re much more difficult to look at than mouse chromosomes, so the story’s not as advanced there, but there is a story.

[1:19:52] Could you tell me how you do attempt to look at whelk chromosomes, and when I say tell me, I mean describe in practice what you would do in a laboratory, if it’s a laboratory that you do it in?

The chromosomes are in the nucleus of the cell and normally you can’t see them. When the cell divides, each of the daughter cells has the same chromosomes as the original, so that the chromosomes split. And what they do is to orientate themselves in the middle of the cell and then divide, well, they divide and then the cell divides and each has the same component. So one’s got to get dividing tissue and then persuade the chromosomes to stop dividing… to divide and then stop the cell falling apart and looking at each before they then reform into the nucleus. So one’s into plain cytology, staining chromosomes. Nowadays you’re looking at them probably with some sort of phase contrast, but in my day it’s a matter of staining them and looking at them down the microscope.

So you were waiting for the cell to be doing something in particular which moved the, because the cell was dividing, it moved the chromosomes into a position where you could see them more easily than if they were in the nucleus?

They become visible, then they divide, then they separate, then they go back into the nucleus. So in the whole of this process the cells are, the chromosomes are visible which they’re not in normal life. But you need a dividing tissue to be able to look at this. Because if the tissue’s not dividing, if the cell’s not dividing, or dividing very rarely, you have problems.

How do you encourage a piece of whelk tissue to, you know, how do you encourage cell division to get this?

You take a tissue that is dividing. One of the problems with the whelks we came up against is so much protein, proteolytic enzyme that it breaks down the cells, you’ve got to get rid of – Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 83 C1672/02 Track 3 this was one of the technical trips – get rid of the enzymes that are causing the breakdown tissue to actually look at it. I mean the simplest thing, go back to mammals, is to look at either blood where the white cells are dividing the whole time or testes, again, rather obviously cells that are dividing.

[1:23:02] Thank you. What did you yourself work on as the possible environmental selection reason for the tendency in some places for, you know, this reduced number of chromosomes because of greater fusion and less of this in other places?

We didn’t get very far, frankly. If you have less, bigger chromosomes you have less crossing over during cell division, so it may be that you’re reducing the amount of variation that is produced and because you have less variation you have less deaths during life. So it may be an adaptation to the variability of the environment. It’s probably something like that. It may be also – and this isn’t different – but I mean it’s a variation on it tied up with behaviour. But it’s very difficult to actually produce rigorous behavioural experiments to look at these sorts of things. You can look at hormones, but when you start looking at chromosomes you’ve got problems.

[1:24:24] Thank you. Could you describe the trip to the Antarctic Peninsula, which was in 1969, to look, I think, at limpets?

This was, if you like, an extension of the dog whelk work, that I was keen to look at what happened to the genetic system of a species when you get to a biological extreme. And to me a biological extreme is permanent ice. And so my trip was concerned with sampling limpets because that was the easiest thing to catch, collect, at different places down the Antarctic Peninsula till we got to the permanent ice. And it was a side issue in a sense that I was asked to go down by the Antarctic Survey as a sort of pastoral visitor, because in those days all the research work was done by graduate students and they liked to have – who would go down for two years and then come back and write up. And so these kids were away from, quote, civilisation, for two years, they’d never been away from mummy, libraries, supervision, all the rest of it. So a senior person used to go down each summer. In those days the Antarctic Survey was very small and for some reason that year none of the senior people were available Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 84 C1672/02 Track 3 to go down, so as a result of drinking gin on an aeroplane from Aberdeen with somebody, I said oh I would love to go to the Antarctic, I was asked to go down. And I had a good scientific reason for doing it, so I did.

Could you tell the story then of that?

Showed very, very little, because what happens with these whelks is that they just migrate into deeper… down the shore, down deeper when the ice comes in. So there’s probably very little difference in stress through the… as you go along. But one of the outcomes of my links with the Antarctic Survey was that some years later house mice were discovered on South Georgia and it was known that there were rats on South Georgia, nobody knew there were mice. And this was on the south side of South Georgia, which is, if you think of the southern hemisphere, the cold side near the pole and away from where all the old whaling stations and the rats were. The Antarctic Survey said would you be interested in looking at these, I said yes, I would indeed. So we spent two or three weeks actually camping, I was camping with somebody who was working on elephant seals, I was catching mice. Then we brought the mice back, kill them, look at them, and incredibly there, there was really quite a lot of selection and we were looking at the same characters that we’d been looking at in the Skokholm mice on these biochemical characters in blood. It was going different ways in males and females and in the males the difference, the selection seemed to be when they were leaving the nest, so post-adolescent, and that was a stressful time, they had to go and set up a territory, find a wife and so on, and that seemed to be the time that the change happened in the males. It was less specific in the females, but there was selection going in the opposite direction and obviously when the males and females got together again you end up with a unity together. So those were the South Georgia mice. I also looked at mice, again because of my interest in the strength of selection, on two other islands. One was Macquarie Island, which is south of Australia. Again there was major selection. And the South Africans caught mice for me on Marion Island, which was in the South African sector of sub-Antarctica, and showed a very similar effect. And also, just to complete the mouse and environment study, I trapped in two places in the middle of the Pacific. I trapped on Hawaii and also on Enewetak Atoll, and this is a very cushy life for the mice, you know, plenty of food, no cold stresses – and cold seems to be the big problem with these animals – and no evidence of selection whatsoever.

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[1:29:47] Could you tell me, or tell me and tell the listener, just to clarify, what no selection looks like when you’re studying these mice?

This is a lack of change through life. You’re born with some, a set of genes and other… you’re better off if you have another set of genes. So the ones that have gene A disappear, those with gene B survive. So you’re comparing young with old.

But in these populations where there was no stress, whether you have A or B doesn’t make any difference, so the relative frequencies of these two different genes stay the same over time.

They stay the same through life. So you divide them into different age groups and compare the young with the old, no difference. When we went to Enewetak, which was the atoll, this was where the Americans used to blow off hydrogen bombs, and they brought in vast quantities of laboratory mice for the experiments and I rather hoped that these would be the descendants of the laboratory mice so that we’d know exactly what genes they were in the first place. In fact, they weren’t. They were just like other Pacific mice, so when they got there I just don’t know, but they were obviously not the laboratory mice.

Why had they taken laboratory mice there?

They were looking at survival, you know, conditions of radiation exposure and so on. But it was, the Americans suddenly got a conscience about their experiments and they would provide money for any biologist who wanted to work on Enewetak, they’d pay everything from Hawaii, all expenses, transport and all the rest of it. And a friend of mine was actually working on the rats there and he said would I like to come and look at the mice, so I said yes please, and I went to Enewetak.

This was a conscience about the tests?

Yeah. You know, making a mess of ‘God’s world’.

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[Track 4]

[0:00:00] I think I’m right in saying that you started to have a family in the early sixties, so during the period that we’ve been talking about, while you’re doing this sort of mouse work, I think you’d moved to Sevenoaks after you married?

We moved to Sevenoaks where my wife was actually in hospital having twins.

Okay. So what I would like to ask is, in the same way that I asked for memories you had as a child of time spent with your parents, could you give me memories of time spent with your own children as young children as they were growing up?

That’s what I keep a wife for, to look after the children. We had twins, the male twin was – fractious is the wrong word – he had a loud voice. I mean I have memories of having to wield the male while my wife trailed twenty yards behind with the female. But they grew up in the normal way. Being twins they communicated very well with each other. When they started going to nursery school the person who ran the nursery school was very dubious about taking them, she thought they must be mentally defective because they didn’t talk English. But they seemed to be alright. And then rather under two years later we had a third child and the three of them grew up together. My wife got very bitchy. She was a medic and she qualified and then did a research job fairly soon after had the children, having spent most of her, all her adult life at fairly high intensity intellectual pursuits, she got very bitchy stuck at home with small children. So I sort of signed her on to do a PhD part-time to keep her mind occupied and because she was a medic and knew human anatomy, she worked on the same sorts of variants that I was working on in mice, but in humans. They were known to vary in humans, but no-one knew anything about the frequency of them, so it started off with afternoons spent at the Natural History Museum while I looked after the children, then she got interested in the movement of the Vikings, because there was a lot of Viking material about, so we had some delightful holidays, either digging up graveyards in Orkney or Shetland, or looking at museum material in Norway, and she went to Iceland on one occasion to look at skeletons. Eight years later she got a PhD.

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What did you do with the children when you were looking after them in the afternoons and she was at the Natural History Museum?

Whatever children do. I mean they were quite happy playing together. They didn’t tear each other… well, they’ve got their eyes left, so they obviously didn’t tear them out at the time.

Thank you. And can you say a bit more about the fieldwork then involving digging up graveyards? We know what you’ve done with the mice, but what were you assisting your wife with in terms of humans?

Well, Caroline wanted these population samples of human skulls. The Scandinavians have very good habits that when a graveyard gets full they dig all the bones up and put them in a museum so they have holes left for the next generation. But we don’t do that and she was very keen to get some Scottish material. And I talked to the archaeologist in Orkney who was the local county librarian. Oh, he said, I know where you can get some skulls. There’s a place where the Boys’ Brigade camp and there are always skulls washing out of the sandy cliff there and they play football with them, so there must be quite a lot there. So we teamed up with a friend of mine who was a professional archaeologist so the thing was done properly and spent a summer – and the children were very small then, sort of three, four, I suppose, five – digging up this place in Orkney and they’re now in the Natural History Museum. Shetland was very different in that there had been a major dig by Aberdeen archaeologists in a little tidal islet, which was known to be a place where they buried lots of people over the years, and then they discovered Viking treasure and got frightfully excited, so they put all the bones in a pit, filled it in and went off with the treasure, which is now in Edinburgh. The problem was finding the pit, but one of the locals who’d been involved in the dig found it for us so we dug that up and they again are in the Natural History Museum. So that’s all the practical work of digging up skulls.

[05:39] And so when you were on Orkney digging up, or getting the ones that were coming out of the cliff, you had young children with you, what did they do while you were… what do you remember them doing while you were…

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Oh, digging, they loved it. Brushing skulls, and you’ve got to be careful when you’re doing these things, they had their trowels and other people had their pickaxes.

So it was the two of you, the archaeologist and your children went?

No, there was a group of students from York. They were actually English students and they were sold this on the grounds that this must be early English. But we took over a village school and all the students were in the school and we actually camped.

[06:30] You used the expression, you said that your wife, having done a medical degree and then research, could you say a bit more about her experience of looking after… going from that to being sort of fulltime looking after just children?

Like any woman, I think, they get perhaps withdrawal symptoms is the word, no adults to talk to, all the sort of adults you talk to, you know, how do you get the wind out of these children or whatever. I don’t know, I don’t know what these people talk about. Anyway, at that time Caroline used to get a bit scratchy so I thought it was a good thing to occupy her a bit.

And how did Caroline feel about your sort of fieldwork, because presumably you were away from home for extended periods on mouse or whelk or limpet fieldwork?

Yeah, well I mean the first major trip, fairly soon after we got married, was when I went to India to catch rats and she wasn’t awfully pleased about that. And then there was the Antarctic trip. No, just how life was, as it were. But most of the fieldwork trips, apart from the Antarctic and India were two, three weeks at the most so, you know, she could survive that. And her parents were not all that far away.

Did you write with her about the human variation?

One of the highlights of my academic career is a paper we wrote together, which is now a footnote in Gray’s Anatomy on Genetical Change in Ancient Egypt. But it is a thing I would Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 89 C1672/02 Track 4 not recommend, writing anything with your wife. The nearest we’ve come to divorce in the two or three papers we’ve written together.

In what ways then do your approaches differ so that you…

Well medics, you see, aren’t trained in science at all, they don’t understand the niceties of these things at all.

I think you said before that, you described, was it Kettlewell?

Bernard Kettlewell, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

You know, when I was at the Free I was teaching medics. They’re just not taught to think, they’re taught to… they’re mechanics.

[08:53] Thank you. Could we talk now about, because it’s about the right time, Adam and the Ape was published in 1975, so presumably you’re… and you told the story last time about, oh yes, the origin of your decision to write it was a talk…

I gave in Melbourne.

Yes, which presumably was connected with the island, 1971.

That was when I was going down to Macquarie to catch mice there.

Okay. And so I’ve got some questions on Adam and the Ape. You talked towards the beginning about the negative effect of Christians who might be tempted to sort of deny the truth of evolution as a kind of defensive way of preserving Christianity from a perceived threat, and you talk about this particularly being the case sort of earlier in the twentieth century, but were there Christians at the time that you’re writing Adam and the Ape in the UK rather than America who you were aware of who were sort of guilty of this? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 90 C1672/02 Track 4

I don’t know about guilty, it’s confusion more, I think. You know, if I go into a church youth group or a school Christian Union or something like that to talk about science Christianity, at the end, ‘Sir! Do you believe in evolution?’ So the problem for them was, and still is, I mean it’s every generation has to face this, how you fit in with what the Bible is apparently talking about with what the scientists are talking about. And the trouble is, very often these kids get a very good scientific understanding at school and they’re told the Bible stories, but not told how to interpret the Bible stories that they need interpreting, rather than just accepting them at face value as a literal statement.

[11:12] How, in preparing to write the book, how did you go about studying the Bible, what kind of Bible study was necessary?

Well, I knew the Genesis stories, and how did all this make sense in terms of anthropology. And perhaps the biggest problem is understanding how God actually works in the world. I mean if you accept that we were chimpanzees or we shared a common ancestor with the chimps or the apes, at some stage how was God overruling, what does one mean by it, what does one mean by miracles. I mean that’s the theological question.

One of the very striking arguments in the book is the one where you’re, I think, talking about Donald MacKay’s metaphor of the tuning of a television, there’s that, there’s the painting and then there’s the scene of a cricket match being played. Could you sort of date or talk about the origins of that kind of thinking, and perhaps it’s related to your experience of Donald MacKay, I mean where that way of thinking about the complementarity of…

Well, this is Donald and Donald was a very constant member of the annual conferences of Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship. He wrote fairly early on a little book, which I can’t remember the name of offhand. I can tell you if you pass me… [pause] Science and Christian Faith Today (1960). Well, 1959, I think, was the… no, 1955 was the first – or ’56 – was the first RSCF conference I went to. But those illustrations of the cricket match, of the television set and so on, they’re in that little book, and he was clearly talking about them beforehand at the meetings I went to, so I was imbibing it from Donald. But it’s set out in that little, well, slightly more than a pamphlet. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 91 C1672/02 Track 4

[14:06] Did you have the opportunity to talk to him about how he’d come to those sorts of views of life? I know that he worked in radar in the war, but he was in fact a physiologist of some kind. I wondered why the television metaphor, for example, and whether he talked…

Well, he got into artificial brains and to what extent can a brain think, a machine think. He was the first Professor of Communication at Keele and that was his bread and butter, if you like. I don’t think I ever talked to him about it, it’s just what emerged from him.

[14:53] You also towards the beginning of the book talk about, well you talk about two kind of, sort of errors that stem from misunderstanding or understanding of the evolution debate. One secular humanism and the other one Bible worship, and then there’s also the liberal error. And can you, if I just read a little bit of it can you then try and explain, help me to understand? So – and this is under the liberal error – ‘apart from the convenience of selecting only parts of scripture as binding, the denial of the reality of God’s creative activity leads to elevating man at the expense of his creator. This underestimates the sinfulness of man and detracts from the all-embracing nature of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross. If man is still on the way up, Christ’s death for us can have only passing significant, consequently liberals concentrate on the example and love of the incarnation rather than the achievement and love of the atonement’. So can you help me with two things: one, bits of scripture that I’m not familiar with, so what’s the difference between the incarnation and the atonement as things to focus on, and I wondered whether you could say more about your belief, because I’ve assumed this has to be belief, in sort of the sinfulness of man and the meaning of Christ’s death and how your position when writing this differs from these, I suppose liberal Christians, you’re comparing…

Yeah, I mean there are, on the one hand the people who take Genesis 1 completely literally, and so God put Adam in a garden in 4004, in October. So that that’s one extreme. Then, if you assume that we are, we have evolved – this is the liberal thing – and we were apes, we’re now humans, by definition we must be improving. Now, how is it that we’re improving and there’s so much, obviously, nastiness about the place. And anybody has children knows about sin, they don’t quite do what you expect them to do or want them to do. That’s hardly Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 92 C1672/02 Track 4 sin, but it is wrongdoing. So the liberal fallacy or the liberal whatever it is, is that we are getting better. Now, one of the things that we learn from Jesus is we have an example, we have teaching, we have, if you like, the Sermon on the Mount. But that only takes you some way, you then have a standard to measure up to and anybody who has tried doesn’t measure up to it. Therefore, there is something else. And this is where the atonement comes in, that through Christ’s work on the cross the past is wiped out, the spirit then enables you to live, not perhaps as you ought to be living, but a lot nearer than you might otherwise be living. So the liberal side is, you know, you’ve got to do it all yourself.

[18:37] I see, yeah. And you also talk about the need to use all the relevant data when you seek to discover the meaning of scripture for ourselves. How did your, I suppose the question is, how as a scientist, if it made a difference at all, did you go about looking at the Bible compared to – and other people in Christians in Science – compared to other Christians that you knew who weren’t scientists, who were perhaps just at the South Kensington church or other Christians you knew in the Church of England?

Well, you’ve got to identify that there are different things in the Bible. Some of it’s poetry, some of it’s history, some of it’s teaching, some of it’s factual, some of it’s parables. How do you do this? Now, I think one of the, if you like, the advantages of being a scientist, you get used to analysing situations into, what’s the word, multiphasic – slightly pompous word and I don’t think it is multiphasic – but different ways, rather than taking the whole thing as purely literal truth. Now, I think most people would go along with that, that you know – well, they’ve got to go along with it, the different things in scripture – but there is a train of thought or a strand of thought that particularly the early chapters of Genesis are literal history and that’s the thing that has got [beeping noise] somehow to be… that’s got to be sorted out and weeded out.

Have you – again, this is really for especially the non-Christian listener’s benefit – what’s your view of what the Bible is, I suppose the history of it as a text and then how did you come to that view? I mean presumably you’ve done some kind of historical scholarship about what the Bible is and all of that thing, and perhaps some of that actually just takes place in these young Christians fellowships and Christian fellowships and discussion. So what’s your view Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 93 C1672/02 Track 4 of what the Bible is, because I think that’s critical to sort of understanding some of the things in here?

Well, the Bible is obviously a very complex document. I mean it’s sixty-six different books written by, I don’t know how many different people, over really quite a long period. So one’s got to accept that there are differences within it. Now, on top of that I believe both from Jesus’s own teaching and other parts of the Bible, that it is God’s word to us. So you have got to somehow balance and understand, on the one hand, the literary side of it and the fact that it is divinely inspired in some way. So often, well not so often, but very often people regard divinely inspired as meaning that the spirit literally worked through human beings dictating it. Which is poppycock, but I do believe, and that anybody who’s written anything knows that you get a way to express things which can be better or for worse, and if you believe in the Holy Spirit and if you believe that the Bible is inspired, I see no difficulty in arguing, believing that scripture is an inspired book. It doesn’t mean therefore that it is a manual like a motor or a television manual.

[22:25] Have you had any particular thoughts on how that divine inspiration might operate, or might have operated in the case of the people writing these forty-four different…

No. No, I think they’re writing it down, they’re not sort of saying look, you know, this is the Spirit’s word, this is my word. They’re writing it down, presumably in most cases after prayer and presumably there’s a revision process comes in. How does God work in the world? If he’s working in the world the whole time, as I certainly believe, I see no problem in that a book like that, which is going to come down through the ages, can be regarded in a rather special light.

Thank you. Now, I’m just going to… Could you tell me, could you try and remember, put yourself back into the position of writing this book and tell me how you came to the view about the difference between special and divine creation. And there was attention here to the use of different verbs at particular parts in the Bible, and then how you came to the argument that Adam might have been a case of God creating with existing material, so that all of the anthropological arguments about humans having qualities that clearly indicate sort of pre- Garden of Eden existences as animals could also be compatible with man as being sort of Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 94 C1672/02 Track 4 distinct from. So, I don’t know how you can think back how that all came together, but how did you put all that together and come to that argument, which seems to be central to the book?

When people talk about ‘special creation’ they’re almost always, I think, talking about God doing things and then that didn’t change. When one’s talking about divine creation, one is talking about God working through existing processes. Now, to me the argument that we have a common ancestry with the apes is overwhelming, that we share a common ancestor. Now, what does it mean that we are different? Are we quantitatively or qualitatively different? Traditionally humans had a soul, what does it mean to have a soul? What the Bible says, it doesn’t talk about soul, it talks, the Bible insists on the unity of humanness. What the Bible does talk, is that we are in the image of God. What does it mean to be in the image of God? It certainly doesn’t mean two arms, two legs, two ears and all the rest of it. I think it means, certainly to me, two things. One is, some sort of relationship. And the other thing is that it is not a physical thing, it is a responsibility – well, she’s part of the relationship, I suppose – that the relationship gives us a responsibility and this comes back to my belief in our environmental job, that being made in the image of God he is entrusted, and this is literally in the text and this is part of how I’d interpret Genesis 1, that God has given us dominion and the dominion he’s given to us is not to do as we please, it’s a dominion of us in his image, which means a responsibility. It’s also a dominion that is part of the nature of God and the servanthood of God, and when one thinks about dominion in the ancient Israelite sense, it’s a royal word, but the ancient Israelites’ picture of royalty was the servant, the caring ruler. David, Solomon, Jesus himself was looking after what had been entrusted to them. So being made in God’s image to me means being responsible to God for the place he’s put us into. Now, I certainly don’t regard this as being a sort of tomato ketchup dollop of the soul coming in. This is God at work in a relationship and a relationship is something that is, it is there, but it’s not a physical relationship. I have no problem in the neurobiologists saying that there’s no evidence of a soul. I’m very happy with that, because my understanding of my relationship to God is a relationship like any other relationship.

[28:27] Thank you. And also, the development of your argument about who Adam might have been, which links together, I think, findings on genetic material in blood about a kind of bottle-neck at the time, but also bits from scripture about the sort of environment. I think you say that, Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 95 C1672/02 Track 4 one theory, that he might have been, was it a Neolithic farmer in a particular place? So all of that sort of, could you tell me about coming to that argument?

What the Bible says is we’re made in the image of God. Now, we’re not told when it was, but it must have happened, it’s an act of God. Now, some people would say that God literally put this into a specific man at one time. And he may well have done, because this isn’t a genetic thing, you don’t have to inherit it in the same way as genes, it could have spread from that person at one time. When did it happen? Well, Adam was a Neolithic farmer, I mean one of his sons looked after sheep. His next generation or two, they were beginning to live in towns. So we’re talking about between ten and 20,000 years ago. I’d be very happy for humanness, if you like, Adam, to have been brought into being at that sort of period. I don’t think it matters, I’m agnostic about it, but it makes sense for the story. Now, other people say of course that the evidence of humanness is in burying dead or all the beautiful cave paintings and all the rest of it. They don’t show anything as such, the important thing is the relationship.

And how novel was the argument that you were making at the time? I mean could you have turned to other publications in the mid seventies to find similar arguments about what man is in relation to evolution?

Most of the arguments were that we must have evolved and how did it happen and, you know, how does God come into it. I think any, I wouldn’t call it originality, any points that I was making was how does one envisage God working through natural processes. Certainly at that time there were suggestions that Adam was sort of Neolithic. Nothing original there, nothing important there, I don’t think. There was a well-known book which was arguing, where did Adam’s Y chromosome come from. I just don’t know. Because, you know, the argument is – sorry, not Adam, I beg your pardon, I’m getting tied up with virgin births and something. No, forget that.

