NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews

Lewis Wolpert

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/06

IMPORTANT

This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk.

© The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document.

Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom

+44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected]

Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators.

The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/06

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

Interviewee’s surname: Wolpert Title: Professor

Interviewee’s Lewis Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Date and place of birth: 19th October 1929, Embryology Johannesburg, South Africa Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: general manager in stationers Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 28/04/2015 (track 1-2), 29/04/2015 (track 3-5), 09/06/2015 (track 6-7)

Location of interview: Interviewee's home, 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 7 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 4 hrs. 40 min. 21 sec.

Additional material: Scanned images

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN with 2 closures: track 2 [7:38-10:52] and track 7 [5:55 - 7:31]

Interviewer’s comments:

Lewis Wolpert Page 1 C1672/06 Track 1

[Track 1]

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

Yes. I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, nineteenth of October, 1929.

And could you tell me as much as you can about the life of your father, either things you know because you witnessed them, or things…

Yes. No, it’s quite complicated. He was born in Northern Ireland, in Belfast, a Jewish family, and they came to London when he was really quite young and didn’t have a proper… and they were very poor. So he went to work at the Central News Agency, a well-known, rather like WH Smith, when he was about thirteen, fourteen. So he never had a proper education but stayed in that firm until he retired when he was old, and became one of the general managers, so he did very well. But he was very conscious of his lack of education.

And his reasons for coming to London, for the move?

I don’t really know why they came to London, no. I never knew his father. I knew his mother a bit, but it wasn’t something that one ever discussed as to why they came.

[01:25] And the life of your mother?

My mother’s family came from Lithuania and they came… and so she was actually born in South Africa, but some of the elder bits of the family were born in Lithuania and they came to Johannesburg. And the elder brothers – they’re really quite a distinguished family actually, that lot – and my father married my mother, I think, partly because he thought he could get some money. [laughs] Because they were moderately well off, they were a much better… and he wanted to buy a coat for his mother.

Did you know the grandparents on that side of the family?

Lewis Wolpert Page 2 C1672/06 Track 1

I knew her, that was all.

What memories do you have of her?

Sorry?

What memories do you have of her, of the…

I wasn’t mad… I used to have to go and visit her with my father on Sunday mornings and I wasn’t mad about it.

[02:32] What do you remember of your family home in Johannesburg as a younger child? If you could, can you take us on a tour of it, to actually sort of describe it as far as you can remember it?

Yes I do, well I do remember it. I didn’t get on terribly well with my parents, that was one of my problems. I found my mother physically unattractive. I know that’s a sad thing to say, so I didn’t like really being cuddled by her and my father couldn’t stand being contradicted. My mother wanted a nice Jewish boy who would behave like a nice Jewish boy, and I’m afraid that wasn’t me. Also, I didn’t like the way they treated the servants. You know, we had black servants, and I think they were quite hard on them. So I wasn’t terribly happy at home and I don’t think my… I did moderately well at school, I was at a local school and I had good friends there and I enjoyed my friends and playing rugby. [laughs] I didn’t like the school. They taught us in a very physical sort of way. He would hold, for example, not just me but anybody, he’d hold a piece of elastic under my nose and say ‘Wolpert, how many kilometres in five miles?’ And if you got it wrong, ping! The elastic… [laughs] They would humiliate us and beat us and all sorts of things. But we all did really quite well at school and I got a first class in mathematics when I… for matriculation. And yes, I did quite well at school and I didn’t make the top rugby team, but rugby was what really mattered to me, but I did become the captain of the third division and did score the occasional try. I don’t know what I really did. [04:23] Lewis Wolpert Page 3 C1672/06 Track 1

At quite a young age I became interested in science. And I had a cousin who was just a year younger than me and we were very close. My cousin was Jac Herberg who’s my mother’s sister’s son. And we were very involved with Meccano electric trains and even when we were fourteen, fifteen, building radios and I was quite jealous because he understood electricity before [laughs] I did. And that’s really I think partly what mattered to me. And then I did have… I had quite a few good friends, yes.

[05:23] Thank you. And the childhood house itself, could you take us on a tour of that?

It was quite a, well Johannesburg was quite… it wasn’t a bad house. We had a lawn and there were, how many, there were five rooms in the house and I had my own room and my parents had their room and there was a room next door to my room where my cousin Jack used to quite often come and stay. In fact he stayed with us for a year on one occasion. And then there was the study and then there was the dining room and then there was the living room. No, it was quite a… had quite a nice big lawn. My mother was very keen on gardening. I didn’t give a hoot about it.

Yes, when you in your mind’s eye picture your mother and your father in the house or in the garden, what do you picture them doing? Where did they tend to be and doing what?

My mother on the telephone [laughs] and my father sitting and drinking his whisky outside on the thing, and when I was about thirteen, fourteen, I used to have to bring my father his whisky when he came home. And I think when I was about fifteen I started drinking with him. They were quite social and my father, because of his lack of education, was acutely self-conscious if people argued with him or felt he was rejected in any sort of way. And my mother was acutely conscious of people doing anything that was non-Jewish. So, for example, her elder brother married a non-Jewish woman, Molly, who I loved actually, and she complained bitterly that – they did wait until the mother had died, my mother’s mother had died – and my mother complained that they didn’t wait long enough until the elder sister had died. I thought that was just ludicrous. And my mother was very involved in Jewish affairs, yes, charities and things like that. And my father played golf and my mother played bowls, so they were quite sporty in that sort of way, yes. Lewis Wolpert Page 4 C1672/06 Track 1

[07:30] You just said that Molly was someone that you loved…

Oh no, sorry, I’m sorry, I liked – not particularly – I liked my mother’s family. There were five brothers and three sisters and the brothers and the sisters – and Molly was the non-Jew [laughs] who my Uncle Sappy married and I liked her very much, they were fine. But the one I liked most, the one I got on best with was my Uncle Mosie’s wife, that was Helen Suzman – have you ever heard of Helen Suzman?

No, I haven’t, I should have done perhaps?

She was, no, Helen was amazing. Helen was very anti-apartheid in South Africa and she at one stage became the only Member of Parliament – she was in Parliament – who opposed the government, you know, the government system, she was very famous. And when I was a bit older, but now I’ve left – should I go on with when I left school?

You don’t feel any need to stick to a chronology because I can take you back whenever I want to.

[08:37] You can always go back. So anyhow, I passed my matric and I didn’t get a first class in science because the reason is I didn’t fully understand how a car battery worked, but I got one, I got a first class anyhow. And I didn’t know what to do, but I decided to do civil engineering, applying my interest in science, and I thought building nice bridges would be nice. And I went to the local university and did that. And then when I’d just started there, one of my uncles died and my mother sent me to stay with them, with his wife and the two children, I stayed there for a while, while I was at university. And then a little later after that I went to stay at my… at Helen’s house, who I liked, you know, the politician, because they were travelling a lot and I had to look after the children. [09:50] And when I finished engineering I got a job in Pretoria as assistant to the Director of the Building Research Institute, Jere Jennings. And his main interest was soil mechanics, there Lewis Wolpert Page 5 C1672/06 Track 1

were problems with foundations in wet soils, so I had to study soil mechanics and also housing, and also I was his personal assistant, so I would sit next to him at meetings and make notes and keep the minutes and things like that. And I was there for two years, but was quite lonely. I didn’t like Pretoria very much, it’s not a terribly thing… I eventually had a girlfriend, Bimby, yes, and she was very nice. Girlfriends before that, I did have, there was a girl, Lorraine, that I pursued quite hard before [laughs], I won’t elucidate, but without much success. [10:53] And I should also point out that I wasn’t that bad a Jewish boy because I had a bar mitzvah – do you know what a bar mitzvah is? No. When you’re thirteen…

Assume that the people listening don’t know.