[31:50] Yes, the quote concerning the bottleneck would be that ‘the strong evidence that man has passed through an Adam and Eve situation in comparatively recent times’. There was an argument that it could either have been a single pair for one generation, Adam and Eve, or an effective population of 10,000 for half a million years. So could you go into that? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 96 C1672/02 Track 4

Well, a bottleneck is shown up in the genetic record as a reduction in genetic variation and mathematically this can be a rather loose, tightening up over a longer period, or a very tight thing for a short period. And there are, there were people who think that everything must have come from a pair. If you actually work out the chances of a pair giving rise to the whole of the population, it just doesn’t work out. You also have the problem, which is another problem, that if you’re talking about Adam as a Neolithic creature in the Middle East, there are by that time Aborigines in Australia, people in China and so on, therefore you can’t make is a simple Adam and Eve character, it must be something that spread. At least, that’s my understanding of it. You then get into other complications with Romans 5, but we’ll not talk about Romans 5.

Go into those though, what are the other complications?

That Paul in Romans, he talks about the first Adam and compares to the last Adam, who is Christ. And that sin came into the world through that first Adam. What do we mean by that sin coming into the world, how do we understand the origin of sin. Now, the short answer is we don’t know. We do know that there is sin in the world. Did it come in through a person or a group of people or what? I don’t have any problem that it may have come in through one person, that there was an original act of disobedience, and that was the falling out of the relationship, the break of the relationship. How it relates to the rest of humankind at that time, I don’t know. But as I say, these are not genetic characters, they’re characters that are spread by God’s work, this is God at work in the world. How do we understand it? That is the crucial question to me, not the anthropology.

And there was a particular use of verbs in one book which allowed you to…

Bara and…?

Yes.

Okay. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but there are two words used for God’s work in Genesis 1. One is bara and the other is asah. Now, asah is a word, use a moulding, it’s the word for a potter moulding pots. And that’s the word that is commonly used of creation; God moulding Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 97 C1672/02 Track 4 something. The word bara is used always of God’s work and it’s used four times in Genesis 1, it’s used for the creation of matter, creation of the great sea monsters, and twice of humankind, suggesting that there is some special work of God going on at that time. Great sea monsters could speak to the common myths of creation, that these were the baddies as opposed to the creation of matter or humans which really come into a different category. But the implication – I won’t say it more than that – is that there are different ways in which God worked.

[36:24] Thank you. Do you remember what the reception to the book was? Reviews, comment in Christian publications or mainstream publications?

I didn’t really read the reviews, I mean it was by and largely well received and people still tell me they read it and that it was important. I once saw it on second-hand sale in a Cairo bookshop. It was supposed to be… no, sorry. The revised version of Adam and the Ape, God and Evolution was supposed to be published in America and it got to the stage that the publisher there announcing a date, and then suddenly pulling out. I can only presume this was to do with the flak that they would have got in the States.

I know it’s a deliberately naïve question, but why would they have got flak in the States for the publication of that book?

They would have been almost ostracised as publishers, people wouldn’t have bought their books, you know, they’d have been picketed. I mean a friend of mine wrote a book, this was on human ethics and test-tube babies and all the rest of it, and the publisher there was picketed, you know, they wanted the book withdrawn.

Was there any negative reaction in the UK that you were aware of?

Not particularly aware of.

Not particularly?

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Well, nothing that occurred to me that made me regret writing it. I mean there may have been negative reaction because the people who take a very literal view of Genesis. I think they’re wrong so I don’t pay much attention.

[38:24] Were they in an identifiable group in the UK in the way, I mean the Christians in Science seems to have contained people whose view was quite similar in outlook to yours, so where would you have had to have, you know, which group would you have had to have joined in Britain at the time in order to enjoy a more literal reading of the…

Oh, I think particularly in some of the free churches. The Brethren and the Baptists. I mean the Metropolitan Tabernacle, for example, here in London inveighs against anything that is evolutionary, you know, this is sinful, this is not doubting the Bible and all the rest of it. Again, a friend of mine was forbidden to play the piano in his Brethren assembly, because he believed in evolution. So those are the sort of places, and you still get it. And I mean there is that element in Christians in Science. It’s a small element, but there are certainly people who have very literal understandings of parts of scripture.

Does that mean then that in your early experience of what was then the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, that… could you detect differences within the group when it was a small, a very small group like that, when you were first encountering it, were there sort of detectable differences in the outlook of sort of key members or…

I wouldn’t say detectable differences, I mean there were questions that people were raising; how can we understand this, that and the other, does this mean this? I wouldn’t say it was more than that, in memory.

But Donald MacKay, for example, would be on the non-literal end of the spectrum in that group?

Yes, but you see, interestingly he was brought up as a Wee Free in north of Scotland. And I mean he’d certainly thought it through on his own account at some stage.

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[40:39] I haven’t checked myself, but the revisions between Adam and the Ape and the next version, what were they, I mean what…?

Well, Adam and the Ape was a very, well, a very small book, not quite written off the cuff. I got more involved in reading the American stuff and how all this affected it and wrote a revised version which was God and Evolution, which was published by Hodder.

[end of Track 4]

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[Track 5]

[0:00:00] When you were talking, writing in Adam and the Ape about the differences between man and say, other animals, one of the things was a kind of an obedience which is connected to the relationship and what you call the responsibility, and you say that this is an unfashionable doctrine at the moment. I wonder whether you could say something about the wider culture and society at the time that you’re writing these things. So this is sort of the UK in the sixties and seventies, what was your view of what is sometimes called the permissive developments and satire and that sort of thing and the kind of questioning of authority, that sort of general…

I was going to say when I was at school there was Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and that lot. I think there was inevitably a, well, clearly a reaction in the Church. On the one hand you got Honest to God and John Robinson and attempting to adjust to the permissiveness. On the other hand there is the complete rejection of it all, how does one go along a middle line. And I suspect that this is where, it’s not only a scientific attitude, but it’s where scientists and thinking intellectuals, I would say, have a responsibility to steer a middle course between what is allowable and what isn’t. I mean at one time, certainly when I was a student, I would never dream of drinking or smoking. I still wouldn’t smoke, but I’m very happy now to drink within moderation. Now, how does one fix that line? I mean we’re told a little wine for the stomach’s sake, which is so often quoted by Christians. There is a middle course and a middle course is always more difficult to defend than either extreme.

[02:26] Having been then in the same college as some of these people, what did you think of sort of satirical comedy in Britain at the time? Did you follow it on the radio or TV?

No, not really.

Okay.

[laughs] I mean, I don’t think I ever saw… I never listened to the Goon Show and I suspect… or The Week That Was. No. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 101 C1672/02 Track 5

And I was wondering about Christians in Science by this time – I don’t think it’s called Christians in Science yet, but it does change its name in the sixties doesn’t it? Has it by this time, I mean by 1975, taken on sort of more female members?

Oh, there were always female members there.

Okay.

I mean no problem there, but I mean as in the science world generally, there tend to be more males anyway.

The only reason I ask is that you write somewhere about the Oxford Conference in 1965, that’s the paper with Malcolm Jeeves, the draft paper, was thirty-six men and that was it, there were no women at all in the 1965 conference.

[inaud]

Okay.

No, I mean they were all invited people and I mean, difficult to know if there were people to invite. You see, when I was collecting testimonies of scientists who were Christians, it was difficult to find women to put in with that lot. I mean I was looking very hard to find them. There just aren’t that many.

[04:00] Thank you. Could you then, if we have, you think, got to the end of your career at the Royal Free, take us onwards in your career, talk about the reasons for moving and so on. I think there was a union of two departments.

Yes. I mean there were various things happening politically in the medical education in the seventies, I suppose it would be. There was a twinning of medical schools. The Royal Free where I was teaching, the medical school was going to be absorbed into the hospital, move up to Hampstead. Also, the University College Genetics Department, which is a very venerable Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 102 C1672/02 Track 5 department, my own department at the Royal Free, by which time had become a genetics department as opposed to biology, as we started, we were actually complementary to the University College department and I discussed with the then head of department, Harry Harris, about fusing up, which would have been part of the general fusion of medical schools anyway. We were probably the only bit at that time that actually fused at all and one of the problems was that Harry, the professor, then moved off to the States before I moved and I went in as joint head of the University College department with a female called Betty Robson who was their boss. That didn’t work out and I moved over into zoology, leaving behind in genetics my two colleagues who’d come over with me from the Free.

What do you mean, it didn’t work out?

She was a bitch. [laughs] No, she had ideas of her own, which I don’t think were good ideas.

How were they different? So what were your ideas and what were her ideas, what was the clash?

I wanted to integrate things much more, she wanted to carry on the way things were done, always had been done. She was the first in possession of the territory, as it were. It was uncomfortable all round.

And who were the two members of staff left in genetics then when you moved to zoology?

Steve Jones and Ian Lush.

So you moved almost immediately into zoology?

It was probably about two… I mean our move took place over some time. It was probably a couple of years, in fact, although by that time I wasn’t really, I was sort living in the medical school at Hunter Street.

[07:12] And then how, could you take us forward in your research from the move from the Free? We’ll look at the institutions in more detail later, but just how did your research continue? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 103 C1672/02 Track 5

We were breeding mice in UC, we wanted to set up behaviour experiments, didn’t quite work. We were bringing in wild mice from various places, much to the upset of the professional animal house keepers who didn’t like wild mice, even though they’re cleaner than most laboratory mice. By that time most of my hands-on research was being done by students rather than by me. We were looking at, or it was about that time, we began to look at the chromosomes of the mice. We were still carrying on with the dog whelk research. I was getting more and more involved in national committees. When did I go on to the NERC – the National Environment Research Council – somewhere about there, which inevitably took quite a lot of time out of the department. I mean there was no major change in my research it was just sort of the way things developed.

[08:46] Could you tell, I know that you said they didn’t quite work, but could you tell me what you were attempting to do with the behavioural experiments?

Well, it would have been nice to compare the different behaviours in terms of aggression and mating behaviour of different chromosome types. Now, to get your different chromosome types, are you talking about segrega… you’re talking really about line A and line B. If you start crossing them, you have problems in how they match up. If you’re talking about two different lines they have different backgrounds and all the rest of it. So you can do it but it’ll become a major experiment, it’s a major enterprise in its own right.

Just to get the two types to compare?

Mm.

And can you say more then about what you were bringing the wild mice in for to do? You say that the other people in the department weren’t keen.

Well, it’s not the people in the department, it was the actual professional animal house keepers. And then the new Home Office regulations came in that you had to check them every day and all the rest of it, and these wild mice don’t like being checked, you had to leave them, literally, without looking at them for a week or two weeks before they start breeding. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 104 C1672/02 Track 5

And some of these island mice we wanted to do, look at some more of their traits, look at more of their blood. We brought some mice in from the Faroe Islands, for example. I almost got prosecuted by the – I’ve forgotten who it was – Home Office I suppose. No, Min of Ag, under rabies regulations. Not that there’s any rabies in the Faroes, but you know, it’s against the rules. [10:44] I mean the Faroes was another quite interesting sideline that Julian Huxley in the Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, the book that actually brought together the different strands of evolutionary thinking, talks about different evolutionary rates, and there’s a very slow rate and a fairly rapid rate and a very rapid rate, and the very rapid rate, his example was Faroese mice, which couldn’t have been there much longer than the human population, and the human population of the Faroes is about a thousand years. Now, to me this was a classic example of founder effect type example, never mind the fact that one of the things about the Faroe mice is that they’re very big mice, and that can happen very quickly. So we wanted to look at the Faroe mice, we wanted to look at their relationships and their characteristics, and so we made some efforts to go to the Faroes, collect them, bring them back, and they’re no more different than any of the other island mice. But it scotches the Huxley story, you’ve got to make them into a special category.

And just to remind ourselves, the founder effect is that because this is a particular subset of the population that moved there in the first place, they’re going to be genetically different from the mass, you know, the wider population…

Yeah, they’re going to be unique in their own right and different because of that.

[12:46] And just so that we have an idea about the sort of practicalities of this, when you say you arranged to go to Faroes and collect some mice, what is actually involved as a scientist, you know, from a London university, wanting to get some mice from the Faroe Island?

Well almost certainly taking your own traps, liaising with the very friendly Faroese people, different places one would collect them, talking to farmers as much as one could the places where one wanted to go, who always think you’re mad, but that doesn’t matter.

Well how do they express that?

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‘Aw, aye, you kill ‘em, you kill ‘em.’ Just the way they look at you, you know.

How do they feel about it?

Well, I think research is a good thing, it’s good to cure cancer. It’s all curing cancer. Nothing to do with cancer, of course, well, only very indirectly. So they’re supportive, particularly if you’re not going to upset their ways of doing things.

[13:55] I see, thank you. Could you then talk about, you mentioned when we were covering this, the NERC committee that you went on, what was that?

Well, I started off, I chaired one of the grants committees, and then I went on to the Council properly and I did two stints on the Council there and my last stint, I was chairman of the Terrestrial Ecological Research under NERC, which in those days was Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, now that’s the main bit.

[14:39] And during the sixties and seventies, could you talk about your awareness of debates about relations between science, especially evolution and religion, in the sort of mainstream media? So you’ve written, in 1975 you’ve written this particular book on it, you’re going to Christians in Science meetings, but how is the relationship between science and religion, especially evolution religion, being presented when you read a newspaper or watch a TV programme? Were you aware of that kind of very public mainstream debate?

Well, it’s hardly a debate. I would say it was the assumption that religion has, or the Bible certainly, has been disproved by evolution, therefore one doesn’t take it seriously, therefore you behave as you want. I mean you may behave morally, you may accept religion but just pick out the bits you want. I wouldn’t have thought at that time that I was aware or interested in the niceties of the evolution debate in the way that it sometimes carried on in different places.

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Do you have a view on why that view, that the Bible has been disproved by evolution, therefore you don’t need to take it seriously, do you have a view on why it was throughout this period and continues to be a persistent narrative?

Well, if you read the Bible it’s obviously a non-Christian, a non-scientific book. It’s not talking about scientific things, you don’t have to take it seriously. There’s some good ideas in the Bible, stick to the Sermon on the Mount and you’re alright. Which is absolute nonsense if you start reading the Sermon on the Mount and find what it’s actually talking about, but that’s another question.

[16:52] What were you at this time, when you weren’t sort of working, what were you reading in terms of newspapers or magazines? I mean did you read things like The New Scientist?

Not often.

And newspapers?

Read The Times. Started when I used to get it for tuppence at college. Used to get Nature, which I never understood. When I got more and more into the ecological world I used to look at the ecological journals and the evolution journals. At some stage I started editing the Biological Journal of the Linnean, which I wanted to turn into a British version of two American journals, Evolution and American Naturalist, which worked quite well, I think, at the beginning. So I edited that for twelve or thirteen years, I think. Can’t remember when it was.

[17:54] And you describe yourself as a student as being completely apolitical.

Mm.

Over this period that we’ve been talking about today, over the sixties and seventies, did you develop any more interest in politics or interest in…

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No, I used to get cross with politicians, as most of us do at one time or other. Not really more than that.

Did you have sort of particular tendencies when it came to voting? You know, a preference for one party or another really?

I would certainly run away from the more extreme socialist ideas because I don’t think they’re based on any true perception of human beings. Equally, I’m scared stiff of some of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail attitudes from the other end.

Can you go into a bit more your view that you think socialism isn’t based on sort of realistic ideas?

It’s based on the assumption that good behaviour, altruistic behaviour comes out the whole time, the selfishness can be negated. It’s just not true.

So it’s a sort of an elevation of human beings?

Yeah. And despite the fact that, certainly the Labour movement came out of Methodism, it’s left its roots rather a long way behind most of the time.

[19:37] Did you read the various publications that were coming out on the relations between science and socialism in the Soviet Union and the sort of planning for science?

I read Julian Huxley’s book, I read… I got sort of on the edge of Lysenko and what was going on there. I collaborated to a very small extent with a fairly senior Russian scientist who worked in the same institute as Lysenko and I always remember going with him to the institute in Moscow, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s Lysenko’s room there’. I never met Lysenko.

When did you go to Moscow?

I’ve been twice. The first was the first International Theological Congress – 1970? That was great fun actually. They asked me to give a plenary address and at that stage I hardly knew Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 108 C1672/02 Track 5 what a plenary address was. Anyway, I was the first speaker on the first day of this congress, enormous Russian place. The Americans had hired a jet and there was a whole lot of Americans there. I think there were two other Brits. And it was simultaneous translation. And it started off, you know, the Minister and the Mayor and all these sorts of things, then it was me. So I stood up and I said, you know, I don’t know if this is a tremendous privilege for Western science or whether I am the capitalist pig being thrown to the communist wolves. And then I got on with the paper, sort of embarrassed titter from the Americans. I said to the translator at the end of it, you know, ‘Did you manage with what I was saying? I didn’t actually read from the text, but I based it on the text’. ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘Just at the beginning you were speaking to the audience from the microphone, I had to fill in a bit’. [laughs] That was my first experience of Russia.

[21:59] Now, during the, I think it’s in the mid seventies, there’s a book which is now seen as very significant, but I don’t know how significant it was seen at the time, and that’s The Selfish Gene, which came out in the mid seventies. What do you remember of it – and perhaps you didn’t read it, perhaps you did – but if you did read it, what do you remember of it and what were your views of it?

It came out, people were talking about it, didn’t seem very exciting to me, and then I was asked to go and debate with Richard Dawkins in an Oxford church, so I thought I had to read it. So I did, and I had no problem at all, I thought it was a bit of way out argument. But Richard talks about two sorts of altruism in it. One is evolved through kin selection and all the rest of it, and the other sort of appears from nowhere. So at the debate I said, you know, I have no problem whatsoever about this, you know, some of it’s evolutionary, some of it’s God’s work in this. It’s the only time I’ve ever known him to be rather lost for words. I mean I think it’s a non-argument, frankly, but that’s another thing. I wasn’t very impressed at the time.

Can you say a bit more about, for the non-scientist like me and the non-scientist listening, why is it ‘way out’ as an argument?

Because it is individuals that survive and breathe and behave, it isn’t genes. Now, I mean to what extent are you run by your genes? I mean your genes are important, but you’re not Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 109 C1672/02 Track 5 determined by your genes. It’s just turning everything on its head. You know, it’s nice and sexy, but that’s about it.

[23:47] Could you say more – and was the debate soon after the publication of it?

Well, the debates were, as always, that this is one more nail in the coffin of Christianity.

Sorry, I meant how soon after the publication were you invited to debate in the church?

Oh, within months.

Could you sort of just… part of the project is interested in the way in which ideas about religion and evolution and science are presented publically. Now one key way in which they’re presented to the public are through these public debates. Perhaps now even more so where they appear on YouTube and that sort of thing, but could you, for that reason, could you describe sort of exactly what happened in that public debate, because presumably there is no film record of it?

No.

And anyway we’d be interested in your experience of it. So how did it happen, who introduced you, where did you sit, who said what, reaction of the audience, as much as you can remember about that.

This was on Sunday evening after a normal evening service in an Oxford church. I don’t remember anything of the service, but it would be, I imagine we moved into the church hall and then Richard did his thing and I did my thing and then it was open to questions. How many people were there, I honestly don’t remember at all. I mean it wasn’t a great event like these staged events you get nowadays. [25:32] I mean one of my other run-ins with Richard Dawkins, I was asked to talk about my views on evolution in the Oxford Zoology Department, where of course he is, was a member. So I did my ‘Adam and the Ape’ type thing, slightly emphasising the science rather than the theology. At the end, he was in the Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 110 C1672/02 Track 5 third row, stood up and rubbished me, so I rubbished him back. The students were all on my side, couldn’t stand him. I mean he’s regarded very much as an arrogant so-and-so.

And when you say that he rubbished you, what was it about the ‘Adam and Ape’ arguments that he…

Oh, you can’t believe in all that sort of hocus-pocus. I don’t remember the details, but it’s just refusing to look at the possibility that it might be true. [26:37] I mean another occasion was in, was it 2000, the Royal Institution bicentenary had a major debate and asked me to give a talk on religion and science, and I was replied to – oh, what was the man’s name? Peter… who is… Peter Atkins, who is the archetypal, even more hardline than Dawkins, he was officially replying to what I was saying. This is not evolution specifically, it was more general. And he was saying, effectively being deterministic that, you know, we know how things work and there’s no room for God. But Andrew Huxley, who was then, I think he’d just retired as President of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize winner, anyway, he then stood up and supported me. I thought it was rather nice.

Do you remember how he supported you?

Oh, saying that what I was saying had more sense than what Atkins had been saying.

[27:57] And when you were in the Oxford Zoology Department and you’d given the talk, you said Richard stood up and rubbished you and then you rubbished him back. Do you remember your reply?

No, is the short answer. Just to say I respect that his arguments were simplistic and reductionist, that he just wasn’t taking into account all the factors that had got to be taken into account.

In these sorts of situations how do you feel personally in these debates? For example, if I was, no matter how I felt about my arguments, if I was in such a debate I think I’d feel sort of, either sort of upset or angry and that sort of thing, so what sort of feelings do you experience in these sort of confrontational situations? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 111 C1672/02 Track 5

More frustrated, I think, that people are so wedded to their own point of view they’re not prepared to look at all the evidence. They don’t work very well, frankly. I mean Dawkins won’t take part, as you probably know, in any of these debates nowadays, or very rarely will, because he just thinks they’re a waste of time, and it’s one of the ways I would agree with him. I mean I’ve got a letter from Bill Howells who’s a very leading American anthropologist, I think I quote him in Adam and the Ape. He had debated with the American people and thought that he’d answered all this man’s, the points that this other man had made, and then he was, when he read the account of the debate written by the other lot, he’d been completely incoherent and not said anything worth saying. This is the, quote, the other side’s answers. Then, you know, they look at me, oh, he’s up with the fairies.

[30:22] How has, I mean you’ve talked about the Oxford church, which was sort of mid seventies, all the way to the Royal Institution bicentenary, 2000. Over that period, how has public debate on this, if that’s how we’re going to describe it, altered in your experience, in your view?

Don’t think it’s altered at all, because I mean you’re still talking about the same things. You’re still talking about the nature of humankind, you’re still talking about how God works in the world, does God work in the world, you’re still talking about miracles. If you like, miracles are one extreme of God’s work. You’re still talking about the credence to put on hard scientific data, what is hard scientific data, what isn’t. You’re getting the same debates perhaps in a more acute way at the moment with climate change, people are just refusing to take on board what it’s all about.

Is there more, I mean was there more of it in 2000 than there was in the mid seventies? More debate, more articles and newspapers in your view?

I wouldn’t say there was more or less. I mean it comes in sort of surges at times, you know, in 2000 you get these all millennial things that, you know, it’s going to be the end of the world. I don’t think there’s any more. I mean another book I’ve just put together, rather like the true science one, is a collection of testimonies of scientists, almost all scientists, I think one or two were not, who had accepted a literal view of evolution and then come to take on Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 112 C1672/02 Track 5 board an evolutionary idea. And I mean some of them are very gut-wrenching, particularly some of these Americans. I’ll give you a copy of that if you want.

Yes please. Very good. [32:38] Can we do a little bit more, are you okay to carry on?

Yeah, fine.

Could you tell the story of the letter written to The Times concerning miracles, so the origin of that and, you know, what happened, in as much detail as you remember.

David Jenkins, who was Bishop of Durham, or appointed Bishop of Durham, and he was brought up as a good evangelical, but became more and more sceptical, if you like, about God’s work in… how shall I put it? About God’s work, shall we say. There’s a famous expression he used, that the resurrection was just a juggling of bones. And there was a widespread sort of revulsion, I mean not only I think in hardline Christian circles, but generally in the country that this was taking things a bit too far. Anyway, a group of us wrote to The Times to express the fact that you couldn’t just get rid of religion like that and you couldn’t put science and religion together as opposites, you know, they had something to say to each other. That was published in The Times and this was sort of July sometime, I think, and everybody was on holiday apart from the editor of Nature, and a couple of weeks later he wrote a leader to the effect that what people believed was up to them, but here was a group of fairly eminent scientists – you know, there were two or three Vice-Chancellors, that sort of thing – saying that resurrection had actually happened and what he said, they’ll be believing in flying saucers and that sort of thing next. And so we, did we write another letter at that stage? I can’t remember. Anyway, at some stage he then asked me out to lunch, he wanted to pump me on what was happening on NERC, I was on the Council at that time, and what was happening with various things. And – oh no, that’s right. Sorry, he then had this leader and he had quite a number of letters saying he was wrong and that we were right. And in fairness, I mean he was a good journalist, he’d published quite a number of these. Then some time later he asked me out to lunch and asked me to write an article on miracles, which I wasn’t very enthusiastic about doing, but anyway, eventually I got round to doing it and I wrote was in fact two pages of Nature on miracles. And I mean that was published in due course, the President of the American Statistical Society devoted his presidential address to talking about the statistically unlikelihood of miracles, etc. And I think it awoke quite a lot of Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 113 C1672/02 Track 5 interest in miracles as such, and people still talk about it. I was at an open session of Any Questions for the BBC and Anne Atkins stood up and said, you know, ‘Scientists do believe in miracles, there’s this wonderful article by a leading scientist…’ and I was sitting two…. Have you come across Andrew Briggs, who is the person who runs the Templeton set-up in this country? Anne Atkins – you do know who I mean by Anne Atkins? Oh, she broadcasts quite a lot, she does ‘Thought for the Day’ and that sort of thing, and writes in The Daily Express. Anyway, she is Andrew Briggs’s sister. But Andrew Briggs, as I say, is Professor of Nanotechnology in Oxford and also has some high function with the Templeton lot.

[37:32] How had the group of you who wrote the letter to The Times organised yourself together to do it, how did that happen?

Well, in those days you wrote to each other didn’t you? I think, I don’t know, I can’t remember if we’d actually been meeting and said we must respond to it or somebody said, you know, this needs a reply and who should be involved, and then write around and get the names. In those days The Times used to insist on everybody having a signature attached, so it all got a bit complicated. No, I can’t remember how it all, I mean we all knew each other, put it that way.

And are you able to summarise the view of this, of your group on miracles?

That miracles were God’s work, that they were by definition un-disprovable, because you couldn’t… they’re outside the realm of science. Science can only talk about things which it can test and prove experimentally, which it does very well, but it cannot speak about things that are outside that frame of investigation.

How does your view of miracles sit alongside this idea of God as the upholder of everything? Again, going back to the metaphor of the painting and the cricket match and the television screen?

I would say it was just one extreme of it. If God is upholding, by definition he can do anything. I mean like on the television, he can switch off the television. There are occasions, and they’re going to be rare occasions by definition, because it’s a miracle, that he does Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 114 C1672/02 Track 5 something special. And I mean the classic example, if you like, is the resurrection, but I wouldn’t say by any stretch of the imagination that is the only miracle. And it seems quite likely, very difficult to be definite about this, that miracles are much commoner in places where people need them, rather than in Western sceptical society where we’re going to scoff at them anyway. You know, I’m talking about among ‘primitive people’ in quotes.

[40:17] Thank you. The other – oh, just related to that, did you take any interest in or are aware of any of the work of, I think it was Alister Hardy, who had a sort of religious experiences research unit that seems to be related to this question of miracles.

Yeah. I mean dear Alister, nice old boy, wrote a lovely book. He went on one of the Antarctic trips just after the First War, wrote a book called The Great Waters with lovely watercolour illustrations of his own. I think he was fairly naïve about how things happened. He was a Unitarian, he wasn’t a Christian. And I think fair enough, if God is going to work, if there are miracles happening, there should be evidence for them. But when he started collecting the data, he found it really very complicated to actually interpret what was happening. And I mean this guy Donald [David] Hay, who took over from him, and has just written a biography of Alister, I think admits as much.

Did you know Alister well enough to… was he someone that you spoke to?

The last time I saw him was in the middle of Oxford. ‘Oh’ he said, ‘I must talk to you, you’ve got some interesting ideas. Can we meet sometime? I must get in touch with you’. Then he died a fortnight later, so that’s as far as I got.

Would you have talked about your ideas with him if…

It would have been fascinating, yeah.

I think there’s, they are archived aren’t they, the sort of responses?

Mm, mm.

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Have you looked at any of these?

I haven’t looked at them. No, I mean as I say, Donald [David] Hay has written a biography of Hardy fairly recently and talks about them and that has… I mean I think he’s in Nottingham now. Whether the stuff’s in Nottingham or… It all got a bit complicated with the relationship of Hardy and the college he was at, you know, they’d promised him – typical Oxbridge thing – promised him all sorts of facilities which never came into being.

[42:44] And finally for this session, could you talk about your contribution to Malcolm Jeeves’ book on freedom, and you’ve got two chapters in there. One is on genes and responsibility, which draws on the…

Oh the lectures, the London Lectures.

Yes, sorry. They were lectures that were sort of edited up into a book.

Yeah, there were three of us: there was Malcolm Jeeves, myself and David Atkinson, who’s a Bishop.

Yeah, so if you would like to talk about the experience of the lectures first.

Well, I mean the London Lectures were set up by John Stott as an attempt to bring modern thinking and scholarship to traditional Christian beliefs. I mean Donald MacKay gave one of the earlier series, so did Malcolm Muggeridge, I mean it was an interesting lot. And obviously psychological ideas are key to behaviour and so on, and Malcolm has been very much involved in this at one time. He’s aware that genes are involved. One of his earlier books I contributed a chapter on genes and determinism and so on. And we thought, I can’t remember whether we were actually asked or whether we suggested to the committee that it would be a good idea to have a series of lectures on behaviour and behaviour determinants, genetic determinants. And I know it was John Stott who was a bit worried, that he thought he ought to bring in a theologian to make sure that we didn’t go too far out, and that’s where David Atkinson came in. So, basically, the two of us did our own thing, Malcolm and I, and David picked up the pieces. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 116 C1672/02 Track 5

What was the concern about going too far, what does that mean?

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I think. I don’t know in detail what he had in mind, but I know he was concerned that these scientists would sort of do all sorts of things which were not quite kosher in his view.

And how did you come to the argument about sex and especially homosexuality, which is your second lecture, I think.

Because, this arose out of the time I was on the Board of Social Responsibility, and the Board had set up a working party under the then Bishop of Leicester, to solve the problems of gayness and all the rest of it for the Church of England. And the working party was packed with gays and, well put it this way, it wasn’t a balanced working party. Now, the Board itself who commissioned the report could not modify it, but they could comment on it and the draft report came to the Board and there were some terrible bits in it. The science bit was written by a prison chaplain and I did a literature search and sent it to him and he was very grateful and revised his bit considerably. The theological bit was written by a gay Professor of Theology for Exeter and he got a lot of criticism, what he’d written, he wouldn’t change one word. Graham Leonard, who became Bishop of London, and I took the bit between our teeth and we wrote a long introduction to this report, really rubbishing the whole thing, and that was published with the report. I mean the report had to come out as they’d agreed, but we put in the introduction. But this meant that I got interested in and read around it, and this is why at that time I knew really quite a lot about what people were thinking, what the possibilities were and so on. So that’s how that chapter came to be.

What was it in your eyes and your working party on the Board of Social Responsibility, what was wrong with the, first the scientific bit before you gave the reading list and it was revised, what was…

I can’t remember the details, but I mean basically he didn’t know a lot of the work that had been done on the determinants, you know, how much was genetic, what were the influences, pre-natal influences, hormonal influences – which is still uncertain – but, you know, he was Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 117 C1672/02 Track 5 talking about, basically from his experience in prisons. I honestly don’t remember, I do remember that it needed a lot of improving.

And so there was observational material from having worked in a prison that was being used to…

I honestly don’t know. It got all modified anyway, so…

And what was wrong with the theological part?

Oh, the argument is that when homosexuality’s condemned in the Bible, it’s not homosexual… it is… people who are behaving outside their norms. If you are normally gay, you’ve got to behave that way and there’s nothing wrong with it. And it depends how you interpret various bits of the Greek and how seriously you take bits of the Old Testament and so on.

And what was your view in this?

Well, he was treating the Bible in an illegitimate way, that you may put different weights on different texts, but you’ve still got to take them seriously if you believe that the Bible in some sense is a divine work.

And where did taking the Bible seriously, okay, weighting different things, take you in terms of this argument about homosexuality and about the Bible’s view of it?

That there are gay people, whether they can be changed or not is part of the argument. We all have behaviours, some of us are highly sexed, some of us are greedy, some of us are drunkards, to give in to those particular weaknesses in an individual may be more difficult for some people than other people. Where the whole homosexuality spectrum fits into all this, I don’t know, because I think it is fair enough, being examined fairly radically at the moment. All I know at that time is that the arguments weren’t being treated very fairly. Whether my chapter treated them fairly, I don’t know. I mean I’m pretty certain I would write it differently nowadays.

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Because? Why do you think that?

Because there’s so much work been done since that time. Which I haven’t kept up with.

[end of Track 5]

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[Track 6]

During the period that we talked about last time, which was mainly the sixties and seventies, to what extent did your colleagues strictly in genetics and ecology and those sort of academic disciplines, to what extent did they know about your thinking and writing and activities on the questions of science and belief?

I haven’t the faintest idea. I mean I never hid it, but it wasn’t a thing that I specifically talked about. I think they probably knew I went to church, but whether it went further than that, I just don’t know. I mean when I wrote, I suppose the first major thing I wrote was Adam and the Ape, which was mid seventies?

’75 it was published.

’75. So that’s probably when, I won’t say I broke cover, but you know, when I became more obvious to other people. But how many people knew about it is another thing.

So there was never an occasion in an academic department, at a conference, at a scientific meeting where a scientific colleague would ask you about your work in this related but different field?

I don’t remember any. I mean at that time I was speaking to things like student Christian Unions, but again, that was, again, the academic people would be unlikely to know about.

[01:35] And in the absence of anyone talking to you about your beliefs, to what extent were you able to get a view on their beliefs, on the beliefs of those people around you about relations between science and religion, relations between religion and evolution?

I haven’t the faintest idea. I mean one knew the obvious things that all scientists are heathen and didn’t believe in God. People like Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell were fairly prominent. But for most people I think it was not a thing that was either thought about or discussed. I had a colleague, come to think of it, who was a Methodist, I knew she went to Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 120 C1672/02 Track 6 church, and still does. But I can’t think of any others. Oh, another one who was a very keen Roman Catholic. That’s as far as it went, as far as I remember.

[02:50] Thank you. Could you describe your experiences, which we didn’t cover last time, of training to become a lay reader? You were admitted in 1962, but I don’t know, we don’t have an account of why you went for it and what it involved actually.

We got married in 1965, was it? No, ’68 and we had a flat in South Kensington. We always assumed that we would move out of London at some stage and I wanted to be able to go into a church and be useful in the church and not spend twenty years in the Sunday school sort of working my way up, and the obvious thing to do seemed to be to train as a reader. So I was officially put forward by the parish, the diocese then lost the forms for a year. Anyway, having found them, I was allotted a tutor who was a rector of one of the city churches, and I went to him and had a chat with him, and he gave me a reading list, he said most of the things on the reading list won’t be of any interest to you. And I went, how often I can’t remember, about every month or so, and we had a chat. And then he said it’s about time I think you wrote something, wrote some essays. I said oh, I’ve written enough essays in my life, no, let’s just talk. So I didn’t write any essays. At that time there was a national reader’s exam, which was in four parts: Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and doctrine and liturgy. I reckoned I was probably boned up enough on the Bible bits. I read some church history and found it quite interesting, and I read bits about the liturgy. In due course I was sent off, or there was an examination, which was in a school in Hampstead or somewhere. We were sat down for a two or three hour exam with these four subjects. As I say, I hadn’t done any revision, I’d done a bit of reading, so I wrote those. And I was sitting next to an older man with a red face who was sweating and obviously getting… I thought he might be having a heart attack. Anyway, that was it and they passed me. And I was duly admitted and licensed in London. Then, when we were beginning to think about going out from London – from the centre – the question was where we went. We had various ideas and we happened to go to a wedding and give a couple a lift home, Sir Norman Anderson, who I suspect is a trustee of the Library, but he was Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, a very distinguished legal lawyer, legal academic. And he was a reader in Sevenoaks where we live and his attitude was that if you’re giving out a lot of you, giving talks, you need a church that Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 121 C1672/02 Track 6 can support you and particularly the children, and he was very keen for us to move in in Sevenoaks, so we moved to Sevenoaks and that’s where we’ve been ever since.

Could you explain that a bit more, why he felt it was necessary to have this support for the children?

Because the children will have good contacts teaching in the church, in the Sunday school, all their peers will be there, and so on. Rather than Little Sinking in Moves where you’ll probably have one other family. I mean that was the message I got and I think it’s probably the message he was intending to give.

[07:07] And in training to be a reader, you say that you didn’t write essays but you had ‘conversations’ with your tutor in London, was it necessary to give sermons and be commented on?

Not at that time. Nowadays it is and I mean I’ve tutored one or two readers and had to sit in on sermons and criticise them afterwards. But I didn’t preach at all. Or it was all this four- part exam.

What did you talk about with him when you talked instead of writing?

Bits of theology, you know, what did I believe about this, that and the other. We probably talked about miracles, I can’t remember, resurrection, who Jesus was, meaning of the atonement. I can’t remember, but that’s the sort of thing, I suspect.

[08:00] And what’s the relationship between work done as a reader, in other words, the talks given – having qualified – talks given, and the kind of talks you’re doing on relations between science and faith elsewhere?

Very little. I mean in my, what we might call standard days as a reader, I would be preaching on whatever the lesson was for that particular Sunday in the lectionary. So I mean I was conditioned by that. I mean obviously my background meant that I was looking at the text Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 122 C1672/02 Track 6 and analysing it perhaps in a different way than other people do, but I mean that was a matter of education rather than science. Latterly, I mean people tend to ask me as a scientist and therefore I’m talking about scientific subjects or bits of the Bible that are relevant to the science. Such as Psalm 19.

Which is?

The two books of God. He wrote two books: a book of words and a book of works. We’re very familiar with the book of words, which is the Bible. The book of works, his other book, is creation. It’s the same author, written in a very different language. Now, when you get home, look up Psalm 19, you’ll find there are two parts to it. The first part is the heavens telling out the glory of God, creation. The second half is the value of the Bible. It comes in other places, but Psalm 19 is a very explicit part of it. And I really started thinking on this way, if you look at the beginning of The Origin of Species, Darwin has two quotations on the page opposite the title page, which has a name librarians have for that page, I can never remember. One by Whewell and one by Francis Bacon, and Francis Bacon is, the effect of the quote is the two books and you must study both if you’re going to get a full picture. And I was very impressed when I read that, even more impressed when to think of it in The Origin, presumably Darwin thought it was quite a significant quote. And this was Francis Bacon in, I think, off the top of my head, 1605.

[10:50] And in your, in what you’ve called your standard days as a reader, given that particular academic training, did the congregation notice a distinctiveness in the way that you were looking at the text and talking about the text?

I doubt it. I mean, ‘Oh, that was a lovely sermon. Oh so good, so nice having you’. That’s the sort of thing you get, I mean nobody… you very rarely get people dissecting you. I mean occasionally I’ve had a twelve page letter in green ink afterwards.

Really?

That was unusual.

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Do you remember on that occasion what the green ink was arguing?

I think it was all about predestination and where we’re going to and that sort of thing. Tell you who wrote it, but she’s dead so it doesn’t help you.

[11:48] Okay. And could you tell me about your personal experiences of prayer, what you, how you – over the years it might have changed – but if not, how you pray, when you pray, what it involves for you?

I, for many years now, and I don’t know when I first started doing it, I have prayed morning and evening. In the morning routinely take a passage of scripture, work through it, tease it out, use some sort of commentary, or notes, and connect the day to the Lord. The evening is much more intercession for other people, looking forward and so on. But as I say, I don’t know when I started doing that, but always I was taught, I think is the right word, that it was necessary to spend time every day with God and to ground oneself in the passage of scripture.

And was it necessary to be in a particular place or…

No. Or in any particular position, no. Kneeling didn’t come into it. A friend of mine always prays standing up because if he goes to sleep he falls down. But I never got as far as that.

And could you say a little bit more about the prayer later in the day involving other people, looking forward, what does that involve?

Well, pray for the family, pray for one’s immediate friends and neighbours, pray for people that one knows who are in particular need, who are sick in one way or another. Pray for the state of the world, for Islam and all the rest of it, not Islam as such, but whatever they call themselves, ISIS. And look forward to what is going to happen, like being interviewed in the British Library, you know, you pray about that and pray you might say the right things. So if I’m saying the wrong things, you know, it’s God’s fault.

Would you really have prayed about these recording sessions?

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I’d have prayed that I’m going to do that and that it might be useful time. I mean certainly not going into any detail because I didn’t know what we were going to talk about anyway.

[14:14] And, this is probably difficult to answer and might be a naïve sort of question anyway, but is there any – obviously it involves a kind of silence – but do you get any sense of a presence or a reply or an achievement of closeness? What do you experience coming back your way, as it were, in prayer?

In retrospect one can, I find, you know, prayers are answered. But that’s only looking back. I can’t say I want something to happen now. Well, I don’t know what the Lord’s going to do. I mean it may be yes, no, I’ll wait two years or drop dead or something. But you pray for something and then looking back you find that that has been answered in some sort of way or another. Now, that’s, I was going to say the nearest I get to presence. When I’m praying routinely I don’t get this feeling, I get it much more if I’m out of the country in a glorious place, you know, you feel that the Lord is near in ‘creation’ in quotes, as I would call it. But I’ve never had any mystical experience if that’s really what you’re talking about.

No, no, I should say that this is partly inspired by in one of Russell Stannard’s books he talks about prayer and that it’s almost the way to discover whether God exists or not. So if you, he suggests giving five minutes a day, for example, if you don’t believe in God, give five minutes a day for two years and see if you feel anything, and he in his view of it, you get a kind of, something happens at the moment of prayer that would make you decide yes there is or no there isn’t a God. But you’re saying it’s more of a retrospective view, rather than at the…

That is for me. Now, having said that, there are so many ways of going about prayer. I mean I know I talk too much, as it were. Some people just say, you know, empty your mind and sit there for half an hour. I doubt that would work with me, but I mean it might be a good thing. And I do occasionally experiment with various ways, in one way or another, but I never get very far with that and come back to the old pattern.

And when you say you talk too much, do you talk out loud?

Rarely. Do sometimes. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 125 C1672/02 Track 6

And are there particular place… when you say that you experience a kind of presence, in particular landscapes, let’s say, are there particular places where this has been the case in particular, you know, particularly strongly?

I’ve done a lot of work on islands and that sort of thing and on an island you can tend to get away from people, get by the sea or up on a hill or something like that. When I’m on a boat, which I haven’t been on very much, but you know, you’re on the sea and the sea is rather stronger than you are, and you can feel that, you feel you’re out in a gale or something, it’s superb.

So there’s two things there: one is a kind of absence of people, of being alone in a landscape; and the other a feeling of a kind of the strength of…

Yeah. The trouble with people, you know, I love them but they tend to be distracting. Present company excepted.

Does that view of people have an effect on whether you prefer, you have preferred in the past, prefer in the present, I don’t know, fieldwork on your own compared to fieldwork in groups or with a partner?

Don’t think so. I mean I’ve done a lot of fieldwork on my own, it’s helpful to have somebody with you actually helping with it. I’ve never done it in big groups, it’s always been one or two people and we’ve gone off and done that and come back and then done that. In the lab of course one gets together, but there again it’s not a vast group.

[18:44] Thank you. And when you say that retrospectively you’ve looked back and felt that particular prayers have been answered, can you tell me examples of that happening?

I think when one’s, let’s say, faced with a situation which is going to be tricky, an interview or a difficult student or colleague and you know it’s going to be difficult, looking back it’s a lot easier than it’s been and the right things seems to have been said and that has gone on to other things. No, I can’t give you specific examples of it, that’s the sort of thing. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 126 C1672/02 Track 6

Are there occasions when you feel that help has been given in terms of the progress of your work, your scientific work?

Certainly prayed about it and things have happened. Can I say that they haven’t happened? Things get stuck. I mean I’m writing a book at the moment, I got completely stuck at the beginning, but is now beginning to flow. Now I’ve been praying about that, whether this is in answer to prayer or what, looking back I’ll probably say yes it is.

And what about the ecological fieldwork, the work on mice, the work on voles or limpets and so on, what would you have prayed to go on about in terms of that sort of work?

Mainly the weather. I don’t think I’d pray about the detail so much, as that the whole… that you were doing the right thing in terms of experimental design and so on. I mean if you were putting a lot of effort into trapping and trapping nothing, you get a bit worried. Are you doing the right thing, are you in the right place? You know, should I move on or… very trivial sorts of things, but I’m a firm believer you actually commit these things to God and see what happens.

[21:10] Thank you. Could you tell me about something which happens at the end of the period we were talking about last time, but which we didn’t cover, and that’s your involvement in the BBC TV series, God and the Scientist, which I, according to your notes is 1979, which is perhaps the broadcast year.

I may have said some of this before, John Polkinghorne announced he was resigning his Cambridge Chair and going off to theological college, and this was a sort of mini newspaper sensation. It was written up in the New Scientist among other places. Now, at that time I was doing a certain amount of broadcasting with the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol and one of the people I had dealings with the producer at that time of the series, who was married to the statutory atheist in the BBC religious department in Bristol, so she passed over New Scientist to her husband and said there might be a programme in that, thinking of Polkinghorne. And I don’t know what went on in the machinations of the Beeb, but the idea was that perhaps there might be a series and perhaps it might be television rather than radio. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 127 C1672/02 Track 6

And because she knew me, I was involved in the planning and how it was set up and they did a pilot with me which was then sold to the top brass and from that particular programme there was a series made and they used the pilot they made of me, very heavily edited, as the bit about me. And as I say, that went out on BBC 2 and then was repeated on BBC 1. And at the time they talked about doing another series with other people, but it never happened.

Many of the people listening to the recording won’t know anything about how television programmes are planned and then in practice actually made, could you first talk about the process, in sort of nitty-gritty detail of planning that pilot, and then the process of making it?

The idea was that there should be two-thirds, three-quarters of the programmes – these are half hour programmes – so let’s say twenty minutes on science, and to establish the credentials of the person being interviewed as a scientist and so the Beeb came to my lab and photographed me looking down a microscope, which I was doing very little at that stage, but you know, microscopes are television, and we talked about the science and what I was doing. And then there was why I was a Christian, what it meant, and I wanted to bring in the cross and the atonement, and the producer turned up with an enormous book of beautiful pictures of the cross, but then we ended up with a simple wooden cross, which was then the background to that bit of the programme. The whole thing was fronted by Ronald Eyre and he was in fact interviewing me, I mean the interviewing going on the whole time, for the whole half hour. The producer of it they then made a bishop, Peter Firth.

And so John Polkinghorne comes into it then following the pilot?

He was another of the people interviewed. Donald MacKay, who we talked about earlier, was another one. Can’t remember who the others were. Oh, I think Robert Boyd was probably one. He was in charge of the British Space Programme. I think Evelyn Ebsworth who was a chemist and ended up as Vice-Chancellor of Durham. I honestly can’t remember the six, you’d have to ask the BBC.

[25:58] Do you have any insight into how the scientists were chosen – why those rather than others?

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No, I think I probably suggested the sort of people. I mean John Polkinghorne was, if you like, the stimulus for the whole thing, so he was necessary. I was in at the ground level. No, I can’t tell you.

And can you say a bit more about the establishment of the relationship with the woman who put forward the idea, was it through her husband?

Through her husband. I mean she worked in the Natural History Unit, she was a producer in the Natural History Unit, and at that time I did occasional radio interviews with, what was it called? Not Sunday Half Hour. It used to go out in the middle of Sunday afternoon. Have I told you about Was Jesus a Good Naturalist? Have we done that bit?

No.