Thirteen, you have to go to synagogue and read and my mother made me go to synagogue every Saturday morning, which I didn’t like one bit, and I also had to learn Hebrew and my mother made me take Hebrew for matric and I didn’t do very well. It was quite difficult. Yes, she wanted me to be a responsible Jewish boy and I wasn’t really. And when I was at university I became much more politically involved, you know, I was against the government’s apartheid thing and as I told you, I couldn’t bear the way my parents treated the servants. And I became friends with a man called Charles Feinstein who was, he was a communist really, I think, sort of, and we became very friendly and we met Nelson Mandela. This is in 1952. And we used to go every Sunday morning, selling his communist newspapers and trying to get people to change his mind. And that was good. And when I’d been two years in Pretoria and I’d been to some political demonstrations and things like this, I didn’t quite know what to do but I felt I wanted to leave South Africa. I felt, my parents said I couldn’t take a flat in Johannesburg on my own, I would have to stay with them, and that was totally un… what, I was twenty-three at this stage. And so I decided with a friend of mine that we would hitchhike up Africa and go to Europe. And in order to make this tolerable to my parents I told them I was going to Israel to go and work as an engineer there, because that would make it more acceptable to them, me leaving the country. And I got the friend, Norman Morrison and I were going to hitchhike up together. I never told my parents I was going to hitchhike. And I got slightly ill before we left and so Norman went ahead and we arranged to meet a couple of months later. And my parents saw me off on a train; I took Lewis Wolpert Page 6 C1672/06 Track 1

all my luggage and they thought I was going to go by public transport up Africa, but I just took the train to Rhodesia and then from there on I hitchhiked and I had a wonderful time. I hitchhiked up Africa, and Africa then was totally safe, there was no danger at all, there was no problem hitchhiking at all. And I hitchhiked for about three months, I climbed a very nice mountain in the Congo, Nyiragongo, there was a volcano and I climbed that one and that was nice. And I eventually ended up, I was in Nairobi for a short while, and then I ended up in Kampala and Norman eventually arrived and he’d just met a crocodile hunter who agreed that we could go with him crocodile hunting. So off we went crocodile hunting with this man. And that was very exciting, to go crocodile hunting, and camping by the river there you had to get into your tent about six o’clock in the evening because the mosquitoes came and you could get bitten to death. And you had to be very careful, not so much of crocodiles, but of hippos. And when we’d finished from him, we hitchhiked down to Mombasa, and we thought of taking a boat to Europe, but looking round the harbour in Mombasa we saw all these wonderful sailing boats, Arab dhows. I don’t know if you know what a dhow is? It’s a sailing boat, a big sailing boat. And so we got on to a sailing boat that would take us to Arabia. And this is a big sailing boat with the thing, we had to get permission to do this and we had to wait a bit of a time in Mombasa when we went swimming every day and my parents had given me a little money to go on the trip. And for two weeks we were on this Arab dhow. We just had a very small place to thing, and there were about a hundred people on the dhow and it was very crowded, but it was really quite exciting, sailing up the side of Africa and seeing flying fish and things like that. And then we eventually arrived after two weeks in Mukalla and we went ashore and when they saw us they said to us, ‘Are you Jewish?’ and I said, ‘Yes’ and they said, ‘You cannot land here’, because it was an Arabian state and they didn’t allow Jews in. And so what were we going to do, and we swam around in the harbour and we found a Belgian boat that was going to go to Aden and they fortunately took us on board with our luggage and off we went to Aden. And from there we got a boat to Italy, going through the Suez Canal. And then I went – Norman went on to England – I hitchhiked around Italy for a little bit – we’d arrived at Naples, you see – and that was very nice, and I met a man on his motorbike and he took me around on, I sat on his back seat and he took me around Italy for about a week. [laughs] Southern Italy, and that was really exciting. And then I took a boat to Israel. [17:13] Lewis Wolpert Page 7 C1672/06 Track 1

And one of my relatives had arranged for me to see the Prime Minister as to what job I should get and I eventually got a job in Israel with the Water Planning Board. And I didn’t like it, I got involved with building a dam north of Haifa and I lived in Haifa and Tel Aviv and thing, I liked being in the Israeli countryside, I wasn’t mad about Israelis, I had a couple of little affairs, I got ill on one or two occasions. But I wasn’t madly happy there and I was feeling more and more that I wanted to get out of soil mechanics. I really didn’t feel that to spend the rest of my life thinking about the mechanics of soils was how I wanted to spend my life. And I didn’t know what to do; should I become a writer, should I become a doctor, which of these should I really do, and I really didn’t know which of these to do. But I decided that I would go to England, and partly because the people I had been doing soil mechanics with had arranged for me to do a soil mechanics course at Imperial College in London. So I left Israel and partly the only place where I ever experienced anti-Semitism [laughs], I know that sounds funny. I was with a group of Bulgarians who really discriminated against me because I was a colonial South African. [18:52] Anyhow, I left and I went to France for a while and had a wonderful period of about two months in France and I loved being in Paris and I learned some French while I was in Paris. And, you know, there’s a celebration, there’s a festival in Paris that I think is the fifteenth of July, I can never remember which date it is, and I was coming back to my room in Paris and I bumped into a woman, and we put our arms around each other in the dark, [laughs] and we had an affair for three weeks. She was a German woman about ten years older than me, but we got on terribly well, Ullah and I, Ullah Kuhnelt and I. And that was very nice, and I loved being in Paris, I was very happy there. And I also met a young woman there who told me – it was very strange really – she told me about, she was an English girl, and she told me about a friend of hers, Rosalind, who used to go to Soho quite a lot, in London. Anyhow, I eventually got to London and started doing my course in soil mechanics and I did go to Soho and found Rosalind, and you won’t believe me, this was in 1954 we’re talking, you’ll never guess who phoned me today, Rosalind. [laughs] I’ve remained friendly. She’s got – I won’t take you through it all – she’s looking for rooms, she’s got multiple sclerosis and she can’t walk, she wanted to know whether it was possible for her to sleep in my flat, but she’d never get down those stairs. You know when you came down from the street, you couldn’t get anyone in a wheelchair down those stairs, I think you’ll agree. So… but anyway, we speak regularly to each other and we did have, Rosalind and I, a little affair. And I used to go to Lewis Wolpert Page 8 C1672/06 Track 1

Soho in London very regularly and I liked that sort of extraordinary [laughs] experience, you know, it was quite bohemian.

[21:01] But I wasn’t happy doing soil mechanics and I told a friend, a friend of mine in South Africa, Wilfred Stein, he knew that, I’d written to him and told him that, what should I do, and I got a letter from him. He said I’ve just been reading in the paper about scientists looking at the mechanical properties of cells when they divide, I think that’s what you should do. And he was coming to King’s College in London and I went to the professor where he was going and I said, is there any chance that I could do this. He said yes, and he arranged for me to do a PhD on the mechanics of cell division. So although I finished, I had a scholarship to do that course in soil mechanics, but when I finished it I went to King’s College and started doing a PhD on the mechanics of cell division. [22:02] And of course I knew no biology at all and I had to do undergraduate courses and pass exams. But I was really, I was really quite happy doing this and the work went quite well and I liked the people in the department and several of us have remained very good friends over all these years. And I got my PhD in soil mechanics and I was given an assistant lectureship at King’s College and that was very… So I got my PhD in 1960. And then I, yes, I remained there and then in 1967 or 1968 – and I was doing quite well and I became a Reader there, you know, I progressed quite well – I had some problems because the man that had appointed me went to America and the new head of department was very difficult with a lot of us and I wanted to get out. But fortunately I was offered a professorship at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School to be a professor of biology as applied to medicine and that was where I went, I think it was in 1968, 1969. [23:32] And at that stage I was no longer, been working so much on naturally cell division or cell movement, I had begun to think a little bit about how animals’ development, embryology, developmental biology and around that time I had one of the key ideas which I’d been thinking about. The fact was that there’s an old experiment a hundred years ago where someone, when the sea urchin egg is fertilised it then divides into two and he separated the two cells and these cells developed into normal embryos, into normal sea… but half the size. And if you think how is it that the embryo, you know, when it’s full size and half the size still Lewis Wolpert Page 9 C1672/06 Track 1

develops normally, and that was a problem that I concentrated on. And I came up with what I’m well known for, which is the French flag model, and the point about a flag is, its pattern is invariant independent of the size. And so I got involved in that. And when I went to the Middlesex Hospital, the Medical School, I had been working on other animals like hydra, but once I was in the Medical School I had to think about something which was more relevant to doctors and I worked on the development of the limb. And I think, I can’t remember when again, but hold on, I’d got married before this. I got married to someone called Betty Brownstein who Trotsky is related to her as a great grandfather or something like that, and we got married in about 1960 and I had four children under five and even though she was a lesbian, a well-known lesbian. She was a well-known lesbian and quite public about that. But we got on quite well and we had these four children under five and we had a very nice house, in Belsize Park actually, a very nice house we had. And I was very happy at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, being a professor there and working on the development… and I had wonderful students and I had very nice colleagues and it was a very happy time and my research really went quite well. I don’t know how much you want me to…

No, that’s great, that’s given me a very good structure to… But can I go back and pick you up on some of those things in detail?

Yes, of course.

Brilliant, thank you.

But it’s not bad that, is it?

Oh, that’s wonderful. Yes, thank you. [26:33] You’ve mentioned your sort of particular relationship with your parents, which might be different to other people’s…

[laughs] Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 10 C1672/06 Track 1

…but nevertheless, can you tell me what you remember of time spent with your mother as a child?

Well, that’s the trouble. I don’t think my mother ever took me anywhere where I wanted to go. I mean she arranged for my birthday parties and things like that and she wanted to make sure that I went to synagogue on Jewish holidays, but she never really took me anywhere where I would have some particular pleasure. We would go on holiday together, my mother and father and I, near Cape Town, and I suppose they were alright there. And my father very rarely took me anywhere, so I didn’t – that’s not quite true, they did take me to theatre occasionally and I enjoyed that very much, I loved going to the theatre. But otherwise, they had quite a big social life and when they had people for dinner I would join them at the dinner, and if they went out they didn’t like me being left alone, I would go and stay with an aunt nearby. So I didn’t spend much time with them and I really, I think my mother – I can show you a photograph of my mother if you want to see it – I found her very unattractive and as I say, I didn’t like her, I don’t think. And whether my relationship with my parents may have been affected, when I was about… nearly two or eighteen months old, my father won a prize, quite a big prize in some lottery that he’d taken out and they went to Europe for about four or five months and I was left with my cousin in Bloemfontein and when they came back I didn’t recognise them. That could have been, I’ve really no idea whether that really alienated them from me or not, but I never felt very close to them. My father would very occasionally take me somewhere and I do remember the one occasion he took me somewhere and there was a beautiful racing car, the Bluebird there, and he let me sit in it and that’s about the only positive thing [laughs] that I can remember. So I have no positive… I feel quite bad about that. And when I got married, I didn’t get married in a synagogue, and my mother died. She was very against me not getting married in a synagogue. Betty, my wife, was Jewish but we didn’t get… and that probably killed her. And that meant my father was left alone in South Africa and he was quite lonely and I didn’t do a great deal about it. He would come to London occasionally, but… and if I contradicted him, it upset him terribly. He couldn’t stand being contradicted by anybody and I’m ashamed to say I’m a well-known contradictor, so that wasn’t good. I can’t, I really don’t understand my relationship with my parents, no.

Lewis Wolpert Page 11 C1672/06 Track 1

[30:14] Apart from wanting you to go to the synagogue what else did they want from you and of you? What did they want you…

Respect and good behaviour and keeping clean. And they wanted me to do my homework, and I did my homework. I never told them anything about the political stuff I was doing. In fact I didn’t tell them most of the things I was doing. I don’t know what they… I think my mother really wanted a daughter, and she did get one when I was about seven or eight, but she died of some infection within a few months and that totally destroyed my mother. I don’t know what my father, what he wanted from me was praise and respect and I’m not good at that. It wasn’t… And then when I was in London he was actually killed by some robbers. They didn’t mean to kill him, but they robbed, they came to rob the house and that killed him. So my relationship with my parents was not good, no.

[31:24] You’ve mentioned some things that you played with indoors and we know that you played rugby, but to what extent did you play outdoors as a child in…

Oh, I played tennis from quite a young age. Oh yes, I played tennis from a young age. Nothing else really.

No other kind of sort of outdoor play, the sort of roaming about that people often tell you they did as a…

I was on my bicycle, I cycled a lot. This is in South Africa we’re still talking about? No, there wasn’t much else to do. It was tennis and rugby.

And could you go into some more detail about the things that you did with Jack, the things that you played with with Jack, including the building and making of…

Well, Meccano. We were quite involved with Meccano. We both had an electric train and although I complained about my parents they did give me nice toys, you know. We had nice electric trains and we even had a steam engine, I even had a little steam engine and I loved Lewis Wolpert Page 12 C1672/06 Track 1

those toys. And then at a later stage we became involved with electric things and we even could build a little radio and I enjoyed doing… Oh, I built lots of model aeroplanes out of soft wood called balsa wood, I built many, many aeroplanes. Sorry, I didn’t tell you that; I was from a very early age absolutely obsessed with aeroplanes and wanted to fly one and imagined and I read books on how aeroplanes fly and I built aeroplanes and things like that. No, my aeroplanes weren’t that great but they were alright, they did fly but… [laughs]

Could you tell us how you make a balsa wood aeroplane because many…

How did I…?

How do you make balsa wood aeroplane because many…

Oh, you buy it.

A kit.

You buy it and you cut the pieces out and stick them together, yes.

And then the… and there’s a covering, I think, over the frame?

Yes. There’s a paper covering which you wet, yes, you do.

What else did you read? You mentioned reading there, reading about flight and…

Gosh, I wish I could remember. I used to remember… I liked Rudyard Kipling and I liked Just William. I can’t… I read a lot actually, but I’m damned if I can… my memory has gone to pot recently.

Where would the books have been coming from?

Lewis Wolpert Page 13 C1672/06 Track 1

Well, my father – hold on – my father worked for a bookstore, Central News Agency, and I could go into the, where they kept all the books, and take any book I wanted. And so I had lots of books and, well yes.

And apart from aeroplanes, is there anything else that you were likely to take a book on if you saw it?

No. Not really, no.

And having made a radio, what did you listen to on that or…

No, we never listened [laughs] to it. No, no. I listened to music. I wasn’t a musician but I did listen to quite a lot of music on the local gramophone, yes.

[34:41] Can you tell me about your relations with the servants and then tell us more about what was specifically upsetting to you about the way your parents related to them?

I got on quite well with the servants, not particularly, but they had little rooms outside the house and my parents would shout at them and things like that and I didn’t like that at all. I remember at one stage after they’d been shouting at the servants, lying down in the corridor and swearing, promising that I would never behave like my parents when I grew up.

Do you remember the sorts of things they said?

No. Sorry, I just don’t.