This was one of these programmes and the Beeb suddenly realised that the programme would be broadcast on… couple of days before Christmas, or something like that. Most of these were nature rambles, you know, you went off, we did one on Fair Isle, we did one down in Cornwall. But the programme that they decided to do this time, Was Jesus a Good Naturalist? And so they signed on me as a zoologist and they had a little Baptist from Royal Holloway College who was a botanist, and we were being recorded in Bristol on some morning. So we all turned up at the Beeb’s studios in Bristol and the interviewer was a man called Peter France, and he didn’t appear, and he didn’t appear, and very much at the last moment he rushed in, very hot and bothered, very apologetic, couldn’t find his Bible anywhere. But then he realised, he kept it in the deep freeze so he knew exactly where it was. So anyway, we started off in a fairly light-hearted sort of frame and they’re very keen, the Beeb, you know, having as much atmosphere as possible. So the little botanist had brought in frankincense, myrrh, and I suppose gold, I don’t know. Anyway, he wanted to light the frankincense, incense. Well, you can’t light things in a studio, it’s all regulations. Anyway, they went and got one of the resident firemen, so he sat in the corner and in due course the incense was lit and we went on. Then somebody rushed into the studio; the incense had got into the air conditioning in Broadcasting House and stunk out the whole of the place, so we more or less finished up on the floor rolling. And this duly went out at Christmas, it was repeated a week later. Two weeks later the Head of the Natural History Unit was very Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 129 C1672/02 Track 6 embarrassed because he got a memo from the Head of Religious Broadcasting saying it’s the best religious broadcast over Christmas. You know, that was just a…

Do you remember what your arguments were about the extent to which Jesus was or wasn’t a good naturalist?

He was very much a countryman. He used lots of examples about his observations of nature, there are lots of animals in the Bible. I mean if you like it’s going back to creation, that is the environment these people were living in. You know, Jesus knew about the things growing and things dying at the end of the season and the weeds growing higher than the cereal crop and so on and so on. That sort of thing.

Thank you. And just…

Sheep and goats, that was another one.

[30:08] The project that the recordings are being made in relation to is very interested in how certain things appear in newspapers and television and how certain things don’t. So just so that we’re clear, can you explain how the husband of the person that you knew from the Natural History Unit then would have taken this forward and why and I think you said he was the single atheist in the…

I don’t know if it’s the single one, I said the statutory one. He obviously thought there was an idea there and presented the idea to whoever has to deal with these ideas from on high. I mean normally, as far as I’m concerned, I am approached and say, we want to do a programme on this, that and the other, would you be prepared to come and talk about it. I mean one of the most stupid ones I did was on the mice in the Underground, which again was apparently a great success and repeated several times. But I mean that was their idea, somebody had seen a mouse in the Underground and got me and somebody else to talk about it.

I’d be quite interested in seeing that, I think.

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That’s pure sound. But I was supposed to be saying whether the mice in one station, in Oxford Circus, say, were genetically different to those in Piccadilly Circus, and the other person involved was a woman called Gillian Sales, who was a professor of, very much interested in sounds. So how did the mice communicate, when the tubes were coming over they couldn’t hear each other squeak. As I say, it was a rather stupid programme with bits of music in the middle of it, but it seemed to go down alright from their point of view. But that was an approach that came from their end.

So are you saying that this was unusual in that the idea comes first and then is being…

It comes down from on high. As far as I’m concerned. I mean there are other people who are very much concerned to put forward ideas, to get them taken up. A friend of mine was Professor of History of Science at the Open University and I mean his whole life was making proposals for films, obviously teaching films or programmes of one sort or another and, you know, how these get sieved I don’t know, that’s not my world.

Who was that, who was the friend?

Colin Russell.

And did you mention the name of the man in the religious department of the BBC who was putting this forward?

He was Christopher Mann. His wife was Moira, his wife at that time. I think they split up some time after that, but certainly that time they were married.

[33:19] Thank you. Last time when I asked you whether you thought that faith had influenced your science, you said something along the lines of, well actually my sort of practical science in the lab or in the field is, I think you said it was something like, it’s like washing up or going to bed, and that it was therefore separate from faith, but that faith and science in terms of your career came together later through work on the environment and on ethics. But can we just push it a bit further and can I ask whether you think that you in any way looked at genes Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 131 C1672/02 Track 6 or genetics or chromosomes or mice or whelks differently because of a belief in God, in Jesus?

No, one asks questions about, for example, are all species to be preserved entirely. Do we have any authority, let’s say, to kill parasites or biting insects. I mean that was in a sense a theoretical sort of question, but that was a question being asked from a religious point of view about a scientific question. And I mean if you look at the topics at the RSCF conferences, I mean these things were thrown about the whole time and certainly that was the time that I would be exercised on these sorts of things, rather than particularly in my own work.

[35:11] In the same way that you might feel the presence of God when you were on a boat and you couldn’t sort of feel the power of the sea, or when you’re in a particular landscape, do you feel that when you’re looking at, in some way, when you’re looking at biological material, when you’re looking at a stained section of something or down an electron microscope at something, or at a specimen or a result or a graph or anything?

Certainly not an electron microscope, I rarely do it. I marvel at the behaviour sometimes of some of these animals. Mice are fairly down to earth animals, as you probably realise, but they can be quite intelligent, sometimes they can be quite stupid. Now, whether I’m marvelling at it. Don’t think I’d use that word for what I was doing.

[36:16] Thank you. We mentioned related things as we were walking over here, and I wondered whether you could tell me what your relations were, interest in, involvement in what’s sometimes called theoretical ecology or mathematical ecology and especially associated with Silwood Park and people like Bob May and John Beddington who we talked about, and Dick Southwood?

In theoretical ecology, I am interested, I can’t cope with that, I can’t do sums. End of discussion. I mean I got involved in ecology, as it were, from the back door, because of the work we were doing on Skokholm and having to find out why mice were living and dying and how they coped, how they interacted with other species and why the mice became extinct. Now, the theoreticians then get down and start modelling all that and that’s not my Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 132 C1672/02 Track 6 scene. What I’m interested in is what actually happens on the ground. The people I have mingled with, I mean I became a member of the Ecological Society, I used to go, I still go to Ecological Society meetings, I became editor of the Linnean Society Biological Journal and when I took it over I said I wanted to make it a British version of two American journals: Evolution and American Naturalist, make a European journal of evolution. And so that was a niche I was sort of cast in. I was very surprised to be asked to be President of the Ecological Society. I suspect more for my ability to chair meetings and that sort of thing, rather than for my distinction as an ecologist, although they did give me an ecological award at some stage. I got in, I mean there was another strand to this. I was a member of the NERC grants committee that divided up money and studentships and that sort of thing, and I was on that for three or four years, and then I became chairman of that committee and I happened to be chairing one of these meetings when Hermann Bondi, who was at that time the chairman of NERC, happened to come in and sat in on our meeting. And I then became, went on to the main NERC Council. They wanted a geneticist, you know, they felt that was the right sort of input and I effectively replaced John Harper who was a botanist from Bangor, who went off and I replaced him. So I then got involved in, I won’t say politics – they are politics – but the decisions that went beyond the strictly scientific, put it that way, which meant that I interacted with quite a lot of particularly ecologists at that time, and I suppose I got known in the ecological community.

[40:00] Say more about decisions that went beyond the strictly scientific.

Well, for example, one of the big ones was that the Antarctic Survey needed a new ship, and that was agreed and the government produced money for this and the powers-that-be went out to tender and the best tender came from a German shipbuilding yard. And then it was sort of shenanigans at the highest level that you can’t have a British research ship made by the Germans. And so that decision had to, well, the decision was that it eventually came back to a… and it was built in… what’s the name of the place? In Cornwall, or Devon, north Devon. No, I mean that’s one case. Another thing was that always there’s pressure to save money and there was an argument that it wasn’t worth maintaining long continuing series of records and the decision was made to kill all long term collection of data. Some of us reacted very strongly against this, because it’s these long term series that actually can reveal things that you don’t expect and as a result of that, somebody and I, one of the NERC people, organised Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 133 C1672/02 Track 6 a consortium of people who were collecting records anyway, people like the water companies, you know have a statutory obligation to look at pollution, that sort of thing. They have the data, the Met Office have the data and as I say, we produced a consortium so this data would be put into a central clearing house, as it were, and could be used, and it’s becoming more and more useful now. But at that time, as I say, it was a financial decision that NERC wasn’t going to do it. So that’s a quasi-political decision, if you like. That’s the sort of thing I was probably referring to

[42:34] Could you tell me more about that, because I’m particularly interested in something that happens, covering the time that you were in NERC, which is ’81 to ’87, and that’s the slightly more than a rumour that I’ve got through other interviews, that, for example, Joseph Farman was under pressure to stop recording meteorological variables and ozone in the Antarctic. And you said that NERC had, NERC who were sort of in charge of BAS, NERC had made this decision to stop continuous recording long term. So could you give us more of a sense of how that decision was made, who was making that decision and who the people were who were with you in resisting it, etc, etc.

The decision was made by the staff of NERC. In other words, the Chief Executive, who at that time was John Bowman, and the financial people within NERC. The people that I was interacting with was particularly Richard Cormack, who was the Professor of Statistics at St Andrews. Some of the people in what at that time was ITE, which weren’t on NERC, but certainly involved. John Jeffers was on council as the Director of ITE.

Institute of Terrestrial Ecology.

Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, which was – well, you probably know about this – is now the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. If it still exists. I mean all these things get pared down and pared down. I mean when I was on NERC, ITE was the research wing of the old Nature Conservancy, and the Nature Conservancy was split into Nature Conservancy Council and the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. The Nature Conservancy had had a lot of these research stations round the country and there was a need to rationalise it in some ways, and I was involved in seeking to make sure that the right research was done throughout the country, it was spread right the way round, and we ended up with, to me, a very good pattern of three Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 134 C1672/02 Track 6 major stations and three minor stations, some of them concentrating on mammals, some on birds, some on whatever. So I mean that was the sort of thing I was involved in. Now, the Antarctic Survey question, Antarctic Survey is always very expensive and the decision, the financial decision was, this has got to be slashed completely. Dick Laws at that time was Director of BAS and the Director used to sit on NERC Council, and I mean he went almost apoplectic about this, because the Antarctic Survey was set up by the Foreign Office and was actually funded by the Foreign Office, and this was a grant from the Foreign Office to NERC. And he was obviously agitating with the Foreign Office and there was talk about pulling BAS out of NERC and going back as a Foreign Office exercise. So there was a lot of politicising around that. And then we had the Falklands and suddenly the Antarctic became okay. Now, Joe Farman, who I never met, if you like was all wrapped up in that, that melange, melee, rumpus, whatever word you want.

[46:47] Could you tell me more about the, did you call it a coalition, a consortium that you set up to bring together various kinds of routine data collection?

I can’t remember what it was called, but it still exists, and it was Bill Heal and I who sort of brought this together. I mean he was the person who was effectively on it. He was the head of, first one of the ITE stations and then the whole thing. I can’t remember what it’s called. If you Google it, you’ll probably find it. Sorry about that.

[47:33] It’s okay. We ought to go back to the start of that question, which is what was your… you say that you couldn’t do the maths, end of story, but what was your view of, as someone who was becoming an ecologist through the focus of your work in genetics, what was your view of theoretical ecology and especially models in ecology?

Some of them are okay, some of them are sheer masturbation. I mean one of the earliest models I got involved in was working with Kettlewell on the Autumnal Rustic in Shetland, the melanics, and how the change in gene frequency over Shetland could be affected by things like migration, predation and so on. And there were two models of a cline, one of which was from Fisher, one was from Haldane, and I went and talked to Haldane, I think, but it was John Maynard Smith, who was really Haldane’s 2IC, in effect, who actually helped Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 135 C1672/02 Track 6 me through to understand Haldane’s mathematics, and I then used these as a model of what was happening in that. So I mean that was the sort of model I found helpful. An American later took on our data and did a pure theoretical study on it, which I can’t understand, and he even got the names of the speeches wrong, so I sort of rather look down on it. But he’s a very distinguished American.

[49:20] And to what extent did you know professionally and personally the people that Hannah Gay refers to as the Silwood Circle?

Not all that very much. I mean part of the university and as in London University at that time, the different subject groups used to meet together. So there was the Board of Studies in Zoology, I met some of the Silwood people. Who was Head of Zoology at that time? Richards had gone. I can’t remember who was… But I mean they tended to be the South Kensington people rather than the Silwood people. I got to know, oh, Dick Southwood of course, I got to know. And then people like Mike Hassell who was very much at Silwood. And who was the woman? Valerie… entomologist, who then went off to run the Commonwealth Institute in Entomology. Valerie… There is, still is, a botanist who works on St Kilda. I mean these are all the Silwood people.

Would you have a view on Hannah Gay’s – I know you haven’t read the book – but in the book Hannah Gay’s, one of Hannah Gay’s main arguments is that Richard Silwood tended to…

Southwood.

Southwood, sorry, tended to favour, help other ecologists who were male more readily than other ecologists who were female and that as a result Silwood Park was a kind of an anti- female professional environment. Would you have a view on that knowing Richard Southwood?

No, frankly. I mean he was married, he had children. I don’t think he was particularly anti- women as such. There were certainly women there. I had a daughter who had an MSc who did it there and I don’t think she felt she was squashed in any way. I mean they were just not Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 136 C1672/02 Track 6 very many women about at that time. Again, going back to my NERC days, at the end of every year there was rotation, people were rotated off and the Council were asked for suggestions for replacements. I mean the replacements were actually done by the Privy Council, but names were put forward. And there was always, they wanted women, but women weren’t there, period. So I mean this wasn’t prejudiced against them, it was looking for them everywhere. I mean many more of them now, but not at that time. Not in that field.

[52:29] Was, I wonder whether, I asked you whether colleagues in academic, a college in genetics knew about your work on science and religion, to what extent was this an issue in NERC where you were involved in and then leading the division up of money for grants. You can imagine that if you were the kind of Christian that we talked about last time who was opposed to religion because of their Christian faith, then that might be a problem within NERC, especially for someone in a role dealing out money. So that raises the question of whether anyone was interested in particular in your views.

I don’t think so and I don’t think it actually occurs in that field. I mean you’re making judgements on the science on the scientific basis, you’re not making it on any sort of religious or moral basis. I mean, one of the questions one does ask is – and this was not so much grant applications – but certainly when I chaired the editorial board of the ‘Zoo Journal’, was this work in accordance with how you should treat animals. So we had a code of practice that contributors had to sign that their work didn’t overstep these grounds. But I can’t remember it ever coming up in NERC. The decisions there were on the quality of the science and whether the expenditure was worth it.

[54:14] Speaking of code of practice in relation to animals, just earlier today you raised the question of whether it’s right to or not to destroy biting insects, for example. What view did you come to about, based partly on reading the Bible, on proper relations between animals and humans, or rather humans to animals?

Well, I think any firm conclusions are very much more recent than that. That these are God’s creatures, but that we have a responsibility to look after them in some way. Extinction is a normal part of how things work. To kill animals, to cull animals, I have no scruples about Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 137 C1672/02 Track 6 that. To actually kill a whole species, you know, the passenger pigeon is the classical one, or the dodo, that’s going a bit far. But to get rid of smallpox, ebola virus if one could, that doesn’t seem to be an immoral act in any sense. I mean there are people who probably do think so, but I certainly don’t, and I don’t think… We have clear mandate in scripture to have dominion, that’s what we’re here for and it’s what that dominion means, how one exercises it. And as far as I’m concerned, the many Scottish midges that are domineered, the better.

[56:02] Thanks. I was a bit surprised in retrospect that James Lovelock was among the small group of scientists at the Windsor consultations that you described last time. I mean I can perhaps see why the Duke of Edinburgh would have seen you as an obvious person, if you like, to, I think the inspiration was to improve the declaration that had been written to…

The Assisi declaration, yes.

Yes, yes. But why, I’m not quite sure why he was there.

Because Gaia as such, not by Jim himself, but by other people, is taken up very much as a religious thing, that we’re all part of Mother Earth, we’re all related together. And he became a guru of, if you like, one variety of religion, slightly way out on a limb. So no, it wouldn’t surprise me. Who else was there, not of that ilk, but certainly people of very different views? I mean there was somebody from Shell, for example. Now, in fact he was a committed Christian, but I suspect he was just drafted in from Shell.

[57:31] I see, thank you. Last time you also said something which I thought was striking, and that’s that not just scientists, but what you called ‘thinking intellectuals’ have a kind of responsibility to define the middle path between opposing views. You were talking then about, not about politics, about morality. So you might have a kind of do what you like, or a very strict – I think you mentioned alcohol – or a very strict kind of practice, and that you need to sort of, you have a responsibility to steer a middle course. And then you said something similar when it came to politics, that you would run from versions of socialism and Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 138 C1672/02 Track 6 versions of conservatism. Can you say more about why you think that thinking intellectuals, including scientists, have a responsibility to set out to define that middle path?

I think what anybody has, any human being has, has a responsibility to look at all the issues in any major group and almost always it’s not black or white, therefore one is looking to grey and if you’re looking to grey you’re looking at a middle path. I mean take abortion if you like, abortion I would say basically is wrong and I wouldn’t want to encourage it, but there are occasions when abortion may be a lesser evil. For example, a Down’s child may be an absolute blessing to a family, but it can be a disaster and I know families that have been split because they couldn’t cope with a disabled child, particularly in that case, Down’s very often is the last, you know, you have five children, then you suddenly have this other one that has to have all the care and attention, the other siblings fight against it. So that’s a middle road, if you like, on abortion. And that sort of argument, I would say, applies right across the board. A friend of mine said to me two days ago last election he voted UKIP, because they were the only party who maintained that marriage was actually important, or heterosexual marriage. Well, my reply was, that’s fair enough, but I doubt that UKIP have actually thought through a doctrine of marriage as such, what they’ve done is, this is how it’s always been done, therefore we must always do it. We must always drive on the left-hand side of the road, because that’s how the British do it. That’s of course, that’s right.

[1:02:29] So it’s a sort of responsibility not to make assertions without having taken the trouble to inspect…

See what’s… yeah, yeah.

Okay. Another thing that we didn’t cover last time, even though it falls within that period, is your role as chairman of Christians in Science. We know about Christians in Science in terms of your life in an early period, how you were sort of recruited into it, how you got involved, so could you just take us a bit further through it, telling us about your involvement in the organisation including chairmanship, how the organisation is changing as we move from the fifties, sixties into the seventies and eighties?

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I was, I regarded my chairmanship as really as supportive for Oliver Barclay who was the secretary, who was the driver behind it all. We had a committee which probably should have changed more than it did, but we met about three times a year, discussed topics, publications, lectures, conferences. But I saw my role very much as supporting Oliver. I think it was as simple as that. He then retired and was replaced by a young lad who was not very dynamic and I had to take more, I wouldn’t say more interest, more direct a role there. But I’d been chairman for far too long and then I handed over to, in fact to Colin Russell who we talked about earlier, who took over from me as chairman. The main activities of Christians in Science were publications. There was a sort of newsletter which then in due course became the journal, Science and Christian Belief, and the conference was always a major thing and getting the right speakers, getting the right papers to be circulated in advance, and then one- off things. When Templeton appeared on the horizon, which Oliver obviously knew about but I didn’t, he then got money from Templeton for lecture series, and I don’t know whether it was Templeton or Christians in Science, actually sponsored these, but there were lecture series in London, Oxford, Cambridge and on continental Europe, which resulted in publications. So, you know, we were behind that. Latterly there were, some of the conferences themselves have been published. There was one on ‘the Fall’, the nature of the Fall, which I in fact combined papers from a Christians in Science conference and another conference, and I edited it with somebody from the other conference. What more is there to say about Christians in Science? Don’t know.

[1:04:05] One thing you could say more about is the description you’ve just given me that when Templeton appeared on the horizon, Oliver of course knew about that and I didn’t. Can you explain why that’s obvious?

Well, it was his world. I mean the whole question of religion, financing of religion, who’s going to pay for conferences, who is going to take the leads. And he obviously knew about this. In the early days of the foundation, Templeton, old Sir John, the man who set up the whole thing, had two advisory panels. There was the panel of the Americas and the rest of the world, and the rest of the world was mainly Britain with one or two others, and I was on that. But they chucked me off after two or three years for asking questions.

Could you go into that? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 140 C1672/02 Track 6

Well, Sir John didn’t like being interrupted. He used to blather on at great length.

When were you on the British committee? Roughly?

I honestly can’t remember. I never remember these dates.

In terms of decades?

When were these lectures? Probably late eighties, I think, that sort of period.

And how often did the committee meet?

A couple of times a year.

Where would it meet?

Very often in a club, one of the London clubs. I can sort of envisage sitting round a table. Did we meet in the International Student Conference? Not conference… Hostel, the place at the top of Great Portland Street. Again, I can’t remember.

And who would have been, aside from yourself and John…

John Templeton, John Polkinghorne, Russell Stannard, Colin Russell. Some odds and sods I never knew. Oh, there was Jack Templeton who is the person who runs the foundation now, who’s the son of Sir John, who used to bring his wife. Oh yes, and there was a publisher guy who was a mate of Sir John’s, who was supposed to advise, knew everything about publishing. Whether he did or not, I don’t know. Yeah, there were one or two Americans who used to appear.

[1:07:27] And why were you meeting?

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Well, John Templeton had this thing about humility, theology and how to advance it and what were the ideas of doing it. He wanted to get away from any doctrinal dogmatic religion that science should show the way forward, he wanted experimental religion. He was not prepared to take on, didn’t seem to be prepared to take on the grounds that there are limits to the system and that if you talk about a reveal religion like Christianity, you’ve got to begin with the revelation. Just as in science you have to begin with the nature of the system. You know, if you have a tape recorder you’ve got to treat it as it’s going to be treated. But to him as a financier, it didn’t seem to come into his way of thinking. You know, you could do anything if you had the imagination and the money to do it.

And what sort of questions were you asking of him?

Well, he used to go on about humility theology, which I don’t think anybody ever understood, but I used to ask questions about what it was and what did he mean by it, and that’s the sort of thing he didn’t like being quizzed about that. I mean he didn’t sort of object violently, but it was obviously not the sort of thing you did.

[1:09:06] And when you say you were thrown off it, that’s just a sort of phrase, what does that mean?

I was just not invited to meetings. I mean it was a very informal thing, you didn’t have a term of office or anything like that. You know, the meeting would be, will you be able to attend, type of thing. And those notices dried up, from my memory.

Do you know how many years you went?

Three, four, that sort of time.

And your colleagues, or people you knew such as Colin Russell and John Polkinghorne, they continued to go to the meetings?

Well, yes. We had a meeting fairly early on in Cambridge, chaired by John Polkinghorne, could we really continue with the nonsense that was being propagated. And it was felt that Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 142 C1672/02 Track 6 the gains were too much to actually throw the whole thing overboard, so we continued, but there was quite considerable unhappiness by a number of us who met on that occasion.

Who met on that occasion?

There was about four of us. It was probably Russell, John, me. Who else would it be? It may have been Colin Russell. There again, I can’t remember.

What were you, in particular, what were you unhappy about? For those completely outside of this world will just have to sort of imagine what you might have been unhappy about, so could you tell us?

He had a thing about answered prayer and how you find out about answered prayer and he wanted to measure it. Rather like Alister Hardy tried to do. And he was pressing questions about how one approached this, which didn’t seem to be the right questions to answer. I mean you’ve probably read Russell Stannard’s Gifford lectures, which was based on a project financed by Templeton to try and get this, and got absolutely nowhere with it. Templeton had a mate who was some sort of psychologist who was claiming all sorts of things and getting literally millions and Malcolm Jeeves was involved in refereeing this, was very cynical about it all and, you know, some of this had to be retracted. But it just wasn’t straight, hard thinking. And as you probably know, the foundation won’t finance anything to do with either developmental questions or environmental ones. Which is a sort of rather arbitrary decision, based on the will of the founder, which is Sir John.

[1:12:31] And so do you remember how that conversation progressed? You met, unhappy about some aspects of the…

Were we prepared to continue with this group that used to meet and, as it were, not inflate, massage Sir John’s ego, or were we, as it were, prostituting ourselves by carrying on. And I think the answer was, you know, we, as I say, the gains were more than the defects.

What were the gains?

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Basically that there was a lot of money there and some of it was being put to good use. We had these series of CIS lectures, which were a series of solid science faith lectures in different places reaching a lot of people, which wouldn’t have been possible without Templeton money behind it. And it’s the same thing still. I mean, as you probably know, there was a Nature correspondence about it some years ago about Templeton money, and so on. And I mean Nature of course got the wrong end of the stick, that this was almost a cult. It certainly isn’t that, but there’s a lot of arbitrariness about it.

[1:14:03] And then, from that point, from having – oh, I should just ask before we go on, what decisions were being made in the actual meetings where John was present and sort of before you were thrown off, what were you making decisions on round the table, apart from listening to John and you asking questions about what he was…

I don’t think decisions were made, it was being told what was happening and asking for suggestions. And the decisions were made by the staff of the foundation itself. They had a guy called Chuck something or other, who’d done a DPhil in Oxford, and he was disappeared at some stage, his contract was terminated and I don’t know the story about that.

But what did you imagine might be the problem?

He’d overstepped something and brought in somebody else, and I just don’t know the present staff at all.

[1:15:08] And how did your relations with them develop from that point? From the point of being not invited back to that committee meeting?

Well, I just didn’t, really didn’t have relationships. I mean I get invited every year to the Templeton Prize party they have over here. It’s not as good as they used to be. And I wrote a book for their press. I’ve probably told you that, I was rather surprised to be asked about it, because it’s on the environment. I don’t know more than that. Well, I mean slightly at arm’s length, the Faraday Institute of course is mainly financed by Templeton, I’m on their advisory board. So we have reports about their relationship and again, the hoops they have to go Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 144 C1672/02 Track 6 through to get the money. And Templeton won’t fund, for example, permanent posts or buildings. I mean one can see the rationale behind all this, but it means you’ve continually got to be inventive about how to get money, which they want to give you, but they can’t give it to you because it’s not in the founder’s will.

[1:16:42] Did you, in the short time that you were going to these meetings, did you sense any sort of differences of view within the Templeton organisation itself? You said that his son was there, for example.

No, really because everything daddy said was perfect. I mean it was nauseating at times, but I don’t think there was any difference of opinion. But I mean other people know Jack Templeton much better than I do.

Were there not other people around the table who were questioning in the way that you were?

Obviously not.

[1:17:25] Thank you. Also, I wonder whether you could tell me about your role in another sort of related organisation, but which is not limited to Britain, and that’s, I think it’s the Science and Religion Forum, which is 1975.

Ah, the Science and Religion Forum was set up by – yeah, that’s somebody else who was probably in the meetings in the old days with John Polkinghorne and all that committee – is Arthur Peacocke. Almost certainly he would have been there. Arthur Peacocke and John Habgood, the ex-Archbishop of York, set up the Science and Religion Forum very much as a talking shop to talk about science and religion, not science and Christianity as such. In fact there used to be, less now, people who would very vehemently say that, you know, we mustn’t talk about Christianity. It is very much a talking shop. It has many more clergy – it’s not very big – many more clergy than scientists. It has an annual conference meeting, which varies from good to terrible, and I go about once every three years, and at one stage Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 145 C1672/02 Track 6 they made, well, at one stage they make me Vice-President, I am a Vice-President. So I’m presumed to be fairly respectable from their point of view, I suppose.

But it sounds like it’s not an organisation that you’ve been involved in to the extent that you have been involved in Christians in Science.

No, no. No, I’m very much from the outside, but I mean it is the other main organisation in this country for science and religion. There is also the Society of Ordained Scientists, but by definition as I’m not an ordained scientist, I’ve never had anything to do with it.

[1:19:38] Are there clear differences in the treatment of or the arguments made about the relation between science and religion in those three groups: Christians in Science, Science and Religion Forum and the Society for Ordained Scientists?

Christians in Science has a basis of membership. I mean you don’t have to sign up to it, only if you’re on the committee, but it is, I think the technical word is a confessional organisation. Science and Religion Forum doesn’t. I mean it’s just an ad hoc grouping of people who are interested. So the discussions tend to be more wide and less focussed than in Christians in Science. I mean there are also at least one European organisation, the – what is it? ESAC. Which again, extends across Europe and meets about once every three years, I think. And that is closer to the Science and Religion Forum than Christians in Science. Christians in Science seems to suck in quite a number of people from continental Europe who come to the conference, particularly Scandinavians and to some extent French.

Is there a reason why that was likely?

Well, I think it is that they haven’t got anything of the same ilk.

And the Society of Ordained Scientists, do you know enough about the content of arguments that it pursues?

I don’t know what they do. It was set up by Arthur Peacocke when he got ordained. He was a biochemist and then he got ordained and he went back to Cambridge, he was Dean of one Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 146 C1672/02 Track 6 of the colleges, then he went to, he retired to Oxford and set up the Ian Ramsey Centre, which in a sense mirrors the Faraday Centre, but has been very much less progressive, successful, positive, but has some good conferences. More theologically deep, I would think. Deep is probably the wrong word. Concerned.

What do you mean by less progressive and less positive?

Concerned about more philosophical questions rather than scientific questions, I think. I think that’s what I probably mean.

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[Track 7]

Sticking with RSCF, or Christians in Science, could I ask you some questions about… which make reference to the draft paper that you’ve shared with me. And the first thing I’d like you to ask about is relations between the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship/Christians in Science are the same organisation with a changed name, and the equivalent organisation in…

In the States?

…in the States, which…

The American Scientific Affiliation?

Yep.

The American Scientific Affiliation was, well it was set up as an anti-evolution group, but rapidly became rather more neutral on the question and probably is now more theistic evolution than creationism. But, being in the States they have maintained – not maintained – have much more involvement with the evolution/creation arguments and for that reason haven’t really burgeoned out in the same sort of way that Christians in Science because it hasn’t got this great burden on its back, has been able to do. And that was one of the reasons for the 1956 conference, which was inaugurated and paid for by, actually a Canadian, who felt that the Americans needed some help from the Brits. We’ve had, I think it’s three joint conferences and it’s good to meet with them. The conferences have been in this country because Americans can get money for travel and it’s much more difficult for us to get travel for that sort of thing. They tend to be long-winded and nit-picking, but there’s some very good people. One of the problems, and I mean this is a major problem in American Christianity is the whole Christian college, university, school which segregates very good people, some of them, away from society as such and that tends to bias quite a lot of their discussion because they’re in a hothouse the whole time. And one of the things that we said in the paper was the ASA members who came to the Oxford conference in ’56 were, I think almost without exception, from secular organisations, not from Christian universities, which would certainly not reflect the balance of membership of the ASA. They have their own Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 148 C1672/02 Track 7 journal: Perspectives in Science and Christian Belief or Science and Christian Faith, we talk to them, they talk to us. I am at the moment writing a paper which will come out in their journal. They’re friendly.

What do you remember then of the ’56 conference in terms of…

Nothing, because I wasn’t involved.

Oh, okay.

It was entirely invitation only. I was on the committee and the chairman of the committee at that time was a mathematician called Allen Weir and he was there. The moving spirit was very much Donald MacKay, Malcolm Jeeeves, who was I think a young lecturer at that time, had a sabbatical coming up and he was given the job of writing up the proceedings. So rather than publish the proceedings as such, he wrote up, based on the pre-circulated papers from that and that was the book, Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith. That was used very extensively, particularly in the States, almost as a textbook. One of the joint ASA/CIS joint meetings, there were calls for it to be republished and there was a feeling that yes, it would be good to have it republished, but it needed revising and there were a number of things not in it. Jeeves was rather loath to get down to doing anything himself, so I twisted his arm and we did it together. And so the revised version, which came out mid nineties I suppose, was a joint effort from both of us. We thought it would be fairly conservative revision, in fact there’s only about one, perhaps two chapters of the original that survived as such. Malcolm wrote new chapters on psychology and neurology, I wrote one on sort of test-tube babies and the environment and evolution. But as I say, I wasn’t involved in the ’56 conference at all, but it was obviously an important event and paid for by the Americans, or by this guy, this Canadian.

Do you know anything more about the Canadian who felt that the American…

No, he disappeared completely from the scene. I was talking to Malcolm about it beforehand. He was a businessman, I think he was an engineer, he was a member of the ASA, becomes apparently rather disenchanted with the ASA debates, obviously knew something about CIS or RSCF as it was then, and wanted – my understanding is – he wanted the Brits to educate Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 149 C1672/02 Track 7 the Americans. So whether they got educated, but certainly some of them became very influential in the ASA, particularly a man called Dick Bube, who was an engineer at Stanford.

[06:22] Thank you. Could you tell me about the section of this draft paper which concerns the visit to Britain of Phillip Johnson, publicising his book Darwin on Trial. So your memories of that period.

I don’t know if he actually came, but what happened is that IVP, Inter-Varsity Press, produced, published his first book with a glowing foreword by a man called John Lennox, who is, does a lot of Science and Christians speaking at the moment, he’s a mathematician. Very good speaker, but he’s sold on intelligent design. IVP then announced – and I think I’ve got this right – they were publishing his second book and a number of us said, you know, you can’t do this, this is just absolute nonsense, this book. And there was a correspondence with, certainly the headquarters of UCCF, and Bob Horn who was the then secretary. IVP really went ahead and did their own thing. Phillip Johnson was supposed to be coming over and doing a promotional tour, but I don’t know if it was all cancelled, but a lot of it was cancelled. I mean he was, I think he’s still alive, he’s had one or two strokes or something, he’s a lawyer, he doesn’t actually do any science. Intelligent design under my understanding is an attempt to smuggle God into the machinery by the back door. It doesn’t make any scientific sense and in fact it’s bad theology in that it is a God of the gaps. You’re postulating that there are some things that science can’t do, therefore God must do it. When you find that science is doing it, God gets smaller and smaller, so God just disappears out of the back door. So that’s why I say it’s certainly bad theology and there’s no science in it.

[09:02] This was the… these were the grounds for the opposition of the research fellowship to the IVP publishing?

Yeah, yeah. I mean IVP have, I mean even worse, Denis Alexander wrote a book, Evolution or Creation: Do We Have to Choose? [Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?], and IVP then produced a collection of essays, really attacked Alexander as a person. I mean it’s an extraordinary book, edited by Norman Nevin, who has just died, who’s a Belfast Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 150 C1672/02 Track 7 paediatrician – nice chap – but didn’t know anything about the subject, and most of the people who wrote it didn’t know anything about the subject, but IVP published that and reckoned to have good sales, and that’s one of the tragedies about the whole science/faith debate. If you like, one of the failures of Christians in Science that this still goes on. This ignorance and attack on evolution. Which is one of the reasons behind the book I’ve just given you.

The book edited by Norman Nevin, what was that called?

Something, Should We Embrace Evolution. Something like that, I can’t quite remember the title. You can get it from Amazon if you want it. [laughs]

[10:37] Has the relationship between the Research Scientists Christian Union and the IVP changed over the period that you’ve been involved in Christians in…

Difficult to say. IVP has now been hived off as an independent organisation, it is no longer part of the, what used to be the IVF. It was set up as the publishing arm of the IVF and, as I say, it is now an independent organisation and publishing entirely on commercial grounds rather than theological grounds. There was a danger at one time that anything published by IVP was regarded as theologically kosher, and for example, Oliver Barclay published at least two books under a pseudonym – not pseudonym – nom de plume, so that it wasn’t seen this was the voice of the IVF speaking. I mean he’d done his PhD on amphibian motion and he published these books under the name, ‘A N Triton’, Triton being a newt. So I mean I don’t think you can say that the… there’s never been a one-to-one relationship between CIS and IVP, they have published things, they have decided to publish, whatever their reasons in the old days and the new days, and they’ve just been offered them to… CIS has just offered them to them, if you like.

Could you say a bit more about why he felt it was necessary to write under this…

Because if he was writing something that was regarded as heretical by some of the old stagers in the Christian world, the organisation would then be tarred with it because of his position Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 151 C1672/02 Track 7 within the organisation. So if he was somebody else that nobody had ever heard of, he could put over the ideas but it wasn’t an organisation’s view, it was his view.

Because of his involvement in the Inter-Varsity…

More than that. I mean the book that was, actually had really quite a lot of influence at one time, was called Whose World? and it was very much an outward looking, from the Christian world, at the world itself, rather than the pietistic attitude that one very often gets in Christian circles.

[13:38] Moving on to something else that you mentioned last time, but only mentioned, I wonder whether you can tell me more about – you may not want to, judging by what you said last time – but could you tell me more about Elizabeth Robson, who was the Galton Professor of UCL between ’76 and ’94. Now this is not just because of the fact that you mentioned there was a sort of disagreement between you, but there’s very little in the public record I can find about her and her work so this is an opportunity for people interested in her who may have no interest in the other things that we’re talking about today, to know a bit about who she was, what she looked like, what she worked on, how she spoke, that sort of thing.

She was a long-time member of the Galton Laboratories, she was a human geneticist, and she was promoted to head up the Galton Laboratory when the then Galton Professor, Harry Harris, went off to the States. She was a woman professor in a man’s world and from that way had a boosting from people who regarded this as a very good thing. She really never made a name for herself and retired… just retired, faded away. I would say probably she was one of these people that didn’t live up to any promise that she had earlier, and what that promise was, I don’t know. Her main distinction at one stage was being married to a man called George MacBeth who was a poet and the head of poetry on the Third Programme. She used to complain that he got up in the middle of the night and walked around composing poetry. I don’t think they had any children.

You think she may have been boosted by people who regarded this as a good thing – who would those have been?

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Well, the general feeling, we need more women in senior positions, particularly in scientific positions. Both men and women. You know, I would regard that as a good thing in principle, but again, people need promoting on merit, not on their sex or appearance or whatever.

And do you know what her work in human genetics involved in particular?

I think it was mainly linkage, in the early days of linkage studies. Links between genes. But she was basically a biochemist.

And could you say more about the sort of conversations you had with her that led to your move out of that department?

We had very little conversations. When I made suggestions she would always have a reason that that suggestion couldn’t be followed up. You know, I wanted to integrate much more the clinical work from the hospital with the academic work, but that was completely impossible according to her and people had terms of appointment and so on. So I, I mean I never fought this particularly, but I used to get rather frustrated. And then Avrion Mitchison said come over into zoology, and so I went over into zoology.

Did you disagree, fall out sort of personally?

Not really. I mean we never got on particularly well, but we were never friends, you know. Not antipathetic, no.

[17:54] Thank you. Now, before we sort of move forward into the eighties and nineties and beyond more firmly, could you just start with a general account of how you think debates about relations between religion and science have changed from the earlier sort of sixties and seventies in the eighties and nineties, and then of course beyond? I’ll just remind you that last time you argued for the sort of similarity of the debates over this time for lack of change, but you also said that there are, things come in surges and particular world events bring about perhaps more or less of this. So I wonder if you could just give us a survey of the Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 153 C1672/02 Track 7 eighties, nineties and beyond in terms of these debates, because you’ve been involved in them all of this time.

Yeah, okay. I mean the science has evolved, and I mean the two particular ‘worlds’, in quote, that I’ve been involved in are embryology and test-tube babies and so on. Now, the whole possibility of that very much has come onto the horizon, I mean it just didn’t exist in the old days. And the environment has become very much more to the fore, because of concerns about what we’re doing to it and how we should be treating it. And so in both those cases there’s the whole moral issues and ethical issues that crop up and on top of that, where does a Christian stand in all these sort of things. Is it different to the world’s view. When I, I was on the Human Fertilisation Authority for six years, and when I went on to it I thought I’d be sort of fighting the conservative corner against all these liberal clinicians and odds and ends. In fact, it turned out that I and the Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, who is very liberal, were the conservative people on that thing fighting to stop things being developed – not being developed – that there were bounds not to be stepped over. Sorry, sorry, no I’ve got it wrong. We were the liberal people saying why don’t you, what is the objection to it. And it was the professionals who were being very much more conservatives than we are.

[20:54] We’ll come back to that. So the argument that you’re making now is that over that period the science has changed in a number of ways and that that raises new moral and ethical questions which Christians have to decide where they stand in relation to, but the sort of public sphere debates on relations between science and religion, the sort of so-and-so debates so-and-so articles in newspapers, letters and so on, how has that sort of level of debate changed over the eighties, nineties and beyond, in terms of amount and content that you see?

Well, I suppose at the same time, I can say this because he’s more or less a contemporary of mine, Richard Dawkins has happened and has been aggressively anti-evolutionary in all sorts of ways. And he’s got a great following, I mean he’s a charming man and he writes extremely well. One, I suppose, can regard that as a development of the period you’re talking about. The older stagers, the Julian Huxleys, the Max Nicholsons are now no longer with us and I don’t know they have direct inheritors as such and that the modern debate is much more abrasive, the Dennetts and the Dawkins and Harrises of this world. Whether the, I mean one Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 154 C1672/02 Track 7 of the problems of the media of course is that they are only too willing and eager to pick up any disagreement. Whether this has got worse or better, I don’t know. You certainly get nonsense talked, but you always have had nonsense talked in the media.

[23:15] And when you say the media are very keen to pick up on disagreement, are you thinking of particular parts of the media? Perhaps you might even know the world well enough to know if there are particular journalists responsible, so the question is which bits of the media, which people in the media do you think are most likely, have been most likely?

By and large it’s the news people as opposed to the science correspondents. The science correspondents are pretty good, by and large. But, the news journalists want to make a splash, I mean that’s what they’re there for. I mean probably the most crass is The Daily Mail. The Guardian has its own viewpoint so it will emphasise those, which are not exactly Christian ones, but at least they’re thinking ones. On the media, I mean Brian Cox at the moment is, I mean he is being more effectively antagonistic than perhaps some of his predecessors. There is a talk, which I’m not going to go to, at the Faraday coming up in two or three weeks’ time, of somebody comparing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with Brian Cox’s recent television things and saying that Sagan, who was certainly an atheist, but he wasn’t aggressively anti in the way that Cox seems to be. I’ve never watched Cox so don’t ask me how he is, but that’s what people tell me. So in a sense I suppose you can say that the debate, I wouldn’t say sharpened, has become more aggressive. That’s the trouble, I mean the debate hasn’t sharpened. The debates probably are too complicated for most people to take on board unless they’re really concerned with them.

[25:46] Are you able to sort of date the increasing aggressiveness of the debates?

No, I mean when was The Selfish Gene? You know, Dawkins reckoned he was on to a good thing so he then started going down that track. So we’re talking about that sort of period, I suppose.

So from the late seventies onwards?

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Yeah, eighties. I mean I’ve never sort of looked at the media or that type of thing, as such. It’s, you know, very much ad hoc reacting when it seems appropriate.

[26:33] When you said The Guardian has its own viewpoint, which though not Christian is at least thinking, what do you mean?

I mean that they are prepared to analyse and think through issues, even if they come to the wrong conclusion, rather than do a knee-jerk reflex, which is The Mail reaction. And you’ve got this Bishop’s letter this week, and I mean just looking at The Mail as reported by the BBC, it’s virulent nonsense, frankly.

[27:15] Thank you. Could we then, I said we’d come back to the Human Fertilisation Authority, when were you appointed? Roughly? Perhaps we can find it.

When it happened.

Okay.

I mean what happened was that the Act went through and the government then had to produce a body to implement the Act, and that was the Human Fertilisation Authority. And they’d had an advisory committee beforehand and I think there was a general impression that they would take over that committee as it was. They didn’t. There were some members who carried over, but by and large it was a new committee and I was a member of it. As I say, one never knows how one gets on to these sort of things, but I assume it was because of the Church of England committee that I chaired.

Can you tell me what you think the logic is for the inclusion of the other members on the committee?

Well, it’s laid down in statute that clinicians must not be in a majority. The chairman was the vice-chancellor of Nottingham, the vice-chairman was Diana Brittan, Leon Brittan’s wife. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 156 C1672/02 Track 7

There was a bishop, a philosopher, a banker, one or two clinicians, Anne McLaren who was the, one of the pioneers of the actual science. Me. I suppose about a dozen people altogether.

[29:22] Is it obvious, should I know why there was a bishop on the committee?

I think because bishops are supposed to know about how to make moral decisions. I mean the next bishop to be… when Richard Holloway went off at the same time as I did, the new bishop, I then gave him a tutorial about it, he didn’t know anything about the subject. Michael Nazir-Ali.

And you don’t know how any of these people, as you say you don’t know how you were appointed and how anyone else?

You never know about these things. I mean this is how the establishment works, you tell me.

[30:08] You made the point that you expected to perhaps be defending a sort of conservative position before you started, what made you expect that?

Because I was the Christian, there were Christian limits laid down, the whole Christian argument which I’d been involved in for the previous, what, four or five years needed defending. It wasn’t a matter of defending it, it was a matter of going forward in a realistic way.

And are you able to remember, and if so, talk about, say, one example that illustrates what actually happened that you feel that you were often less conservative than others around you, even clinicians?

This isn’t a moral question, it’s a scientific question – how long could you store sperm. And the rules actually say five years. We said there is no evidence that there’s any deterioration whatsoever, so why not put it at twenty years. But it was regarded that that might give the wrong signals so you had to be more conservative and it’s laid down at five years, you have to destroy everything after five years. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 157 C1672/02 Track 7

It was felt that would give the wrong signals…

That you have all this genetic material lying around and, you know, it is somehow holy and therefore you’ve got to treat it as differently you would anything else.

Were there, in spite of the fact that you tended to be sort of progressive rather than conservative, were there discussions of things that you were morally uncomfortable with precisely because of Christian belief?

I don’t know this is a Christian thing, this had happened just latterly when the decision was made that sperm donors should no longer be anonymous, which was an absolutely stupid decision, because they haven’t got any. Now, I see no reason whatsoever why a sperm donor shouldn’t be anonymous, so long as they are donating out of reasonable grounds to do it. But they had this sort of lobby that everything must be open and plain and above board and so this was brought in as an edict, order or whatever these things are, which I don’t think was a good idea. You know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

[33:18] Thank you. Could you now tell me about your presidency of the Linnean Society, which is in the eighties?

Well there again, one of these things I never expected to happen. And the Linnean I think still hasn’t achieved its potential. There’s a tremendous sort of conservative, in the wrong sense, element there. I wanted to go back to the function of the Linnean to co-ordinate the Natural History Society’s and I tried with Sir Eric Smith and we didn’t get anywhere. One of the things that I think I did achieve was the what is now the National Biodiversity Network. Now, the Linnean were asked by the University – not University – Museum biological curators to set up a working party to look at biological recording. I thought this was a waste of time, because you know, there’s so much recording done in this country, I mean we’re par excellence in this country, anywhere in the world, but we agreed. I chaired a working party and all sorts of questions came out of the woodwork: who owns the records, how passes it on, how they get tied in with environmental data. So I then wrote a report, which was officially the report of the committee, and that was taken on board by NERC, who had an open meeting Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 158 C1672/02 Track 7 at the Royal Society, they accepted the recommendations and this led to what is now the National Biological Network, Biodiversity Network. So I mean I think that was one thing that happened, a very trivial thing that I did, and I mean this was all part of the trying to streamline it. The meetings used to begin with reading the minutes of the previous meeting, which is absolute nonsense. And so I now orchestrated them to be pinned up beforehand in the meeting room so people could read them and just accept them on the nod. I tried to persuade them to put in a lift, they couldn’t afford it, the lift has just gone in, twenty years later. [36:28] I mean it was a fascinating time and the Linnean, because of its position as the, well the oldest existing biological society in the world, still retains a sort of aura about itself. You know, I used to be invited to receptions, diplomatic receptions, you know, garden parties in the Japanese Embassy, that sort of thing, which was rather fun.

Because of your presidency of…

Because… yeah.

What was the organisation discussing more widely at the time that you are president. So in these meetings where the minutes are no longer read at the beginning of them, what is…

Well, I was at the Linn last night and there was a meeting then on cocoa – not cocoa – coffee and climate change, and the way that climate change is happening particularly in – and I didn’t know this – in Ethiopia, which is the main source of coffee and four million people in Ethiopia are employed in coffee, either growing or dealing with coffee. Because of climate change it’s at risk. And that’s fairly typical. I mean one of the things I inaugurated during my time was a series of regional natural history meetings: natural history of the Isle of Wight or Romney Marsh or the Orkney Islands. So you’d have, well, there are two sorts of meetings. Whole day meetings with six, seven papers or as last night, just one or perhaps two papers. But I mean, as you probably know, everybody always thinks of the Linnean as the place that Wallace and Darwin’s papers on the origin were read, even though neither of them were there.