[35:28] And could you tell me more about your faith, if it was faith, as a child, or at least your…

I think I had to say prayers to my parents every night, pray for them and so forth, but I stopped at quite an early age. Quite an early age. And I masturbated quite a lot when I was young. I didn’t know about children and sex, you know, if you want to have children, this is Lewis Wolpert Page 14 C1672/06 Track 1

what was coming out of my penis. And it was a friend of mine, going to school one day, walking with me to school, who told me about it, I was quite shocked, but of course there was no education otherwise. And I had quite a few books in my room at home and I later became a book collector but we’ll come to that later.

Did your parents know that you had stopped believing, if you had stopped believing?

I think they probably did and they didn’t approve of that.

Was there a particular reason for the lack of belief or the loss of belief?

Yes, I think there was. I think I used to pray to God to help me find my tennis balls and he didn’t help me, so I gave him up.

And did your parents talk to you about the Jewish faith, about the things that you ought to believe?

No, no they didn’t. They just wanted you to obey the Jewish laws and the Jewish holidays and fast and not eat pork and things like that.

Thank you.

More my mother than my father.

Is that because you think that they were different in their own approach to the faith?

[37:16] I don’t think my father loved my mother. I think he married her because he needed the money, you know, when he was quite young. He didn’t leave a debt. And after she died he never mentioned her ever again. He never once in all the years once she died, because she died in 1960, he never mentioned it, he never mentioned it, never mentioned her again. I don’t think he cared about her. She was quite a difficult woman.

Lewis Wolpert Page 15 C1672/06 Track 1

When you were a child, what did you see of them together? Did you see any…

They did have arguments, yes. Not terrible, but they did have arguments, yes.

In what way was she difficult?

Well, because she liked to do everything her way, yes.

[38:09] Thank you. Could you give me some more specific memories of teaching and learning at school, the first one if you can remember at the first one, if not we’ll go to the, I think King Edward School in…

It is the King Edward School, yes, that was my first school. I was at a nursery school for a while, but I don’t remember that, but I think I didn’t behave well there. It was a Jewish nursery school and my mother took me out. And my mother wouldn’t let me read words more than two letters. [laughs] And so when I went to school at seven I couldn’t read and I was terribly embarrassed when they asked me whether I could read, and I lied. Then they tried me and I clearly couldn’t read. And then of course I learnt to read then, but that’s quite old, at seven, not being able to read. I could read little two letter words, but she didn’t want me, she thought it would be bad for me to learn to read. And she had all sorts of things… if you’d washed your hair and then went outside, you’d get a terrible cold and die, you know. Her obsessions with health and she made sure I went to the lavatory every morning and God knows what.

Why prevent you learning to read, what was she worried about?

I have not the foggiest notion, I just thought it was extraordinary.

Wasn’t it necessary to learn to read in order to become the sort of good Jewish boy that she…

Yes, I learned to read at school though. Lewis Wolpert Page 16 C1672/06 Track 1

[39:50] Thank you. And then more memories of teaching and learning as you get older at that school and can remember more clearly.

Well, there’s the junior school and the senior school and in the junior school it was alright, it wasn’t thing, but in the last year at junior school when we were about to go to the high school, which was just round the corner, there were some notes the teacher had left on the desk about who was going to go to the high school, and we’d all looked at it, and then a close friend of mine, Colin Hersch, had been away and when he came back I took him up to show it to him and the teacher saw us doing it and he went mad. He said, ‘How dare you be looking at my notes’. He took us to the headmaster who caned us and then took us round to every class saying that these boys have been looking at my private notes and they then threw us out of the school and told us never to come back. [laughs] And we were how old then? Twelve or something like that. And so I couldn’t tell my parents and we went away and after a while we came back and we went to the headmaster and apologised and they allowed us to come back. But that’s the sort of school. And then in the high school, that was alright, as I say, they would humiliate us and thing, but we learnt and we did quite well at school and yes, it all worked perfectly well so long as I got into the rugby team.

Was it mixed or just boys?

No, no, purely male.

And do you remember how you saw yourself at the time, whether you saw yourself as being like or different to those around you in some ways?

No, very like. No, no, we got on, we all got on. And the class I went in was mainly a Jewish class and we were all perfectly friendly with each other. All perfectly friendly. And had very good and amusing times together, which I enjoyed very much, yes. Yes, now that was good.

Are there particular memories of things learnt or things that were striking at this age that you were learning? Lewis Wolpert Page 17 C1672/06 Track 1

Well, I liked maths best, the maths and the science I liked. I was still learning Hebrew at home, the Hebrew teacher was still coming to me. Yes, Mr Bregman, and I hated learning the Hebrew and I took it for matric and I didn’t do terribly well. At school, no, the teaching was quite good and I didn’t mind it, I didn’t mind it at all. They weren’t, I mean the only nice thing, in the final exam when the headmaster was handing out the exam papers, as he gave me mine he said, ‘Wolpert, last but not least’, because ‘W’, I was at the end, [laughs] that’s the only positive thing he ever said. And there was a maths teacher who thought I was good, but none of the other teachers took the slightest interest in me whatsoever. But there was a debate at the school in which I - the debating society - and I opposed, it was something about Napoleon and I can’t even remember what the debate… but I won the debate and got a medal. And that’s the only time that my parents ever came to the school. They never came to watch me play rugby or do anything to do with the school, and that’s over ten years. So that was the only time they came and they did see me win the medal.

[44:01] And were there particular aspects of science that interested you within what was being taught to you as science at that school?

Yes, maths. Yes, that’s the bit that I liked.

And no biology?

I can’t remember any, virtually no biology, no.

And how did you get to and from school from home?

Sorry?

How did you get to and from school at this age?

Bicycle. Bicycle. Or walk. I was very close to the school.

Lewis Wolpert Page 18 C1672/06 Track 1

What did the sort of religious education at the school consist of?

No, there was virtually no… we would say prayers every morning, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven’, and that was it, there was no strong religious thing at the school, no.

And at this age, as a child at high school, to what extent were you aware of your parents’ political views, to the extent that they held them?

Do you know, I think I was totally unaware of them compared to my own views. No, totally unaware of them really. They only cared about Jewish things, that was my mother.

[45:18] Thank you. Could you then tell us more about the course at the university that you began?

Well, that was okay. I liked being at university and I met a lot of very interesting people there. One of them was a man called Sydney Brenner who had won a Nobel Prize and he was a couple of years older than me and it was just wonderful to hear him talk. There were a lot of very clever people there and I liked the university very much. I wasn’t mad about my course and it was quite funny because in our final year we, as a civil engineer I had to design a water tower and a bridge and when the external examiner came, he showed that my bridge would fall down and my water tower would leak, but he said you’ve got the general idea, young man. [laughs] I just made some arithmetical errors. And also, in the final exam, I was quite good at spotting questions and I had a very close friend doing the course with me, a man called Stan Goldstein who was doing civil engineering, and we arranged that what we would do in preparing for the final exams, I would try to spot what questions were coming up and we would teach each other various subjects just a few days before the exams. And we didn’t do very well but I spotted two mistakes in the exams and I went to the teachers and said you cannot fail Stan and I because you’ve made two mistakes, and they passed us. So that was quite clever of me to do that. And then…

Did you have any…

Lewis Wolpert Page 19 C1672/06 Track 1

Sorry? And I also gave, I got the student lecture prize, I gave a lecture on, oh I can’t even remember what it was about, but it was about a particular development of a dam in America and I gave this lecture and I got a prize for it.

Had you thought about doing anything else other than civil engineering, when you were thinking about university, what else was competing with it?

No, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel I was good enough at maths, and I wasn’t. And when I was doing civil engineering there was a time when I thought I would change to maths, but I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t good enough. No, I didn’t think… I didn’t want to do chemical engineering, I didn’t want to do mechanical engineering. Oh, I did have a chemistry set when I was a child, which I enjoyed having, I made a few things, but nothing of great interest, no. No, no, didn’t.

[48:13] What did you do at university when you weren’t attending lectures or…

Well, we were leaving, compared to my friends who were doing the arts, they worked us unbelievably hard. I… what was I doing? I wasn’t doing very much, I’m afraid. No, not much at all.

When did the political sort of activities start?

Sorry?

When did the sort of political interests and activities start?

While I was at university?

Could you tell us in more detail about that, including the handing out of the newspapers and…

Lewis Wolpert Page 20 C1672/06 Track 1

With Mandela? Well, that was through my friend Charles Feinstein. And Mandela, when we did that, he knew I was going to hitchhike up Africa and he gave me a letter introducing me to other militant groups, and when I hitched up Africa I did go and visit one of these military groups and the police discovered that I’d – the South African police – discovered this and went to my father and said what is your son doing, visiting this group. So my father wasn’t very pleased about that. What did I do otherwise? I don’t know what I was doing. I can’t bloody well remember.

Do you remember what the response was to you and your friends’ handing out of this material?

Oh no, no, but no-one… no, no, no. This was in the townships we would sell this, the African townships we would sell it, to try and get them to be more militant against apartheid. We were selling to black people, not to white people. I can’t remember. I tried to do a little bit in the theatre, but I wasn’t very good as an actor. Can’t remember very much really.

What can you tell me about relationships with girls during university?

There was this girl Lorraine, who I found very attractive, but she was really… And I did eventually get to handle her breasts and things like that, but she wasn’t very keen on me, so I didn’t really have anyone that I was really close to. But in Pretoria I had a good relationship with a very nice girl called Margaret Findlay and she had a tragic thing because while I was with her, her mother got up from dinner one evening, went out, got a gun, came back and shot herself. And Bimby did the same thing forty years later. Terrible story. No, Bimby and I got on, in Pretoria we got on very well.

Can you describe Bimby?

She was just a very attractive young woman, doing law. Can’t remember much more than that.

Can you remember any of the things you did with each other? You said that in general Pretoria you didn’t like, but… Lewis Wolpert Page 21 C1672/06 Track 1

No, I was bored with Pretoria, yes. No, there wasn’t much I ever did in Pretoria. And I had a friend there, Ivan Katzen, and he used to cook for me occasionally and he was doing architecture and I would help him as a civil engineer with some of his things and he would cook for me, and he’s still around, I still see Ivan. But I was quite lonely in Pretoria until Bimby came. And I would come back to Johannesburg every weekend, I didn’t spend the weekends there, no.

[52:09] Did your relations with your parents change now that you were sort of independent to some extent, sort of at least financially?

No. Not at all. And even when I became a professor, I don’t think it changed [laughs]. No.

What did you do as personal assistant to the Director of the Building Research Institute?

Well, I was doing stuff on, working on some problems of soil, moisture moving through soils. But as he was running the Institute I would have to go to meetings with him and make notes of the meeting and write the minutes for the meeting, that was the main thing they had to do.

Did the work on soil mechanics involve scientific work or experimental…

Yes, it was semi-scientific work, yes. I can’t say we made much progress, but did do a little, yes.

Do you remember what you did? How did you investigate problems with soil mechanics?

I think we had to dig holes and measure the water content and plot them and things like that. And there was one bit of theory about how did… if you had water in the soil and you heated the one end, how would that affect the distribution of the water in the soil, and I did make a contribution with that and there was a joint paper in which my name was added.

Lewis Wolpert Page 22 C1672/06 Track 1

[53:36] Thank you. Now, on your trip up Africa, one of the moments of that was meeting the crocodile hunter, could you – very few people listening will have hunted crocodiles – could you describe that period, of someone…

Well, it was just a few weeks. Well, we would have our little tent and we would get up in the morning and we would go with him and he would try to shoot a crocodile and we had to be careful and then his team, when he shot the crocodile, they would dash to try and get it because they didn’t want other crocodiles to do it. And that was really quite exciting, yes it was.

Did you have any feelings of unease about leaving home and…

No.

…hitchhiking up Africa?

None whatsoever. It was just a great relief to be on my own with no-one criticising me and telling me what to do. No, it was a great relief to be going up Africa like that, it was terrific. And at one stage when going up Africa, when I was hitchhiking, I was picked up by a couple of Americans and they were interested in what I was doing and they took me to their hotel and looked after me for a couple of days and we went to see some waterfall together. So that was very nice. Oh no, I didn’t have any feelings like that at all. No. And in South Africa, with the friend that I went hitchhiking with, we used to quite often go into the countryside, we went to a place called Tonquani, which was a river with quite high thing, and we used to camp there and I used to take girlfriends there and things like that. And Norman was a climber and he was going to teach me how to climb, and he started climbing up and I was going to then follow him, and as he climbed up he slipped and down he came and hit his head just next to me on the thing, which was very upsetting, and we had to take him out of course and I had to run back and get an ambulance, and I was the one that had to tell his mother. But he recovered, he recovered. A little deaf perhaps, but he recovered. So I’m very frightened of heights, so I don’t like climbing.

Lewis Wolpert Page 23 C1672/06 Track 1

Were there things that you saw as you travelled north through Africa that were surprising to you as someone who had lived as you had done up to that point in a sort of stable home?

Not really, because I’d lived in South Africa, it was not… No, funnily enough, there wasn’t anything that wildly surprised me. No. Not greatly. Well, climbing the volcano was a great surprise. Well, going crocodile hunting [laughs] was a great surprise. You know, we went to all sorts of… yes. No, that was a great surprise. And in Israel there was a great surprise because going down to the south of Israel there was a little hill that one could climb up and watch the sun rise very early, you know, in the morning and that was a wonderful experience too, I really liked that, yes.

I think that’s the first time so far that you’ve told me about a kind of a landscape that you’ve liked or a kind of natural scene.

No, I liked, in South Africa I loved the countryside. We used to go camping with my friends, we would just get into the car and go and we’d go and camp somewhere. And there was no… sometimes we’d be by the sea, it was just where we saw somewhere nice to camp and I did this all the time, and I loved that. No, no, I loved the physical spaces of Africa and Cape Town is so beautiful, I love being in Cape Town. It really is thing, and I just like the whole atmosphere of Africa, you know. And as I hitchhiked up and seeing the, oh what the hell was the name of the falls? My mind goes. Famous waterfalls in Africa? I’ll remember the name later.

Not Victoria…

The Victoria Falls, yes. Rhodesia. Wonderful, wonderful. No, I loved being in Africa, yes.

Did – by asking this question I’m not suggesting that you ought to have done – but did you have sort of natural historical interest in animals and plants and…

Not particularly, no. And one Christmas we climbed a mountain. It was not a dangerous climb, we walked up, six of us went on a group, and these were various friends of mine, and we ended up in a hut at the top of, the mountains were called the Drakensberg, and the Lewis Wolpert Page 24 C1672/06 Track 1

weather was very bad and we couldn’t come down and there was actually a story of us in a newspaper [laughs], that we were trapped, trapped up the mountain, but we weren’t really. But that was funny because one of the people I was with was a doctor and while we were up there we went out camping for one night from the hut, and while the three of us were in this tiny tent he told me about evolution. It was the first time I’d ever heard about biological evolution and I thought that was terribly interesting.

Do you remember what he said?

No, just Darwin’s theory.