Well, I think of it as the place that holds the archive of the Council for Nature that I once looked at.

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Oh yeah.

I wonder whether you were involved in that group, because last time when you were talking about your, the beginnings of your interest in the environment, you talked about the Duke of Edinburgh and the conferences that began in 1970 and I think the Council for Nature were involved.

Came out of that, yeah. And then it folded up because of the bullying of the big organisations like the RSPB. And, as you say, the archives are in the Linn, so the person you want to get in touch with is Gina, Gina [Douglas] whatever her surname is, who is the archivist.

Say more about the closure of the Council for Nature?

Well, I don’t know very much about it, frankly, but my understanding was that the smaller societies and the Natural History Societies were the whole time outvoted and bullied by the big societies like the RSPB, the BSBI and the lepidopterans and so on and so the thing slightly folded and continued as the Committee on Environmental Conservation, CoEnCo. And what happened to that, I don’t know. I mean it never had the publicity that, the vision – not the vision – the awareness of the old Council for Nature.

[40:09] And can you now tell me about your presidency of another organisation, the British Ecological Society? ’87 to ’89. Starting with why you think, I mean how does this sort of thing happen, how do you become the president of…

Well, the president of any of these societies, be it the Linn or the BES or anything else, is a discussion on the Council when the presidency is going to be coming up. Why the BES wanted me, I don’t know. I think they were very keen to see that one of the ways that ecology was going was to have a much greater involvement of genetics and so I was one of the fairly obvious people from that point of view to push that. I, when I was Linnean president and trying to bring societies together, I brought a number of societies into Burlington House into the Linnean headquarters as a beginning of what I hoped would be a grouping. The Society for Environmental Biology, the Mammal Society and the BES. After my time with people with much more vision than I am, the BES actually bought its own Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 160 C1672/02 Track 7 building and headquarters and expanded enormously. The BES is, in a sense, in a very different way a much more important society than the Linnean, is very much involved in conservation issues. One of the things that arose in my time as president was that the growth of environmental consultancies was sort of blossoming and these people wanted their organisation and there was the fear that they would be more or less taken over by a group of Young Turks and become almost radicalised. And I forced through the Council of BES the setting up of what is now the Institute of Environmental and Ecological Management, IEEM, which has gone from strength to strength.

What else was being hotly discussed in the society during your period?

Go and look at the minutes. One of the things that did crop up was our relationships with other societies abroad and we set up meetings with the more active continental societies, which the Scandinavians were the most active, but also the Germans and to some extent the Spanish, and from this came the European Ecological Federation and I was the first president of that, and that still continues. It’s never really become a powerhouse. There used to be – well, there still is – an occasional European meeting, ecological meeting, which – and the EEF was really building on that and taking it over to provide some sort of linkage between the groups. One of the things that did crop up, and that was a major thing in my time as president, was the break-up of the Nature Conservancy Council into the regional groupings. A lot of people were dead against this. There seemed to me a very strong argument for having the actual conservation decisions made by people nearer to them. So I wasn’t against the principle of it all so long as there was a strong overall co-ordinating body between the country – Scottish, Irish, Welsh and the rest of it – and I argued very strongly for this and I thought, and you know, I was completely outplayed by the politicians on this, that this was set up. Well, it was set up, but it was set up more or less as a sub-group of English Nature with the finance going through English Nature, which made me very cross. By that time it was too late to do anything about it.

[46:00] Thank you. Could you tell me about the development of your research from where we got to last time, which was the end of the seventies?

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Well, more and more of course I got distracted with the things we’ve just been talking about, the NERC and the societies. I was still very much – well, I still am – concerned with what genes actually do and the initial work we were doing with the mice, we had gene frequencies changing. What were those genes doing? And so I pushed and got several grants to look at the physiology of the mice that were carrying the genes, see if we could find out what differences between different mouse genotypes were in terms of physiology. We knew that the big problem for a mouse was winter survival and particularly cold in winter, because the cold snaps were the ones that really killed them off. And so I had students looking at putting mice into cold chambers to see how they coped with the cold in terms of oxygen metabolism, and then they were released back and their survival plotted in the wild. And I think we were ahead of the, or rather the techniques hadn’t been really developed to be able to do these things as one would do nowadays. It would be nice to do a lot of hormone stuff, but the assays just weren’t happening in those days. One of the things they almost got side-tracked on was chromosomes. I think we talked about chromosomes didn’t we, to some extent?

The fusion? Yes.

And why that happens. And we spent quite a lot of time looking at the distribution of these different chromosome types and trying to find out why that was happening. One of the things we did do was with these odd chromosome types, which should be a bad thing, was move a group of mice from one of the Orkney Islands with these chromosome fusions and put them on to the Isle of May which didn’t have any fusions, we had perfectly normal mice, to follow through the fate of the introduced mice. Now, my thought was either these mice would remain as a little huddle – and this was all tied up with the ecology and the lack of movement and so on - or that they would just disappear. And I was completely surprised that within something like three years they’d taken over the whole island. I mean they hadn’t replaced the originals but they’d bred with them and that the chromosome types were distributed fairly evenly over the whole island. So I mean that really got us to the end of that story. I had a student who was looking at the difference between males and females and the males as we knew from ecological grounds, when you looked at the white chromosomes they were spreading about three times as fast as the females with the X chromosome, so that fitted in with part of the story. I looked – I think we probably talked about the Antarctic mice and those sort of things – which in a sense is all part of the physiology, even though we couldn’t really get at the physiology in depth. And that’s probably the end of the mouse, really not the Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 162 C1672/02 Track 7 end of the mouse story, it’s as far as we took it. I got involved with – I think we’ve talked about dog whelks haven’t we?

Mm hm.

[50:53] Thank you, and what’s happening outside of work in the eighties and nineties? Presumably you’ve got now much older children. We haven’t covered the extent to which as they grew up from children into young adults they expressed different levels of interest in your work.

My younger daughter was interviewed by my old Cambridge tutor who asked her about what I was doing and that sort of thing. Of course the small daughter hadn’t the faintest idea, he got hysterics and offered her a place, so she ended up in the same college as me at Cambridge. My son, I don’t know if it was my influence or not, got a first at Oxford in zoology and then Bob May chatted him up to come over to Princeton where Bob was at the time, to do a PhD there. When he got there, May immediately came to Silwood. And so Andrew did a PhD in Princeton. He then became a Harvard Junior Fellow and he’s now on the faculty at Harvard, so he’s still around in Harvard. Daughter, the one who went to Cambridge, teaches in Oxford, teaches science. She worked for ESRC at one time and found it very depressing because it was the time money was getting shorter and shorter. People would get a good assessment on their grant applications but then had to be told there was no money. So she backed out of that. She travelled for, I think, three years for a girls’ Christian boarding school organisation and then did a teaching diploma and has been teaching ever since. The other girl did a nursing degree and is some sort of administrator with the East Lothian, no, Lothian Health Board now.

[53:13] As children, what understanding did they have of what you were doing?

We had some very good holidays getting dog whelks. We used to go down to Cornwall and collect the dog whelks, so they had a sense of that. Andrew, the boy, as a project, did a study of… what are they called? Philaenus. Spittlebugs. In Rum, Muck, Eigg and Canna and that sort of thing. You know, it was quite interesting result, this was just a university project, but which was published. So I mean he was vaguely interested in that sort of thing. I think he Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 163 C1672/02 Track 7 was the one who was more interested than the girls, which is gender stereotyping, but without any effort on my part.

[54:19] And what was their own experience of Christianity, your children’s?

They all came up through the Church. The two girls – the boy went away to boarding school and he is the one who has rejected - I think reject is too strong a word – has bowed out from active faith on the grounds that there’s no point in it all. The girls are still very active. The younger girl is secretary of her PCC in Oxford at the moment.

What’s that?

The Parochial Church Council. And the elder daughter is active in her church in Edinburgh and sort of cooks for Alpha suppers and the sort of things that people do.

Can you say a bit more about your son’s view of Christianity which is not a rejection but a…

I think his wife is more anti than he and I think this is part of the problems, that God doesn’t do things, that God doesn’t move mountains when you pray about it, therefore why bother about God. I mean he knows exactly obviously where his parents stand and he is, as I say, I don’t think he’s anti, he’s just not pro. But the feeling is that his wife has had a nasty sort of experience at some stage with religious things and it’s certainly turned her agin it. One of her uncles is an active homosexual, another is – is now retired – was head of the Church Army in America. So I mean she’s got an odd background.

[56:41] And what over the eighties and nineties are you doing when you’re not working, so when you’re not working in ecology, not presiding over a society having meetings, not thinking and writing about science and religion, what do you do when you’re not doing any of those things?

Was there any more time? I mean very often our holidays were working, science working holidays, and we had some superb holidays digging up graveyards for my wife. We did a fair Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 164 C1672/02 Track 7 amount of whelk collecting in Cornwall, in Scotland to some extent. We had, Andrew and I spent some time trapping in one of the Shetland Islands – one of the Orkney Islands, I beg your pardon. There was never sort of time to do vast extra things. I mean what with science and its ancillaries and church, that was it.

I’m just wondering whether you read things that have got nothing to do with science and faith, or you watch or listen to things that have got nothing to do with it, or you have a hobby that is entirely separate from both of those things?

I used to read a lot of detective stories, but they don’t write them now. They’re all sort of horror stories. I mean, I like a good whodunit. We don’t watch much television. Occasionally get a reasonable documentary on BBC4, but that’s about it. Certainly didn’t have any hobbies, I mean we occasionally go to the theatre, we got to the Proms once, twice a year, but that’s hardly a major involvement.

What were the detective stories that you did read when they were…

Oh, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie for that matter. Who else was writing? Who’s the Oxford chap? Michael Ennis. But then they sort of began to tail off.

How is modern detective fiction different from these then?

Well, it’s about four times as long, so it takes you long to get through the wretched book and, you know, you have lots more violence and that sort of thing. I mean Dick Francis, for example, he always used to have one violent scene, but that was it. So you knew when you were through that, that was alright. Yeah, I mean he’d be another person.

[59:44] And you said that it was a mystery, you don’t know why you get elected to certain things, why you get asked to do certain things. Was it clear to you why and how it was that you were invited to give the Gifford Lectures in 1997 and eight?

No. There again, I was, am, involved in what is called natural theology in a sense. In other words, theology of natural systems, so I would be a fairly natural person to be invited. And I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 165 C1672/02 Track 7 think there are now more, what one might call working scientists being invited. But it was a surprise when I was asked, I was delighted and privileged to be asked. But I was a slightly obvious person to be asked. I’d given a series of lectures, the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity had a series and I’d given a series in 1992, I think it was, it was tied in with Rio, and in a sense my Giffords were an expansion of those. And there again, since then I know slightly more about the Giffords than I did in those days and each of the Gifford universities, the old Scottish universities, has a Gifford committee and they throw up, you know, decide among themselves who they’re going to invite. I mean, you know, a number of my mates have been invited to give lectures more recently, David Livingstone, for example, gave the Aberdeen ones this year. Denis Alexander gave, I think, the Glasgow ones two years ago. Alister McGrath gave, again, Aberdeen I think, series. But that’s the local committee and, you know, when you are involved in an area like science and faith there are only a limited number of people with a limited number of interests that the committee have to trawl in. As I say, I think I was invited on to NERC to replace John Harper, because John Harper had been very much pushing the importance of genetics in ecology.

And how did you decide what it was in particular that you were going to lecture on for the Gifford Lectures?

Well, it’s what I knew about. I’ve got to space out eight or ten lectures, what did I know enough about to talk that long. So I mean it’s a sort of potpourri if you actually look at it, but it’s how God has worked in the natural world over the years.

What do you remember of – the reason I’m asking about these is that they, as you say, when you said many of your friends had been asked to do them more recently, if you’re going to sort of try and survey the field of science and religion debates in recent years one way to do it is to look at sort of lists of Gifford lecturers, to some extent. So I was just wondering if you could give us a description of the experience of them, the reaction of audience, the kind of questions you get, that sort of… the sense of being there.

Not an enormous audience. I mean the person who had big audiences was Russell Stannard in his, because he specifically said he wanted to do a popular series and he wanted to have a reception afterwards, which apparently upset the committee but, you know, they were popular lectures. I had respectable audiences, some reasonable questions, not vast questions. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 166 C1672/02 Track 7

I used to be entertained when I was giving a lecture at a dinner and meet university people and good discussions, but I mean nothing out of the way. And that was Glasgow, of course. And I mean I knew virtually nobody – well, I knew one or two people in Glasgow, not very many. I knew the head of zoology who’d come from us, from UC.

[1:05:06] And just looking superficially at the field, the people who you’ve mentioned as being your sort of friends in this field, a glance at the work of Alister McGrath, Denis Alexander, yourself, if you just glanced at it you’d think that a fairly similar message is being argued by many of these people, but as you’re much closer to the group and to the material, what would you say about what are the differences between the approach of these people who we might call science-religion scholars, or something of that kind.

I think that the main difference is the particular, from their own viewpoint. I mean my interests are environmental, ecological, because that’s where my science is, therefore I want to develop my theology through that. Denis, for example, is an immunologist. He’s much more interested in the nitty-gritty of the genetics and determinism and those sorts of things. Alister McGrath is, well really a historian, and much more of a theologian than a scientist, I think he would say that himself.

But are there differences in the theology?

I don’t think so. I mean I think all of us would say that we start off from an acceptance of – I’ve got to be careful here – of the truth of the Bible. In other words that there is an actual revelation that one is working from. So we’re starting from common ground there and if you like, have a convergence in the way we’re thinking. Even go back to where we started on this discussion, I think Donald MacKay was enormously influential in the way that understanding has developed over the years.

Are you saying that Donald MacKay is an influence on all of these people?

He is an influence in the thinking of Christians in Science and the way that that has developed and the discussions there, I mean there are differences, obviously there’s no point in discussing if there are no differences, but that the theme, the tenor is that which was Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 167 C1672/02 Track 7 derived from Donald and the people around at that time. Have you had any response from Malcolm Jeeves? I told him to get in touch with you.

No, not yet.

I said that I’d been talking and had he heard. Oh, he said, yes, it’s on the back burner. I said well, you know, it’s worth doing something. And he replied, oh well, I’d better get on with it. But he was very much part of that group around the time. Roland Dobbs, who’s had a couple of strokes, he was another one, physicist. Douglas Spanner, whose son set up Third Way, if you’ve come across Third Way, do you know Third Way? It’s the sort of intellectual Christian magazine, it’s now owned by The Church Times.

[1:08:52] Are there, it sounds like there’s a lot of convergence between this group. Does this group look out on other attempts in Britain to relate science and religion that it disapproves of, if you like, in the way that it was concerned, the Christians in Science were concerned about some of the American groups’ arguments. I mean do you notice, talk about, think about people who are doing what you’re doing but doing it in such a different way that they set themselves apart from you?

There are certainly people interested in the field who are, I wouldn’t go along with. What’s the man’s name? The Starbridge Lecturer – do you know about the Starbridge Lecturer? Who wrote these novels, novels about Cornwall? They made a mint. Anyway, whoever it was, some female, and I’m going back twenty years, used to… was not a Christian, but then she started going to Westminster Abbey to evensong and got interested, and then she happened to be sitting next to John Polkinghorne at some dinner and asked how best she could do something about science and religion, and he suggested endowing a lectureship in Cambridge, which she has done, this is the Starbridge Lectureship. And the first one has, whose name I… was a psychologist, who I regarded as very woolly and into things that I certainly wouldn’t want to get involved with, and there’s now another one who is much more a theologian than a scientist, even though he’s got a science background. So I mean I would slightly – Andrew Davison, I think is the present one. I wouldn’t take issue with them but I wouldn’t necessarily agree with them.

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For what reason would you not…

Because they’re not really grappling with what I regard as the key nitty-gritty bits to be dealt with. Who’s the one who’s just retired? I can visualise him. No, can’t remember. As I say, he was very much involved in psychology and that end of things. I get my psychology from Malcolm Jeeves, which is very much a physical psychology, I mean he’s a physical experimentalist.

So what are they doing that is not the nitty-gritty bits that you think ought to be tackled, what are they tackling instead?

Well, the guy whose name I can’t remember is very much involved, talks about prayer and meditation and much more what I would not call… perhaps the way to put it, it’s more theology than science, and therefore I would say not enough science in it. I may be unfair. Probably am unfair.

[1:12:55] And within, you’ve talked a bit about your view of and reaction to what’s called New Atheism. Last time you talked about the first debate with Richard Dawkins in the Oxford church, and then when I asked whether there’d been any significant changes from the period we talked about last time to the period now in the science-religion debate, the key factor I think that you said was the rise of New Atheism as a more aggressive kind of… Do you and your friends, the other people who have been influenced by Donald MacKay have a consistent outlook on the New Atheism, do you talk about it, does it concern you, do you have discussions about how to respond and all that sort of thing, or is it more in the background, or what?

I don’t think we have discussions about it. Oh, Dawkins again, type of discussion, but that’s not quite the same thing. I mean one or two of the letters in Nature and Denis Alexander’s been more active in this than others, responding to various things in the public domain. I mean my last note in Nature was there was an inane leader in Nature saying that when Darwin’s ideas appeared it upset the Church to the extent that they said they would excommunicate believers, which was absolute rubbish. And I wrote and said this. Rather to my surprise, published the letter. And, you know, I gave chapter and verse, Charles Kingsley Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 169 C1672/02 Track 7 saying, you know, Darwin had shown him the gaps in his own thinking. Then you had Frederick Temple, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, being very positive about the whole thing. No, there may have been people who got excommunicated, but it was certainly not the attitude of the Church. As I say, that was published in Nature. There was another letter that some of us published eight to ten years ago, never mind the miracles one. So I mean to that extent we’ve been involved in general debates, but some more than others, I think.

You think there are some people who’ve been involved more than you in these things?

Well, Alister McGrath certainly has, and has debated with Dawkins. And I mean Richard doesn’t like debating. Neither do I, for that matter. I mean you tend not to get very far.

[1:15:50] Thank you. You’ve just raised another strand of all of this, and that’s, could you tell me about your interest in and perhaps relations with the work of historians who have been writing about and reprising the sort of history of relations between science and religion, including reception to Darwin and that sort of thing. The people I have in mind, but don’t be limited by this, is I think you mentioned David Livingstone a minute ago and I know that John Hedley Brooke is linked in, but could you talk about that?

Well, I mean it’s a thing that interests me, having been to the same school as Charles Darwin and how ideas developed. John Brooke has written widely on this and, you know, I talked with him about it. The other person, and someone who’s come up twice already tonight, this afternoon, is Colin Russell, who wrote a book called Cross-Currents seven or eight years before John Brooke’s, whatever, Science and Religion is it? His big book. And he was the other, if you like, pioneer in this. The other person active in the field at the moment is Janet Moore, who wrote probably the big and best biography of Darwin who now teaches of course in Harvard with my small son. And he’s, Andrew, is very much involved with Wallace and has published two books on Wallace. Just edited Wallace’s Malay Archipelago as a Penguin Classic. I mean I take the… I’m no historian so all my history is, as it were, secondary. I’m at the moment writing this book on environmental attitudes and how they developed and literally yesterday I was reading about the origins of the British Association and how they Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 170 C1672/02 Track 7 were important in the development and propagation of scientific ideas. And of course, as you well know, they were notorious for the Wallace – not Wallace – Huxley/Wilberforce debate.

So is it possible to say who you have read and perhaps even spoken to on the history of science and religion?

Well, certainly John Brooke, certainly Colin Russell, certainly Janet Moore. Who else is there around? Oh, Jim Moore, who was a student of Colin Russell’s. You know who I mean by Jim Moore? There’s a nice man in Leeds, who retired fairly recently, who I’m in between times reading. And the other book I’m reading at the moment is, not the same period, is Martin Rudwick, geologist, who I’ve met once, but I can’t say I really talked to him about it. I mean he wrote a glorious description of how Darwin, Darwin’s big mistake on the parallel roads of Glenroy. Do you know the story? I mean that was Martin Rudwick who didn’t expose it, but showed why Darwin got it wrong.

And when you say that you…

Oh, and David Lack is another one, of course. I mean I’ve just written on David Lack, haven’t I? Did I send you my David Lack paper?

No.

Oh, do you want it?

Yes please.

Are you interested in David Lack?

Yes, yes. Yes please, yes. When you said that you talked to John Hedley Brooke about it, where? Where and when would these conversations…

When I meet him.

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But is there a reason why you would meet him? I mean are you involved in similar organisations?

Well, he at one time was chairman of the Science Religion Forum, so I meet him there. He spoke at, did he speak at the last Christians in Science conference? I think he might have done. We are both founder members of the International Science… the international thing, which again is a Templeton founded body. International Society for Science and Religion. Yeah, ISSR.

Of which you’re a founding member?

Well yes. I was one of the people, when it all started.

Okay, so that’s how you know him. Could you tell me about the…

Well, I didn’t actually know… that’s not why I knew him, but I mean I know him through that. No, the feeling that it would be good to have some international grouping and that it should be an academy rather than just a society, that anybody could join. So it’s one of these things you’re supposed to get elected to. So that a fairly elite group of us got elected in the first place, I always think probably self-selected ourselves. And since then there have been a number of other elections coming up.

And why did you think it was needed?

Because there are these discussions that go on in other places and what is the link between them and we need to know who is doing what where and can we help them. One of the most active groups – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this at any stage – are the Australians, who have an outfit called ISCAST, which is the Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology. But they involve much more than CIS, theologians. So it’s a theological science group. And I mean some years ago my wife and I went, every two years they have overseas speakers and my wife and I went and spoke at their major conference and then round the state capitals giving talks at them.

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[Track 8]

Reading your recent books and comparing them with Adam and the Ape, am I right in perceiving a sort of consistency in your position on relations between science, including evolutionary science, and religion over the course of the forty years that you’ve been writing?

I think so. I mean certainly my ideas in some ways have sharpened up and I’ve had to deal with various problems which never occurred to me in the first place, but by and large I’m still looking at the complementarity of the two.

Are you able to say what are the things that have been challenges to your thinking?

The question of humanness and how the key thing of being a human is being in the image of God. And I used to rather naively think of God sort of adding in something, but it doesn’t add in something because we are human spirits, we’re unities. More recently, and particularly looking at the effects of the Fall – and this comes in the previous bit, in a sense – the key thing appears to be relationship and a break in relationship and therefore I see the image of God establishing that relationship, it’s not adding something into it all. So that is something. Now, when you get to the Fall, again, I’m clear that there are no problems about the Fall, there is problems of course, how they affected the rest of humankind. Again, we’ve talked about that in the past and all I can do is say this is the most likely way it seemed to have happened, because there’s a spiritual spread rather than a genetic spread, it’s certainly not genetic. So one can talk about the federal headship of humans, which is a fairly traditional thing for theologians to talk about. I mean Calvin, Luther all talked about the federal headship, so I see Adam as the federal head of humans and as the source of the so- called originating sin. Not original sin, original sin is something you inherit according to Augustine, this is the thing that started it off and that screwed up the relationship and that was what required Christ to restore the relationship, or reconcile, in the Bible words.

What are your thoughts on the means of this spreading from the…

I don’t know, I mean this is God at work. I mean how does God work in human beings? I don’t know, I just know that he does do. I mean if God is working in me today now, I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 173 C1672/02 Track 7 haven’t the faintest idea, but looking back, I can say well, I said something then that I didn’t expect to say or said it in a better way. I believe that was God at work. In other words, it’s a spiritual influence on me in some way. And that’s how, somehow, how I see it working.

[03:27] Thank you. Could you explain your view expressed last time that you think the Faraday Institute has been more progressive than the Ian Ramsey Centre, the two being similar organisations in different places?

I think part of it was leadership. And it, Faraday Institute went out to actually teach and run courses rather than act as a sort of think-tank. They produced quite a bit of written stuff, not a great deal, but a fair amount. Denis Alexander as the leader has published two or three books. So does Bob White who’s the current – what do you… not chairman, but anyway, the boss. There’s no particular reason why the Ian Ramsey Centre shouldn’t have survived. I mean I would query its theology somewhat, I mean it’s a very sort of woolly approach, as opposed to the Faraday’s being much more positive. But as a result the Faraday has survived, not survived, spread, which to me is a measure of you doing things rightly. Could be the devil.

[04:54] Could you say more about this distinction between woolly and positive, because I noticed in your views on John Templeton last time, the things you said about the Starbridge Lecturers – not that any of these things were unkind, but just the thing you said – and about parts of say, philosophy at university, suggest that you’re somewhat opposed to certain kinds of ungrounded speculative kind of thought. I think you’ve said woolliness before. What is this, what is woolliness?

I’m thinking as a scientist. As a scientist I need answers to questions I’m asking. Now, I may not get a black and white answer, but there is an answer and I want to see what that answer is. You can fudge the whole thing, and that’s what I would call woolliness. That, oh there must be something there, therefore something is happening. You know, it’s so vague, so woolly. I mean that’s what I would see, but I think this is one of the contributions of scientists to the debate, that we are actually trained in looking at questions, making decisions Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 174 C1672/02 Track 7 on those, on data, and I think this is perhaps where the Faraday has succeeded over Ian Ramsey.

[06:22] Thank you. Can you talk about the nitty-gritty decisions, discussions as a member of the advisory panel of the Faraday Institute as far as you’re able to, allowed to?

I don’t think there are any nitty-gritty decisions. It is a matter of the paid staff reporting to the board and the board discussing whether they’re going the right way, whether there are any suggestions to make. One of the problems with Templeton is that it will never renew a grant, you have to put in a new project. And so – and Templeton is not unique in this way, there’s always a certain amount of how can you reword what you’re doing to get the right answer. Now, that is not for the advisory panel to do, it’s the people who are actually making the application. But these things are put to the board and discussed. I can’t remember as such any nitty-gritty decisions or sacking people or unnecessarily swearing at people.

So it sounds from that as if you haven’t had to point out, as a board member, ways in which you think the Faraday Institute is not going the right way?

No. I mean there have been… there’s some members of the advisory board keep saying there ought to be a closer relationship to the philosophers, to the theologians. Now, I’m not qualified to say if the Faraday really needed it or not, what I do know is that what the Faraday’s doing it seems to be doing rather well and being successful in it. Now, the more disciplines you can draw in, the better, but you’re not going to have any advantage if somebody just comes in for the sake of papering over a crack. But I mean perhaps that’s the most consistent comment. I mean the other comment is how closely you can be related to the university as such. Now, the Faraday has a very good website and the number of hits it gets is well up in the number of hits that any of the University of Cambridge websites get, so it’s, again, doing the right thing at that level.

Are there dangers in including, having a greater, closer contact with theologians and in particular, philosophers, and a sub-question, are there kinds of philosophy that you think would be particularly?

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I think the dangers are that it dilutes what you’re trying to say, you know, it fudges the questions. On the other hand you want to make sure that you’re asking the right questions. So I think the dangers would be that one, if any one discipline sort of took over and diluted what you’re doing in the first place. That’s what I would see as a danger. One of the things they did this last year in fact, they had a joint meeting between the Faraday and the classical department in Cambridge, which was fascinating. And they’re now talking about having other joint meetings with other departments, which I think would be an absolutely excellent thing to do. You know, I’ve been encouraging them to do that. I don’t know if they will do, but we’ll see what happens.

And are there certain kinds of philosophy that you see as being more – or philosopher – that you see as being more or less valuable in debates about relations between religion and science?

I get very worried with any thought that is not based on data. And again, I go back to as a scientist, I’m looking at hard data all the time, or hard-ish data, but you know when the data can’t be supported by real hard facts or not. So the further you get away from that, the more dangerous it is. Now, a good philosopher is putting up ideas which can be tested, but you want to be able to test those ideas to make them useful or not. If they just float around, say well, it may be this or may be that. It’s always said that Christianity has a stronger base in Cambridge than Oxford, because Oxford is so full of theologians looking, it could be this or that. Cambridge is full of scientists who are saying, well it is this or that.

Where is that often said?

It’s just one of the things that does get said, you know, when you look at the Christian Unions, when you talk to people. Haven’t heard it very recently, but it used to be said quite often.

[11:43] And are there, when you think of debates about the relation between religion and science, are there particular British philosophers that you have in mind as having contributed? Whether you think their contributions were valuable or not, but have contributed to the debate?

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The people who are always quoted are people like Wittgenstein, but I can’t understand what Wittgenstein was saying. Bertrand Russell, very often in a negative way, but one of the values is when you get a stupid idea you then look at the idea to see how it should be developed one way or another. I mean going way back into history, John Locke, who rationalised the usury, he got rid of usury from the Bible, not the Bible, the Church’s teaching, and prepared the way for capitalism and all the rest of it. Now I mean that’s philosophy if you like, that affected the debate, in retrospect, in a rather negative way. Then you get all the utilitarians: Jeremy Bentham and that generation. There again, they’re putting forward ideas which need looking at and testing, but is the best for all, the best possible, the right way of looking at it. So I wouldn’t like to say any of these are positive contributions. The more positive, and again I go back to Donald MacKay, who was about a quarter or a third a philosopher, but that’s the sort of philosophy I would go for, rather than the more woolly and effete.

In what way was his philosophy the opposite of those things, woolly and effete?

Because he was basing himself on neural processes and asking real questions about what might be happening in the brain.

Are there other more recent philosophers who have contributed or attempted to contribute?

Who was the guy who was at Warwick? Roger Trigg. I mean he’s probably among the best. And in fact, I mean just going back to the discussion we were having a few moments ago, he is now the senior research fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre. So I mean I think he’s one of the good influences at that level. And then you get the sort of historians who tend into the history of ideas. Peter Harrison, who was Professor of the History of Science in Oxford then – he’s an Australian – he went back to Australia. He was a wholly good thing, but he was really a historian.

[14:52] Thank you. Could you clarify something that I don’t think I was clear on last time, and that’s why Oliver Barclay wrote as AN Triton in two books published by Inter-Varsity Press, including Whole World?

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Whose World.

Whose World, sorry, yes.

At least two, I think. Because if he was writing as Oliver Barclay it would be taken as a party line of the IVF, this was what they were thinking, this was what they were laying down. Writing as AN Triton, he was judged as a writer, perhaps writing common sense, but not putting forward a party line.

Because his name was known? Oliver Barclay was known…

Well, he was the general secretary of the IVF, UCCF. Much more so than as RSCF, I mean that wouldn’t have mattered, it was secretary of the whole shooting match.

[15:55] Thank you. In places in your writing you hint that the efforts of Christians in Science and others in promoting the view of evolutionary science and Christianity as complementary, that those efforts have been unsuccessful to the extent that in the public sphere, general, ie non- academic debates, still often position evolutionary science and religion, especially Christianity as opposed, and within Christianity debates about whether to embrace or not evolution continue.

I think there are two things here. One is the media loving to have some sort of argument and debate. I was only reading yesterday about Merchants of Doubt – do you know this book?

Mm hm.

Apparently they’ve made a film of it now, which I’d love to see. But the thesis there is there is a small group of people who influence the debate completely outweighing the evidence from climate warming. Before that it was the same people: cigarette smoke, CFCs and the whole… So that’s one thing that has gone wrong in the debate, and the other thing – and this I think is part of the popularity of intelligent design – is that there is, well it’s more than lust, it’s a desire to see where God is at work in how things work. And part of the success, I would argue, of the Christians in Science approach, is that you don’t have to bring in the Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 178 C1672/02 Track 7 ghost in the machine to do it for you, which is what ideas is saying. So you have this suspicion, I think particularly perhaps among clergy, who don’t want to exclude God in any way, therefore they get scared of science. So I put those two things.

Is there a reason why, using the Merchants of Doubt type argument, is there a reason why the Christians in Science position – I’m just using that to summarise your position and those like you – is there a reason why that argument doesn’t influence public debate in the way that say the minority voices in Merchants of Doubt are disproportionately heard in public debate, is there a reason why the Christians in Science debate is not as loud?

It’s always difficult, and this came out in some of the things I obviously said before, to argue for neither extreme, to argue for a middle position. You can argue the Dawkins position that there is no God, or the fundamental position that God did everything. To say that God did it, but in a rather subtle way is a difficult argument to get over. I don’t know that it’s a difficult argument, but it’s a more tricky argument for people to actually have to assimilate and therefore deal with.

So the argument tends to be too subtle for media presentation, is it…

Yeah, the media… well, the media wants to, likes to produce an opposition, therefore something that is rather subtle, they will throw dust at.

[19:55] Should Christians in Science and groups like it have a sort of press office that converts these, as you say, subtle middle way arguments into something that the media can pick up and use? So you talk about Merchants of Doubt, well the argument there is partly that these minority groups have been very successful in getting their message heard, in other words, using the media. Is there a sense in which Christians in Science hasn’t used the media well?

Part of this is finance. I mean it’s certainly been talked about, that when there are these media reports there should be a reaction to it to put in a more balanced treatment. And some people have been very good at doing this. Denis Alexander, if you look at his publications in Nature, there’s a whole series of them where Nature’s made inferences that are not really quite what most of us would believe. I mean just to go back to the Faraday, there’s a talk Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 179 C1672/02 Track 7 coming up somewhere about now which I’d love to go to, of somebody comparing Cox, you know, the current guy, and Sagan, Carl Sagan in his approach. Both of them atheists, but Carl Sagan was much more thoughtful about it than Cox, who is just damning the whole thing. So Cox, if you like, is part of the, not as shrill as the Dawkins, Sam Harris lot, but is quote, ‘on that side’.

[21:45] In the same way that in Merchants of Doubt, say certain groups got their voice heard very loudly, who in the science-religion debate are the groups who seem to disproportionately get heard through…

Oh, Dawkins and the antis, on the one hand. And I think the fundamentalists generally speaking are disregarded in the general population, but they’re highly regarded, of course, in some church circles. You know, the Second Coming – who’s the guy who wrote… Hal Lindsey, you see, read enormously, particularly in the States, about the last days and what is going to happen. I don’t think we’d swallow him so much over this side of the Atlantic, but he is playing into the ears of a vast Christian audience.

What do you think is the likely future or near future of the kind of science-religion position that you’ve been promoting throughout your life?

I sincerely hope, I would regard it as the correct position, so I hope it will float to the top. If it doesn’t float to the top, well if you like, it’s climate change all over again. Either we do nothing and we have problems, or I suppose there isn’t another side to that. Or we do something, you’ve got to do something positive.

What needs to happen? What would you like to see happen to develop this, to encourage it to rise to the top?

Part of it is a better PR public persona. I only heard, I don’t think it’s published yet, public yet, that Christians in Science have just got a big Templeton grant, and this will enable them to have a permanent presence, rather than a part-time secretary and a part-time this and that, so hopefully there will be, I don’t know whether they’ll call it a press office, but somebody Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 180 C1672/02 Track 7 who will be more geared up to deal with the debates when they arise. [24:06] But you’re still up against an awful lot of inbuilt psyche of how people do react.

God… what…

Well, I mean think of the climate change thing. Most people are now, accept that climate change is happening and that something should be done, but I can’t do it because anything I do, it will be trivial, so I’m not going to stop flying off to the south of France for my holidays or getting a smaller car, all that, because I’m so unimportant. Yes, if I did it, it would be important, it would be a good thing, but it’s not important so I won’t do it. You’ve got to get over that attitude. Why isn’t everybody a Christian? If it is true, if it makes sense, what is stopping them? Well, you can invoke all sorts of things. On the one hand the devil, but on the other hand self-satisfaction, laziness. Which, you know, if you read your CS Lewis and Screwtape is exactly what it is.

[25:26] I haven’t heard, you haven’t talked about the devil before. In what way do you mean that?

I have no clear picture of the devil, I do believe in the presence and the activity of evil. So it’s easy to personify that as the devil, but I’m certainly not talking about a guy with horns. And I don’t think I’d want to go and in any way try to tie it down, just in the same way I wouldn’t like to tie down heaven in any way. I mean I do believe there is an afterlife, I do believe that something will be there, but whether it’s nice green rolling pastures or seaside or what, just pointless thinking about it. I mean there’s enough things to think about without thinking about things you have no answer to.

But is the impression the belief that evil operates in the world like other parts of your thought based on a kind of grounded evidence, a grounded…

You’ve got children. I mean we had a curate who was very dubious about children being, not evil, but bad behaviour until he had his own children. You know, it’s there the whole time. Why do, Muslim estate, whatever it’s called, IS, do what they do. It’s beyond all normal human trends, but they do it. You know, it’s everywhere.

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[27:17] Thank you. What’s your view of, just because we haven’t talked about this and I should imagine it’s something that you took an interest in, what’s your view of the way in which the various Darwin anniversaries have been marked in the sort of public sphere, media, including the most recent?

I don’t particularly have any feelings about them, quite honestly. I mean all these jamborees are useful in recalling both the contributions of people in the past, I mean whether it’s Trafalgar or VE Day or The Origin of Species, it is useful to be able to mark them in some way. In 1958 or nine, the British Council had an Origin of Species exhibition which went round the world and I spoke to it, spent a week in Norway and then a week in Ecuador, lecturing on evolution, which gave me the opportunity to lecture on evolution and what Darwin was saying or not saying about Christian faith. So I mean in that sense it was an opportunity to talk about faith, but that was ancillary to the British Council blowing up British contributions in the past.

[28:49] Thank you. Two things from your paper on David Lack that I wanted to ask you about. One, talking about his ‘Evolution theory and Christian belief’, 1950s, 1957 I think.

Something like that, yeah.

You say his arguments have been strengthened by more recent discoveries in ‘phylogenetics, epigenetics and the constraints on variation spelt out by Simon Conway Morris’. For the non-scientist listening, including really the one in front of you, could you take each one of those in turn and say how each of them have strengthened the arguments made by Lack. So, starting with phylogenetics.

Phylogenetics. Really one is talking about molecular biology and looking at actual genes in different groups. Before molecular biology you could compare, let’s say, chimpanzees and humans and you’re looking at the shapes of skulls and the size of the brain case and so on. We’re now looking at actual, what the genes are doing and changes, let us say, in chimpanzees and humans which were not there in gorillas, so it must have happened in that line. So this is the phylogenetics, which has enormously strengthened the whole evolution Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 182 C1672/02 Track 7 argument. Epigenetics, that’s probably sort of egging the cake somewhat, but it is getting away from a rather simplistic idea of what genes do in terms of Lack’s own work, in terms of things like clutch size in birds and survival and that sort of thing. Simon Conway Morris, his contribution was to make the point about convergence that when you have an environmental challenge there are only a number of solutions to that and if you’re going to survive you’ve got to take perhaps one of three ways of doing it. And I mean he cites examples of things like eyesight, the mammalian eye, that mechanism arises something like a dozen times in different lines evolutionary, so that when you get to, let’s say, the human line evolving, you’re not talking about randomness the whole way up, you’re talking about something that is not quite predetermined, but there’s much less choice, so that he talks about the inevitability of humans arising rather than the Stephen Jay Gould argument that if you start with the human DNA and run it as many times as you like, you’ll end up with different solutions. Conway Morris would say no, that’s wrong when you actually look at what is happening in evolution. And I mean I would say from my perspective that you’re looking at the interaction of the ecology and the genetics, you’re bringing them together rather than just playing the genetics, or for that matter, the ecology.

So do I understand you right that your work on the sort of the environmental genetics would be one way of explaining what Simon Conway Morris talks about as the deeper structure of biology, that because genes exist in particular environments you don’t have all of the choices, you know, certain choices?

Yes, I would say. I mean I’m very much, if you like, on the edge of Simon’s arguments, but certainly supportive of it and my way of thinking would chime with where he’s gone much further than I have.

[33:01] And I’m right in thinking that epigenetics is a relatively, especially has come to attention relatively recently?

The first paper I published on epigenetics was in 1963, I think it was. People realised for a long time that epigenetics must exist. Epigenetics is just the way things develop after the genes. So in development, and this is one of the things that originally enthused me as a student and I mean still does, that you’re talking not about 10,000 genes doing this, that and Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 183 C1672/02 Track 7 the other, you’re talking about a whole interaction, which is the epigenetics of the system. One of the things that was said when they worked out the human genome, that everybody’s very surprised that there were so few genes. Well, I wasn’t, that was the estimate – 10,000 or whatever it is – I’d been saying for a long time, because these aren’t doing separate things, they are doing things which then act together to make the machine work. And that’s your epigenetics.

[34:25] How do developments in epigenetics affect the arguments that Richard Dawkins is making in the mid seventies about The Selfish Gene?

Well, he is arguing – he’s leaving out epigenetics, if you like. He’s saying that everything depends on the gene and survival depends on the gene, which got him a lot of publicity and a lot of money from his book. I still don’t think it’s true.

[34:58] Thank you. The other thing from the Lack paper is this. That I wondered how common it is for a kind of paternalism to be involved in the way in which people come to Christianity? I noticed that in the case of David Lack it was the Naylands, and we could argue in your life story that it was the member of school staff who invited you to the summer camp and then later Oliver Barclay to some extent, and so on and so on. In your experience of taking and encouraging other Christian scientists to write about their lives, how often is this happening, this kind of paternalism?

I think it’s happening the whole time, that people are influenced by other people. I mean some people are influenced completely by the arguments as such, but it’s usually a personal contact or somebody you respect, so you’ll accept what they say more than others. One of the few people I’ve come across recently where this didn’t apply was – what’s the man’s name – at York? He’s one of the people in True Science and he had been marvelling at the Galapagos and then happened to read CS Lewis and it clicked into place. Well, I suppose he was respecting CS Lewis as opposed to somebody he’d actually met. So I think all the time it comes back to relationships, respect, ideas you base yourself on.

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Was, in that case, was there anything in the… who was the member of staff who invited you on to the summer camp at your private school?

At school? Well, he was a schoolmaster and I was a member of, well it was The Rovers, which was part of the Boy Scout movement, but it had nothing at all really to do with the Boy Scouts, it was sort of a camping and climbing club. And I was a member of that and so was he, so he and I just got friendly and he asked me.

And was there, I mean was there something about him that you respected – this is a bit too leading really – but does he fall into the same sort of category as someone like the Naylands or in other life stories as someone who you admired?

Well, somebody I certainly got on well with. Somebody who was not distant like so much schoolteachers. I mean there was another man, and I was going to look it out, the Times Ed, years ago, did a mini-series on being influenced, who influenced people to go into science, and they asked me to do this and I wrote about another master, he was the chemistry master in fact at school, who was again a member of The Rovers, the camping, climbing lot. And he taught divinity at school. He’d done a year in theological college beside his chemistry. And I mean it was him who introduced me to, well certainly to Isaiah, doing it for A/O level, or whatever it was called in those days. Probably still is. No, I don’t think it is.

When you say that the first person that we’re talking about is not distant like other schoolmasters, what does that mean?

Well, a schoolmaster, you know, it’s them and us, he’s not a friend. This guy was obviously much more a friend because we were going up on the hills together.

Was he also a teacher in class at other times?

I don’t think he ever taught me, but he was a teacher, so I mean he was part of that brigade.

Who else was in The Rovers then, among the staff? The chemistry teacher…

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The chemistry chap was. It was led by one of the housemasters, who again was a much more distant man and who I heard a fascinating story about recently. He was Martin Rees, went to the same school as me, was almost turned down by the school because he was such a little weed and hunchback and all the rest of it, and this guy actually accepted him into his house, and the result is history. But he was another person in that group. Another person was the school doctor. Another person, very much on the edge, but I mean he actually taught me to climb, was Richard, RC Evans, Charles Evans, who was on the, he was the deputy leader of the Everest expedition that actually climbed it. He was an old boy of the school, and so he used to come with us sometimes. So I mean there was that group of seniors, as it were, as opposed to the boys.

[40:33] And when did The Rovers do their things?

We used to go off for weekends in Snowdon in, you know, probably once, maybe twice a term, and then there was also a summer expedition somewhere, usually in somewhere like Scotland.

And is that separate from the camp that you talked about?

Oh yes, completely separate. As I say, it was technically part of the Boy Scout movement, you know, Cubs, Scouts, Rovers. This was entirely a school thing, nothing at all to do with the Christian things.

Did it have a Christian element?

No. Any more than the Boy Scouts do. You know, I honour the Queen and God and do whatever, I can’t remember, whatever was said in those days.

And would the first person that we’re talking about, the schoolmaster, have talked about Christianity as part of The Rovers, even though the group itself, as you said, little more than having that slogan.

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I don’t remember it, I certainly don’t remember it. There was a school meeting, I was probably not a member of it at that stage, of, the chaplain used to have a tea party and there was another group run by this man that we’re talking about and somebody else, who also had one where Christian things were talked about. And certainly latterly I was a member of that, but when I became a member of it, I can’t say.

Thank you. And is it, should I, I’m a bit surprised, maybe because I’m naïve about the culture of public schools at this time, that Martin Rees might have been turned down, you know, for those physical reasons. Should I be surprised about that?

I think the question was, whether he would be able to survive in the sort of things that went on. It was very much a, I mean it was academic, but it was also, you had to hold your own physically and, you know, play football and all the other things that people did.

[42:52] Thank you. Could you now talk about the presentation of the natural world, including evolution, on natural history programmes during the period of your career? You’ve talked a bit about your own contributions, but I wondered whether you had a view on how the natural world was presented by different kinds of natural history programme that really became very popular from the sixties onwards?

Have we talked about Romany?

No.

One of the things that really set me off as a schoolboy, and I was eight, nine, ten, was a programme on Children’s Hour – I mean this was way before television – on the radio with a man called Romany, he called himself Romany, he was actually a Methodist minister. But he used to go out with his dog and a companion and talk about the countryside, as it were. And I used to listen to this avidly as a small boy. I always remember going to – he did a programme on rooks nesting and he went up a church tower and looking at the rook’s nest at eye-level, as it were. Now, I always remember going to our parish church and being absolutely furious to find it was locked, I couldn’t get up the tower. But that was what was happening in Children’s Hour. Now, probably there was nothing very much else in those Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 187 C1672/02 Track 7 days. He died, he was replaced by a man called Norman Ellison. When the television started, there was Peter Scott, there was Armand and Michaela Denis, and then of course David Attenborough, but that was coming on later. [45:01] I suppose this will be post- university, there was always a half hour programme on radio on, something in the countryside. These were – it still goes on in a way – they go into a place or talk about a subject, and I did two or three of these, I did one on Fair Isle, I did one down in Cornwall on dog whelks, and the same series, the one we have talked about was, Was Jesus a Good Naturalist? So these were radio things. And there was always more on radio than television. I mean it’s only latterly that the Natural History Unit has really got going. Now, in, somewhere about 1990 I was asked to give the summary paper in a meeting for the jubilee of the Society for Natural History on the future of natural history. And, you know, this came out of the blue, it sounded really quite fun, and I actually went to Bristol and talked to the Natural History Unit at the Beeb about how they saw things developing. And quite interesting, I mean this was what, thirty years ago I suppose. They thought they might be able to do things in real time, and now you’ve got Nature Watch and Autumn Watch and all the rest of it. But that didn’t seem to me to be the answer of where the future of natural history was, and the way I came to rationalise it, natural history, love of the wild, if you like, is something you catch rather than you rationalise. Who had influenced me most? Well, one was this man Romany. One was Bernard Kettlewell, who we’ve talked about. One was John Barrett, who was one of the original Field Studies Council wardens at Dale Fort. He wrote the Collins Guide to the Seashore. He used to broadcast a fair amount. And the other was Charles Raven, who taught me in Cambridge and who had been Regis Professor of Divinity, but I suspect was a better naturalist than theologian. Still, that’s my idea of his theology.

You were saying then that you ‘catch’ this interest. How was that against what they were suggesting as the future of natural history?

Well, they were obviously trying to sell natural history, I mean that was their job. And obviously they’re successful in it. I then had to ask, how did I get involved, what did it mean to me, and it was through these four men – they were men – that really switched me on and, if you like, put me down my life’s path as an ecologist, if I’m a real ecologist, which I doubt.