[1:00:17] Interesting, thank you. Could we, if that’s okay, now go to – because you’ve suggested to me that soil mechanics didn’t sort of generate great enthusiasm in you…

For me, no.

And so I wondered if you could tell us in detail about the work that you do at the point of sort of conversion from physics to biology, which is the PhD, and if you could go into more detail about…

Mechanics of cell division?

Yes, but also where you were doing this, who was around you, who was supervising you?

Well, I was at King’s College doing my PhD, and the problem was to understand how a cell divided into two, and I don’t know if you know, there’s a constriction. So you’ve got a single cell and then a furrow forms and divides the cell into two, and what I was looking at was the mechanical properties of that process. And fortunately, one of the scientists who’d been working on this problem had developed a mechanism for measuring the mechanical properties. It was a tube attached to some water and if you took this fine pipette up to the cell, you could suck, by lowering the level of the water, you could suck a bulge out of the cell and you would know what force you were using by how much you lowered the water. And Lewis Wolpert Page 25 C1672/06 Track 1

so I looked in this way and measured the mechanical properties of the sea urchin egg as it was dividing, that was my main thing. And then did various calculations to work out in physical terms what all these properties were. And while… that was the main thing that I was doing. But I also made some… I was pretty sure that the… I worked with someone from a cancer research institute called Howard Mercer, he was an electron microscopist, and I brought some sea urchin eggs that were dividing back and he looked at them under the electron microscope and we could see in the furrows and filaments and I thought these are just like muscle filaments. And we published that paper, that was one of the first papers I published on cell division and I thought that would be quite thing. [1:02:57] But it was known that if you put on too much of a particular substance called ATP on to a muscle it stops contracting and so next time when I was up at the… and so when I did this work I would go to marine stations, and I started off going to one in Wales, in Bangor, but I wasn’t mad about that and eventually started going to marine stations in Sweden, because the others were too boring [laughs] for me. And I got grants from the Royal Society to go there, every… and I would work on the sea urchins there. And I put this chemical on to the eggs and it stopped them dividing, and I published a paper, but the paper was false, because although I’d collected – I don’t know if you know what pH is? It’s the acidity, while I’d collected for the acidity, I hadn’t done it properly, I’d done it with paper and not with a proper machine and my results were totally false. So the first paper I published on that stuff was simply wrong. But then I published other papers on the mechanical properties and came up with a model, which was wrong, which I published my model and only later realised that it was wrong. And then just very recently, it had at least one or two valuable things, and I pointed this out in a tiny paper which I published. My results, my mechanical… my calculation of the mechanical properties, there was nothing wrong with them, but the model for how the cell divided and how the cell furrow was specified was simply wrong, and so that was the way it was. [1:04:45] And then when I got involved with my pattern formation and my French flag, I was at a marine station in America called Woods Hole and I was invited to give one of the Friday night lecture, and I gave a Friday night lecture on my new ideas and no-one would speak to me. At the end of the lecture just no-one spoke to me and nor would anyone speak to me the next day. And I asked a friend of mine what’s going on, they said who in the hell do you Lewis Wolpert Page 26 C1672/06 Track 1

think you are, and they just hated it. But I was in the sea the next morning, you’ll never guess who I bumped into, Sydney Brenner. Now, Sydney was one of my heroes and is the only genius I know, and I was very depressed, of course, about this and I told Sydney, and Sydney talks about finding me crying in the water. And he said, ‘Pay no attention Lewis, we like your ideas, and just ignore them completely’. He totally saved me. He said both he and Francis Crick – you must have heard of Francis Crick – both Francis and I like your ideas, please don’t give them up. That saved me completely. And then I wrote a paper which is widely quoted and it was alright.

How had they… how did they know of your ideas, Francis Crick and he? They had…

Well, they’d heard the lecture. And I had spoken a bit about it on other occasions. Yeah.

[1:06:21] Could you, for the listener who not only has not worked on sea urchin eggs, hasn’t perhaps done much scientific work at all, could you describe what you actually did with these, in other words, how you collected them, what they looked like…

What, sea urchins?

Yes.

Yes, of course. Well, you were at a marine station and you would ask the people to bring you sea urchins, and I don’t know if you know what a sea urchin looks like. Oh. Well, they’re a little like starfish, some of them, others are just little rounded ones with little spikes sticking up. And then you could put them in the water and cut them and they would lay their eggs, that would be the female, then you’d find a male and you’d take the sperm from the male and put it on to the eggs and that would fertilise them and they’d start developing. And they’re quite big eggs so as you could work on them, you see, and you could measure their mechanical properties.

When you say that they’re quite big eggs, how…

Lewis Wolpert Page 27 C1672/06 Track 1

I can’t remember how big they are, but they’re not tiny, these eggs, they’re reasonable size.

How would you look at them, could you just…

With a microscope. But not with a… just a slightly enlarging microscope, nothing big.

And you’ve described one of the things that you do in order to record the mechanical properties of the urchin…

It’s to suck a bulge out, yes.

What other things were you doing to the eggs to examine them?

No, nothing, nothing. Very rarely anything that I can remember, no. It’s sucking the bulge at different times, yes.

At different times during this process of…

Yes, and watching, yes. How it’s changing during time.

And the filaments that you described seeing with the electron microscope, are these at the division…

At the furrow, yes, in the furrow region.

And is it possible to explain how you came to your model of the mechanics of division which you later realised was wrong, but which had elements that were useful?

Well, it’s a little complicated because inside the dividing cell there are structures called asters and I thought the asters caused the poles to relax and therefore the – there are two asters, it’s quite complicated. There’s a spindle, when the cell divides there’s a spindle with the chromosomes and at the end of the spindle there are asters and I thought the asters caused the Lewis Wolpert Page 28 C1672/06 Track 1

membrane near them to relax and therefore they would contract, and it’s not true. What the asters in fact do is they signal to the furrow region to contract, so I was wrong.

[1:09:22] Thank you. And who was working around you at the time of your PhD, who was…

Ah, I worked next to a man called Trygve Gustafson, a Swede, and we became very friendly. He was working on the development of the sea urchin and that’s how I really got into developmental biology, and he was taking films of them and I went to Sweden I think about four years running, and we would, he liked working with me because he could run his colleagues down and complain about them and swear at them non-stop. And then every summer I would go to Sweden and we would work together and then in the winter I would go to Stockholm and we’d write up the papers together. And he was very nice, we got on very well together.

[1:10:11] And who was supervising your PhD?

Oh God. I suppose Danielli was. There was really no-one because he went… Danielli was, yes, the professor at King’s was supervising it, yes.

[end of Track 1]

Lewis Wolpert Page 29 C1672/06 Track 2

[Track 2]

Can I ask, what was your level of interest in the actual practical work of your PhD, the actual going into the laboratory, getting out that piece of equipment and sucking up the sea urchin eggs and so on?

Well, it was unusual for me to be interested in actually doing the experiments. I’m not terribly good at manipulating things myself and later when I became a professor I had millions of PhD students and research assistants and colleagues and my skill was to design experiments, but not to do them. And in fact, when I was at Middlesex Hospital Medical School I had a technician, Amata Hornbruch, a German technician, and she was my hands for about thirty years and we did many things together and I would design the experiments and then we’d publish the papers together. And in general my skill was to persuade other people to do the experiments. But when I was doing my PhD I hadn’t reached that level of sophistication, but I’m not terribly good at doing experiments myself. I quite like, I don’t mind doing it, but I’m not very good at it.

[01:21] It’s one thing to perceive yourself as not being good at it, but how did you actually feel about doing it? Presumably there’s some repetition so that you…

Oh, you do it again and again. I didn’t mind terribly, no. It was quite interesting and the fact that it was working, I was impressed with, yes.