And how does that, if it does, how does that influence on your interest in nature differ from a similar set of people who influenced you in Christianity, or is it a similar sort of process? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 188 C1672/02 Track 7

If you like, it’s similar in that if you’re going to make sense of the whole you’ve got to bring them all together, you know, where do science and faith meet, where does life and survival meet. You can put things in separate boxes or you can say it’s all one of a package, and if you do believe, as I certainly do believe, that there is a God who created and who created me and has a will for me, my professional life and my religious life have got to somehow merge, match, cohere, complement – use what words you like.

You raise this issue of wholeness in one of your recent books where you write autobiographically and you talk about your father’s suicide leading to a kind of breaking up or splintering of the self, and then a kind of desire for wholeness. Do you see that as something that’s operated in you in particular?

I think it ought to happen in anybody else, in everybody. If you’re going to be, well, it’s part of maturity. You can regard your work as something that happens on Monday to Friday and then you actually live on Saturday and Sunday, and I think some people live that way. I find it absolutely mind-boggling to do it.

And yet in your early career when you were talking about just the actual doing of science, you said that that tended to be separate from Christianity, you said it was sort of like going to bed or doing the washing up, actually doing the…

Yeah. Well, I mean one’s got to, as it were, think outside the box. And you start off doing something, you start off by learning how to ride a bicycle, but having learnt how to ride a bicycle or drive a car or something, you then get to places that you couldn’t get before, you actually enjoy the process of doing what you are doing. So the thing opens up. So starting off doing science, you do science, but what do you do it for. Well, you may do it for nothing else, but it may become a part of the whole. I’m just reading a biography of René Dubos – have you come across…? He was one of the people behind the UN human environment Stockholm conference.

René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth.

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Yeah, but he actually discovered one of the first antibiotics, I mean he was a microbiologist. He was a Frenchman. I mean I knew nothing at all, I knew him about this being involved in Stockholm because he wrote a book, a Penguin, with Barbara Ward who was an economist, but bringing together the rationale behind the UN conference on the environment, the human environment.

Interesting.

There you are, some reading for you. I mean I’ve only read a couple of chapters so far.

[52:25] Going back to where we started then, with natural history programmes, what was your view of programmes like, on the one hand, David Attenborough’s on BBC and then, I don’t know whether you saw the ITV sort of Survival programmes and that sort of thing, what was your…

Yeah, I was never sort of an aficionado of any of them. I mean David Attenborough’s stuff, I mean I knew David from way back, so I used to watch them, not very religiously but it was good stuff, very good stuff. I remember we got to the stage at work that we were so short of taxonomists we were actually showing Life on Earth to the students to teach them the breadth of the animal kingdom.

Were you aware of particular kinds of evolutionary science being tied up with the way in which animals were presented in their environment in these programmes?

Never thought about it particularly. I mean it was obviously there, you know, that worms and insects are related, that echinoderms and humans are, but I don’t think… it was just how things were. And in most of the programmes, I mean you’re not going to that sort of depth with them in any sense.

[53:50] Thank you. You talked last time about working with Moira Mann and how this relationship led indirectly to God and the Scientist. Were you aware of her sort of religious views?

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Not at all, not at all.

You mentioned that her husband was the statutory atheist on…

I didn’t know that at that time. I mean she was the sort of sub-producer at Bristol. Dilys Breese was the top person and then Moira was the person under her. So I used to deal with her with these programmes we were talking about twenty minutes ago, you know, going and ramble round Fair Isle or something like that. So that was, it was, if you like, a professional relationship. She must have somehow known that I was a Christian because of this relationship that developed into the television series, but quite why and how, I don’t know.

What can you tell me about Peter Firth? I managed to find details of this programme.

Yeah, I saw you got the names, yeah. [laughs] Very clever.

And Peter Firth was the, he’s listed as the producer with Christopher Mann as the director. So what was Peter Firth’s involvement as far as you remember it?

Well, he was the person who told us what to do, on the spot, as it were, and he was a producer with the Beeb, but I don’t know if he was ordained at that stage or not, but he then became the Bishop of, I think it was Malmesbury or Tewkesbury, somewhere round there. Now he’s dead. I mean I didn’t have a close relationship with him, we were friendly with him when we’re doing these things.

And I unfairly expected you to remember the names of all the scientists in the programme last time, but…

I got Robert Boyd…

But now we know who they were, along with the ones that you’ve spoken about: Antony Hewish, Derek Burke and Evelyn Ebsworth. Could you talk about why those three were chosen if you happen to remember?

Well, I don’t know why they chose them, I mean they were chosen by the Beeb. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 191 C1672/02 Track 7

Okay.

I mean Antony Hewish was a good old-fashioned deist. He was, he got a Nobel Prize for astronomy, he was a very good astronomer, and he believed in God and he believed in astronomy. Evelyn Ebsworth, I know nothing whatsoever about, he was a chemist. I think I’m right in saying he was at one stage Vice-Chancellor of Durham, but I may be wrong on that. He’ll be in Who Was Who.

It’s just the last time you said that you thought you might have suggested some people who might have been included.

No, what happened is having done this, the first series, they got really quite upbeat about it and there was talk about another series, who could they have, and that was when, you know, I made various suggestions.

Okay. But that second series wasn’t made?

No.

Do you remember who you suggested for this unmade second series?

No. Well, presumably Robert Boyd, because if he wasn’t in the first series… [laughs]

[57:12] I see. Thank you. One thing that I wanted to ask you about, I was watching, I think it was the Alan Macfarlane interview with John Polkinghorne and he says that he’s not on email because when you work in the sphere of science and religion you get quite a lot of unsolicited mail and that’s his reason for not doing it, which led me to want to ask you, to what extent working in the science and religion sphere has led to, in your case, unsolicited mail?

Normal span. You know, you get the sort of, ‘Dearly Beloved’, you know, ‘I’m dying of cancer’. How much other people get that sort of thing, I don’t know, but I mean I just delete these things, I’m afraid. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 192 C1672/02 Track 7

Do you get…

David Attenborough’s not on email either.

For that reason?

I don’t know why. [laughs] I would say it was a generation rather than a rational thing.

But do you get people writing to you wanting to take issue with you on points of theology or on points of relations between science and theology?

Not really. I mean they approach you as a Christian and therefore a soft touch. That’s, very little beyond that, I think. I mean one or two people write out of the blue. I haven’t told you about Hank Shugart have I? I mean this was literally last week. I’ve just reviewed a book called Foundations of the Earth for the Ecological Society journal, and found it’s actually based himself round the so-called whirlwind speech in Job, in the Book of Job. And his chapter headings are the questions that Job… that God put to Job and Job had no answers to. And then he talks about the origin of the earth, about alien species, about climate change. I mean he’s a senior, very well respected American systems ecologist and it wasn’t clear to me why he’d put it into this framework. He actually says in his introduction that he came across this speech when he was trying to find a reading for his mother’s funeral. And so having written the review, I sent him a copy and said, forgive my asking, but how do you come to this particular way. And I had a fascinating email from him. He said he was born in Arkansas, very much in the Bible belt country. Parents were very keen southern Baptists, they used to go to church every Sunday, he was a member of the Sunday school, learnt large tracts of the Bible. At the age of twelve, somehow he got hold of a copy of The Origin of Species and started asking questions of his Sunday school teachers which they couldn’t answer, so he went to the minister with these questions. And the minister said, put away all – what was the word he used? More than dangerous books, you know, devilish books, type of thing. So he stopped asking questions. Went to college and didn’t go to church again. You know, and he wrote and told me this and I’ve sent him a copy of Christians and Evolution, so I don’t know if he’ll read it. That’s my evangelistic effort for the week.

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[1:01:18] Thanks. What do you think has been the effect on science and religion debates of the internet?

I don’t know. I mean I’m not a blogger, as it were. I would think probably not very much, but I may be completely wrong because it’s not my world. I mean the internet is very useful, as we all know, except when you send things that are not received. I just don’t know.

[1:01:55] Thank you. And do you have a view on… at one point in the interview you say that debates on religion and science in the public sphere go in sort of surges, affected by sort of world events and that kind of thing. Are there particular kind of world events over the period that you’ve been working in this thing that have produced a kind of surge? I’m thinking of things like sort of 9/11, perhaps reporting of Northern Ireland, that sort of thing, whether you remember these things changing the debate or increasing the amount of it?

I think some of these events increase interest in religion as such and obviously the science/faith bit comes into that, because science is always supposed to have displaced religion. As far as specific issues are concerned, I wouldn’t have thought… none of them spring to mind. There are issues, like test-tube babies for example, which there was a lot of media and public interest and how all this fitted together, and in that sense, yes, science/faith does fall apart. And then you get these periodic discoveries, I mean we’ve had one in the last couple of weeks about missing links, you know, this lower jaw they’ve just discovered in Ethiopia or somewhere, you know, where we’ve come from, what is man. They can say that nowadays and still get away with it. Most of us can’t.

What does that mean? Oh, okay.

You see what I mean.

[1:03:44] Steve Jones, could you talk about your professional and personal relations with him from the point of appointing him, which you talked about, onwards. I ask because he is prominent in science and religion debates, especially in the public sphere, but obviously coming from a Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 194 C1672/02 Track 7 different position to yourself, and yet often acknowledges you in his books and from what you’ve suggested so far you have a friendly relationship with.

Oh, very friendly, yeah. I mean I think Steve sort of regards me as being a good thing because I appointed him, you know, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened, I’d assume he’d have got a job somewhere. I always think he’s not an atheist, he’s a sort of, what I would call a Manchester Guardian liberal. Probably an unbeliever, brought up in a Welsh background, so there’s probably a Welsh Nonconformist somewhere in his background, I’m sure there is. I think his grandfather was a minister. He wrote or rewrote the Bible, or whatever, something and The Serpent’s Tail [The Serpent’s Promise?], and I suggested to him afterwards that he and I wrote a paper together setting out our separate views. I mean he’s got frustrated with Richard Dawkins, but I mean he still gets lumped with him as popularisers. And I mean they were both elected to the Royal Society as popularisers of science. What more is there to say?

What do you mean that he’s got frustrated with Richard Dawkins?

Well, Richard has gone off so much in extreme ways condemning Islam, I mean that’s been going for some time. And Dawkins has recently – I haven’t read it – written his autobiography or written the first volume of his autobiography. Steve said, oh, don’t you read it, it’s all about Richard Dawkins.

And could you explain by what you mean by, for the listener who may not understand what you mean by this, you see him as a Guardian liberal and not an atheist. What’s the difference?

Somebody who feels that there’s something more to life than… an atheist who would specifically deny the existence of God. Woolly, to come back to that thing. I mean I don’t know if Steve has ever thought through his faith or lack of faith. Probably has to some extent, but we’ve never had any deep conversations about it.

[1:06:53] And did you experience the sorts of things that he says he experienced as a teacher, university teacher on evolution and genetics of what he calls ‘frisky discussions years ago Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 195 C1672/02 Track 7 with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, whereas now it’s Islamic students’ and what he talks about as the boycotting of lectures by Muslim students.

He’s much more up to date than me on that sort of thing. Certainly one used to get one or two students per lecture who used to come and question you and so on. I’ve never really experienced the Muslim boycott, but I’ve never really been teaching regular courses since the advent of large Muslims in classes. I mean that’s a fairly recent development of universities recruiting to get as many overseas fees as they can.

[1:08:05] That might be a good time then to ask you to talk, if you will, about debates on relations between science and faiths other than Christianity in Britain.

Very limited. I mean I’ve been a party to various attempts at discussion with various groups. The first time I came across these debates was in a major World Council of Churches conference at MIT in the States. Oh, this must be early seventies, probably, and there were two Muslims who put forward their ideas of evolution. One of them I would agree with wholeheartedly, and the other was a straightforward, old-fashioned fundamentalist. And so it became apparent to me there were these enormous differences in their approaches. More recently I’ve been concerned with the different approaches of different religions to the environment. Now, Muslims have a doctrine of stewardship. As a senior Muslim academic said to me once, it doesn’t feature very much in their theology, but it is there in the Koran. Jews are obviously much closer to Christianity in that way and have some very developed ideas on the environment. Buddhists get very involved, but the thing about Buddhists is, they have no doctrine of creation, things just go round in circles. Hindus I’ve not been involved with at all, but again, you have this problem of non-linearity of time. I think most of the interaction I’ve had is with Islam, but as I say, the trouble with Islam is there is a minority that really think through their faith and a majority – well I think it’s a majority – that clearly doesn’t. I was, two or three years ago, asked to be part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which was rather fun. And this was a debate in a church about science and faith, and I was debating with some Muslim guy who was actually the chaplain to the university. And I was really rather nervous about this. Anyway, he had a PhD in astronomy, I talked, slight presentation as a starter, and then he started, the first duty of any Muslim is doubt. I said, amen. You know, we had a very amenable debate following that. I don’t think it got Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 196 C1672/02 Track 7 anywhere, but it was an interesting occasion. But he said afterwards that he’s had death threats from other Muslims for believing and teaching as he does. So, you know, that’s a Muslim problem.

Who was this, do you remember his name, this person that you debated with?

I can’t tell you. I mean I can… I don’t know if it will be in the programme. I’ve probably got the programme somewhere. Look up Muslim chaplain to the University of Edinburgh and see what it says.

And who are the two at the international meeting, I think you said early – MIT - was it early seventies?

Again, I can’t tell you their names. This was a big World Council event on science and faith and where it all fitted together and I think it was almost the first time I went to the States. I remember John Habgood, the Archbishop of York, was very senior in WCC circles at that time. But I don’t remember very much about it, frankly.

[1:12:54] Thank you. Can we move then on to the John Ray Initiative? Set up in 1998, in part due to a perceived tendency of Christians not to regard environmental problems as high on their agenda as say, to spread the Christian faiths, for example. And there are reasons set out by Hugh Montefiore and ‘A Christian Approach to the Environment 2005’, he gives twelve reasons why he thinks Christians tended to have not taken on the environment as something they ought to be interested in. And I was particularly interested in one of them, which was, ‘One of the reasons why some Christians do not like to join with secular organisations over environmental issues is that they fear they’re joining forces with adherents of the New Age movement’. Could you talk about that?

Yeah, I think that one has faded somewhat. But I mean the New Age was effectively pantheism, in many effects is worshipping nature and being one with nature. And this was the danger, of course, of Gaia, with Mother Earth and we are sort of parasites on Mother Earth. And I think that that is true, and again, probably truer in the States than here. I think both the more mature environmental secular organisations and Christian environmental Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 197 C1672/02 Track 7 organisations have now matured on that particular front. I mean just to talk about the John Ray Initiative. The initiator was John Houghton, Sir John Houghton, and his concern, expertise, interest of course is climate change; he chaired the IPCC scientific panel for years. And he, not particularly as a climate scientist, but as a Christian, saw this need to try to help Christians understand environmental questions better. There was a redundant Outward Bound school for sale on the Welsh coast and he had this vision of buying this and running it as a Christian environmental centre. And he called three or four of us together and we met and prayed about this and the decision, which I was dubious about, but it seemed alright, that we should put in a bid for this and trust the Lord would provide money. Well, thank God the Lord didn’t provide money for it, but having, as it were, begun to think about Christians together in the environment, this is where the John Ray Initiative came from, and the first big event, attempt, was to sort of, as it were, see what the issues were, which was the day conference we had, the thing you’ve been reading, and getting various people to set the agenda for us. And the John Ray Initiative has gone on. It’s always, it’s never been very well funded. It just about staggers along. But they have an annual conference, they’ve just had this year’s, which apparently was over-subscribed and was very good, was on climate change. It was based for quite a long time at the University of Gloucestershire, in Cheltenham.

[1:16:53] What experience have you had personally of finding it difficult to persuade other people in the sort of organised church to regard the environment as a priority or as an important…

Enormous difficulty. You know, it’s a fringe interest. It’s a good thing. Just as, you know, you’ve got to provide housing, you’ve got to provide food banks, you’ve got to provide, look after the Salvation Army and so on. And enthusiasts should be encouraged and tolerated, but it’s not a mainstream interest. Now I regard this as theologically very ill-thought through, because if we are really part of creation, if we really take seriously the two books of God, this should be fundamental to faith and thought, but very rarely can you persuade the powers that be that this is. Now if you’re talking to a minister, his immediate problems are the old and the young and all the rest of it. He will tolerate, encourage you, but it will never, or very, very rarely become a major part of one’s thinking. [1:18:32] I mentioned this conference in Coventry in September, this is called ‘Reconciling a Wounded Planet’ and this is a big push to try and get the Church of England to take it seriously, at least the Church of England, I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 198 C1672/02 Track 7 mean it’s not specifically Church of England, but it has its roots in Coventry in the cathedral. But no, it is an uphill task.

And if you were not going to give us twelve reasons like Hugh does in the book, but if you were going to identify a couple of reasons why it is an uphill struggle, what would you say?

Well, I think the first thing is this business of straightforward theology, and I mean this is where I would start, where I do start, that people are not prepared to take on board the nature that it is part of creation and we’re responsible for creation. And the initial sins were not covetousness or sex or anything like that, it was actually disobeying God. And the first command we were given was to look after creation, to have dominion over it.

And to what extent have you been involved with secular environmental groups? Okay, we know about the Ecological Society and the Linnean Society, but what about more sort of campaigning environmental groups, have you had relations with them?

I’ve always slightly not got involved. I’m not a campaigner and so often these groups are… play rather fast and loose with the facts to put over a case. I’m a member of Green Christian Link, whatever it’s called, they call themselves Green Christian now, which is a campaign organisation. That of course is not a secular group. I have a lot of sympathy for Friends of the Earth, much less sympathy for Greenpeace, because they play fast and loose with real data as a campaigning group. I mean the chief executive of Friends of the Earth is an old mate of mine, Andy Atkins. Then you come on, I suppose, to all the naturalist trusts and RSPB and all the rest of it, or environmental organisations. I mean I’m a member of some of these. I’m not a campaigning member as such, because that’s not the sort of thing I do, and I would regard being a member of these as part of my wholeness, if you like, as a Christian. That my Christian life isn’t wholly in church, it is in church but it’s in the world as well. And that there is a convergence between the interests of your secular environmentalist and the Christian environmentalist, because we’re talking about the same substrata, the same strata, we’re looking after the world. And the thing about the Christian, he’s got a reason for it, which is more than self-interest, and that to me is, should be, an opportunity for Christians to, as it were, invigorate and challenge the secularist.

Why not campaign? Why not see that as part of your… Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 199 C1672/02 Track 7

I’m not a campaigner. And I mean I think this is part, if you like, of the defect of science, that your science straight down the line is based on a hard intellectual objective base. Your campaigner is pushing in a certain direction. I mean this came home to me, and this is nothing to do with Christianity, in the early days of the Mammal Society, which I joined soon after it was formed. And the Mammal Society, less so now, but very much then, regarded itself as collecting and presented data on mammals so that your badger groups and your deer groups could argue, they had data to base it on, but the scientists were providing the data. Now that’s what I regard the scientists to produce. Just in the same way, if you like, I mean John Houghton argues very strongly with them, climate change, there’s so much hot air talked on both sides, what are the real facts.

[1:24:00] Thank you. Could you say a little bit more about the meeting chaired by John Polkinghorne to discuss whether to continue association with the Templeton? I can see, you talked last time about why you decided to continue it, which was the funding of a sort of valued lecture series, but what I didn’t think was quite as clear was what was at stake, what was the potential danger of continuing, what was seen to be at stake for Christians in Science in continuing?

I think the questions were, back to that wonderful word, woolliness of John Templeton himself and where was he going and this was not the true faith as we understood it, it was a very watered down, if you like, campaigning sort. I think that’s what it was, you know, did one really want to be associated with it.

Were there thought to be dangers for Christians in Science of having that association?

When you say Christians in Science, this is not the organisation, it is Christians who are scientists, and it was those of us who were involved were, I don’t think seeing a danger to be involved, but a sheer waste of time.

And I think you described John Templeton’s sort of reading of the Bible as liberal, last time, and when you were talking about Hugh Montefiore when you were at Cambridge, you saw his reading of the Bible as liberal. Are they liberal readings of the Bible in a similar way? Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 200 C1672/02 Track 7

I doubt it. But, as always with somebody who is interpreting things, is a thing legitimately interpreting or not. I mean Hugh Montefiore got a lot of bad publicity at one stage by suggesting that Christ was gay. Now, what he was arguing for, well you know, he didn’t get married, blah, blah, blah. So it was not a very strong argument. But it was certainly, well it certainly caused anger among people who took Christ seriously. John Templeton, I’m sure, well he certainly didn’t believe in evolution and I suspect he would have problems with miracles and that sort of thing. I don’t know, but that would be my guess.

He didn’t believe in evolution?

No. And Russell Stannard, in fact this was Jack, his son, Russell Stannard made a series of science-faith films, videos, financed by the Templeton thing and Jack discovered that evolution came into them, you know, he almost sort of vetoed them on the spot, but he was persuaded not to. I think the son, Jack, was more right wing than daddy. You know, Jack financed the… there was the government thing on anti-gays, there was an amendment some years ago, and Jack put money into financing the anti-gays, and there was something else that he did. I mean this is nothing to do with the foundation as such, this was Templeton and Templeton money. So I mean that, if you like, this is, you know, going back to the previous question, guilt by association rather than anything else.

Did John Templeton talk about evolution in those meetings?

Don’t think so. I don’t remember it.

And just to clarify, Jack is the son?

Jack is the son and is the president of the foundation now, took over from daddy.

What did the prize, because you won a prize, in 1995, what did that consist of and what was it for and how were you given it?

Well, there was a presentation ceremony, which I think was actually in the Linnean, and I was presented with it by the Dean of Windsor, because I’ve got a picture of it. How they got Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 201 C1672/02 Track 7 hold of me, I don’t know. I mean it was for the persistent advocacy of the Christian faith among scientists, or something like that. And they just said they were giving it me, so I said, fine. And I made a speech and said how wonderful Templeton was, thank you very much.

And did it involve, did you get any grant or something from it, or a…

I had a cheque, yeah. I mean nothing vast, probably two or three hundred. And a scroll, I’ve got the scroll somewhere, don’t know what you do with these things.

[1:29:34] Last time you mentioned your view of the reporting of the, recent reporting of the bishop’s letter which was concerning – which is obviously because there’s a general election soon – and it concerns sort of society and politics. Can you say more about… because you said that it’s virulent nonsense, but could you say a little bit more about… I wasn’t sure whether you were talking about the reporting of the letter or the letter itself or the reporting in some places or, you know, so what?

The reporting of the letter, you know, objected to by the government, this was communism and all the rest of it. And it’s exactly the same as we were talking about earlier and evolution, I would suggest that it’s the difficulty of making a balanced comment that is not extreme pietistic on the one hand, everything’s religion, or is all utilitarian and how much tax cuts and all the rest of it. So it was a principle statement, I would agree entirely with the bishop’s letter, I mean I haven’t read the thing in detail, read bits of it. I think it was an excellent initiative.

Do you have a view on the Church’s role in relation to politics? I know you said from an earlier stage you were apolitical, but…

No, I think the Church has got to be seen to be apolitical, but to challenge society when it needs challenging, you know, whether it’s over housing or the young or abortion or divorce, or whatever. I mean that’s what the Church is there for – not there for – but it’s part of the role of the Church.

Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 202 C1672/02 Track 7

And finally, can you talk about your sort of most recent activities, taking us right up to the present, including the book that you’re working on?

Well, there’s a man called Merchant who has written something or other… No, I’m writing this book on environmental attitudes and what forms and what has changed it over the years. I mean in the early days it was pure survival and then gradually we came to learn how to deal with the environment, and one’s really talking about first place in agriculture and food and of course housing, then there became sort of arrogance, and we’re still in the arrogant phase but realising that we can’t be arrogant and we’ve got to take responsibilities. And that’s really what the book is about. It really started from my involvement with the IUCN ethics group and the thinking through environmental ethics and an ethic really is an attitude, so it is in a way an attempt to popularise the thinking that went on at that time in the ethics group.

Thank you.

Right, can I go home now please?

[end of Track 8 – end of recording]