And having spent a day doing that, working on your PhD, what did you do in the evenings, what did you do at the weekends, if you had weekends?

When I was in London, when I was back? Well, I used to go to the theatre a lot and when I was, at an earlier stage I would go to the movies a tremendous amount, which I’ve almost stopped now. But I used to go to the theatre really once a week, but there was not… there was tennis over the weekends, and that’s about all, yes. But then of course, must remember, from about 1962 I had all these children, so that was four children under five, it’s quite a stressful number of children to be looking after. And I don’t think I was a terribly good Lewis Wolpert Page 30 C1672/06 Track 2

father, but they did drive me insane. I was once driving them along a very dangerous road in America and the youngest was making the eldest cry and the other two were bickering and I told them if they didn’t stop I was going to drive us over the cliff, and I partly meant it. [laughs] But they did stop.

[03:01] Before I ask you more about your children, could you tell me how you came to meet your first wife and obviously more about her?

Well, I knew her from South Africa, I knew Betty from South Africa and I once invited her to a dance but she put me off at the last moment, but her brother was a very good friend of mine. And it was when I was doing my course in soil mechanics at Imperial College that I bumped into her because she was going somewhere near there, and that’s when we started getting together, that’s when we started getting together. And as I told you, she was a lesbian. Do you want to hear about our relationship?

Yes please.

And we had the four children and we got on pretty well, and she came from a very rich father, she was very rich and publicly a lesbian, you know, she’d never… but she wanted children and she loved being pregnant. I’m not a great lover, but nevertheless [laughs]… I kept saying to her, are all those children really all mine. And then the children grew up and we looked after them and we bought a house with her money in the south of France, near Gassin, near St Tropez and we used to go there every summer, and that was absolutely lovely, I really enjoyed it, and we had a swimming pool, and that was all going very well. And then she got a bit short of money and we had to sell the house in the south of France. [04:35] And then a little later she said to me, when the children were about, the oldest must have been about sixteen, she said, you know, our sex life is very poor at the moment and you do know that I’m a lesbian and I want to have an affair and I want you to have one. I thought, I don’t really want to. She said yes, but I want to have one, are you happy that I have one and you’ll have one too. And I said okay, and then for a year or so she did seem to be having an affair and I ended up looking after the children, you know, and just covering up and not doing Lewis Wolpert Page 31 C1672/06 Track 2

anything about it, but then I started an affair with someone we both knew, and she went mad and threw me out and we got divorced. And I felt that was very unjust of her and she didn’t speak to me for about twenty years and then she got a bit ill and we did speak, you know, we became more friendly again then, and she died really last year, you know, very recently.

Do you know who she had her affair with?

I can’t remember, no. I don’t think I do. Well, I don’t remember anyhow.

[05:50] And what memories do you have then of all, of the whole sort of family being together? Perhaps in the south of France or elsewhere?

That was lovely. No, no, we got on, you know. I would look after the children, she would look… I don’t think I was a terribly good father, I was a bit bad tempered, I think. But it all worked and I loved being in the south of France and we got on pretty well, I think.

How did you combine the sort of beginnings of an academic career with having four young children?

It was quite hard work, yes. No no. Struggling, yes, looking after them. We also had someone, because she could afford it, we had someone living with us, Eddie Weighell, to help look after the children. When we went on holiday we usually took someone with us to help look after them.

What do you remember doing with the children when they were young, apart from going on holiday?

Swimming, going to the seaside. Can’t remember much more than that.

Do you have memories of reading with them or of playing?

Lewis Wolpert Page 32 C1672/06 Track 2

I think I told them stories when they were young, and probably read with them, but I don’t really remember. I don’t think I was a terribly good father, no.

What makes you say that?

I think that’s what they feel. [laughs]

Have they commented on your parenting now that they’re adults themselves? What’s been the feedback?

A little bit. It varies. But we’re all perfectly friendly at the moment, we’re all perfectly friendly at the moment. I don’t know if you want me to tell you about the children, it’s quite…

I think it would be logical to tell me now actually, how each of them developed.

[07:38] [section closed until 2115] [10:52] Thank you. You begin as a lecturer, assistant lecturer at Imperial College in 1960?

Yes. That’s at King’s College.

King’s College. Could you tell me then first about the continuation of your research, now as an assistant lecturer?

Well, in those days I was then working, I was working primarily on how amoebae move and on hydra, because I thought I’d understand a bit about development of it. You cut off the head of hydra, you know, it regenerates, and we did quite a lot of work on that, I’d started working on that and I continued a little bit of that when I went to the Middlesex. But then I moved to the chick limb because that seemed more appropriate for a medical school.

Lewis Wolpert Page 33 C1672/06 Track 2

Could you tell me, could you describe the work on how amoeba move? What is actually, as someone going somewhere to work on this, what do you do? This is mysterious to lots of people.

Well, what we did is that I found a way of isolating the membrane of amoebae and then with my PhD student we isolated them and made an antibody to them, labelled the antibody with a colour and then put it back on to the surface of the moving amoeba to see whether the membrane went into the cell as it was moving, and it remained uniform throughout its movement. And that was published in Nature in – that was one of my earliest Nature papers – can’t remember when it was published. And I also found that I could isolate from the amoeba, cytoplasm, you know, the filaments that are involved in those movements. I can’t say that I ever fully understood how amoebae move, no.

What is the, how far did you get in beginning to understand how they move, what did…

I just don’t know. I don’t know what the situation is today, I haven’t followed it.

[12:54] And the work on hydra, what did that involve in practice?

Oh, that wasn’t too bad. The work on hydra, we came up with a model of various gradients: an inhibitory gradient and a sort of positional gradient which determined… And that’s been more or less moderately well accepted, yes.

[13:14] Could you tell me about the rest of the department that you were working in, so tell me about it as a kind of workplace with the sort of social relations and the…

I was perfectly friendly with the other people but they weren’t doing anything to which our work was related at all, so I didn’t have much to do with them. That’s when I was at King’s, yes.

Not during coffee breaks or in sort of seminar times, was there any coming together? Lewis Wolpert Page 34 C1672/06 Track 2

Yes, I think we were perfectly friendly but I don’t think there was anything particular going on there, no. In fact, the most intimate social relation, when I was doing my PhD there were three of us working in the basement at King’s College for our PhD and we’ve remained very friendly over all those years. And they’re all professors now.

[14:10] What was the sort of relative gender balance of the community of students to…

Mainly male. Mainly male. Not when I was at the Middlesex. One of my closest colleagues is Cheryll Tickle, who’s a female of course, when I was at the Middlesex we worked very closely together. In fact we’re having lunch together on Friday. And there were some female PhD students, yes, but it was mainly male.

And could you then remind of the reasons for moving to the Middlesex Hospital…?

Oh, because they offered me a professorship. To my amazement.

[15:07] While still at King’s then, could you tell me about your experience of teaching?

Yes, I had a great deal of teaching to do and they were also in subjects about which I knew nothing, so I had to learn a great deal, and I think on the whole quite a few of them really quite liked my teaching and I was with one of them just very recently, you know, who I taught. He was my last PhD student, actually, but that was at the Middlesex. But at King’s, yes, I taught quite a few people at King’s and they were quite happy with my teaching and I tried to explain things clearly and I had to learn things. I quite enjoyed learning about animal behaviour, which was one of the subjects I had to teach, which I found very interesting. But I had to learn evolution, I had to learn all sorts of anatomy. I had to learn all sorts of things. Had to teach cell biology, all sorts of things. I think teaching is quite tricky as to how to get the students to best, the best way to teach, I’m not really sure. You really want to make the students think about things, but it’s not easy. But on the whole, the students seemed to quite like my teaching, yes. Lewis Wolpert Page 35 C1672/06 Track 2

[16:40] Could I ask, during your PhD and your early academic career, to what extent was the question of relations between science and religion discussed by…

No, never…

…people doing it?

No, no, not at all. No relation between science and religion. I mean I’ve written a lot about science and religion, claiming there’s no relationship whatsoever. And I’m not anti-religious, I must make this clear. If people have religious beliefs, so long as they don’t interfere, I don’t… Because my secretary, when I was at the Middlesex, is a very committed Catholic and I still, I phone her every day still. I will phone her later on this afternoon. It helps her a great deal and she doesn’t interfere and why not that thing. But there’s nothing in religion which has anything of relevance to science and I think it’s a wonderful myth, but it helps a lot of people and as long as they don’t interfere, that’s fine.

I just wondered whether, as it seems to be often in recent times, whether the question of especially the relation between evolution and religion was something that people talked about in scientific departments of biology or…

No, I’ve never… I’ve had debates with people. You know, there’s no relationship at all.

Were any of your fellow PhD students believers?

Not that I know of. Or they never told me.

[18:19] Thank you. The Middlesex Hospital, you moved there in? To the professorship?

Lewis Wolpert Page 36 C1672/06 Track 2

I think about 1968, something like that, 1969, something like that.

Could you describe first of all it as a physical place, so the particular bit that you were working in?

It was in Charlotte Street. It was very close to University College, it’s quite close to that. And the building we were in is gone, they’ve pulled it down, so I’m afraid that’s gone. And it was quite a small department, well, the Medical School was there, but our little department was on the fourth floor and I had a very nice office and a secretary, you know, the one I told you was quite religious, a religious Christian. And the staff that were there when I arrived, I wasn’t too keen on and I tried to get rid of them and I got rid of them bit by bit and then I brought in my own people and we had a lovely time, and I had wonderful PhD students and colleagues and we had a really lovely time there. And it wasn’t a time when administrators interfered, apparently the way they do, so it was very enjoyable. And it was easy to get grants in those days.

What did you feel that the staff that you inherited…

What?

What was wrong with the staff that…

They were just poor scientists, very poor scientists.

For the listener outside of science, how do you recognise a poor scientist?

By what they’ve achieved. What papers they’ve written, what they understand. It’s not too difficult.

And so the other side of it is then, what were you looking for in the staff that you recruited?

People who were very intelligent, and one of the first people I brought over was someone that I knew at King’s College and who I’d worked with, David, who was a very brilliant scientist. Lewis Wolpert Page 37 C1672/06 Track 2

Who was that that was…?

David Gingell.

And is it here at the Middlesex that you have a technical assistant, a technician who works with you on your experiments for a long period?

Amata, yes.

When did Amata start?

I can’t remember.

But after your appointment in ’68?

Can’t remember.

Okay. And so how big was your department? You were the professor of this?

I think there were about four, five members of staff and there were a couple of technicians that helped, looked after, you know, the equipment and things like that. Not many, a couple.

[21:20] And having moved here, you say that you felt your research ought to – earlier in the interview – you said you felt that your research ought to have closer relations with medical research?

Well, so the development of the limb was obviously something of interest, how the embryo develops, yes.

How did you decide what to work on, and this is a question that a non-scientist might feel is a bit mysterious. How do you know, having decided I’m going to work on the development of the limb, how do you decide what in particular you’re going to do, what aspect of that? Lewis Wolpert Page 38 C1672/06 Track 2

Well, you have to look at what is known already and then you can decide what experiments to do.

Can you give us the context for that time then, what had happened in the subject?

One of the first things I think we did, well first of all one looked at the literature on the developing, development of the limb and because I had my idea about the French flag and positional information, that is, what determines, one of the key ways in which patterns are formed during the development of the embryo is there’s a gradient in something which tells the cells their position and that determines how they’re going to behave. And there was someone’s experiment, not ours, in which they had moved a piece of tissue from one part of the developing limb to the other side and they’d got a mirror image limb and that looked like two gradients being set up and that’s how we started on the limb. And then we pursued that and we developed other models for how gradients might be set up. Sorry, although it’s been successful, it’s been pretty controversial too. And as I told you, they wouldn’t speak to me at Woods Hole.

Why did it produce such a strong reaction at Woods Hole?

I never really found out. I think there’d been other ideas about gradients before which had not been successful. Don’t know why. Never really understood it.

And what was it necessary to set up experimentally in the department here in order to pursue this work, what did you…

Well, I got PhD students and I got grants to, you know, to bring people in to do the work. And then Amata and I were doing work together and some of the postdocs were doing the work with me. We worked as a group so it was pretty good.

And what was actually going on practically, so if we could sort of hover in the department at the time what would we see people doing?

Lewis Wolpert Page 39 C1672/06 Track 2

Going to chick eggs, opening them up and doing experiments on the developing limb, you know, moving pieces around and things like that.

How would they, I mean how would they move pieces around? Is this done…

With fine instruments. They’d cut out one piece and move it to a different place. It was about signalling, you see.

About?

Signalling regions moved to other places.

So it’s the effect of making a change on what then happens?

Yeah, and seeing how the limb developed.

[24:55] You say that this was a controversial theory, can you talk about opposition to it within the scientific community?

Well yes, a friend of mine, Cliff Tabin, quite a few people. There’s an American friend of mine, Cliff Tabin, was pretty negative about some of our ideas and we’ve had lots of publications arguing with each other. But I think Cliff’s a bit more sympathetic these days, maybe.

Could you tell me then more about your professional relationship with Amata in conducting experiments?

Yeah, we were just… every now and then I phone Amata to see how she is, she’s retired of course, but I think she works one or two days a week at another place. No, there was no problem at all, we would just get on with it together, we got on very well together.

Lewis Wolpert Page 40 C1672/06 Track 2

I was wondering whether you could describe an experiment that you did where you were directing her in terms of what to do and she was doing the…

No, I would just tell her what to do and she would understand what to do. Oh yes, there was no problem at all.

And what was it that she was doing…

She was moving pieces around or irradiating things or chopping things out or photographing [laughs], whatever was necessary.

[26:21] Thank you. And at this time your children are growing up at home and…

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

And then Miranda went, she went to Oxford, and Daniel went, I think, to Cambridge, yes.

And apart from science and family life and childcare, how do you spend your time at this… in the 1970s, what are you doing?

In…?

What are you doing outside of work, apart from childcare and family?

A little bit of tennis and a little bit of theatre, not much else. But with all the childcare I don’t think there was much time for anything.

[27:09] Who was taking them to school and picking them up when they were at that age?

Lewis Wolpert Page 41 C1672/06 Track 2

Well, at that age it was quite safe, they would go to school on their own really, basically, yes. I don’t remember taking many of them to school. There was a thing or someone would walk them there. The junior school was very close. No, it wasn’t a big problem.

And to what extent were your family interested in what you were doing yourself at work?

None. They weren’t interested. Never have been.

So your wife was not interested in…

No, good God, no.

In the absence of their…

But to be fair, just let me say, I also became a collector of old science books and I collected a lot of them and on my fiftieth birthday she gave me a copy – just to show that she did take an interest – she gave me a copy of Darwin’s work, you know, which was worth a great deal of money and which I later sold, but never should have. But that was very, very kind of her.

And your children, were they aware of what you did?

I don’t think so really.

And did you talk about your work, whether they were interested or not?

[both speaking together]

At home no, no. They weren’t, no I didn’t, not that I remember. No.

So that science is something you’re thinking and talking about at work, but when at home you’re not?

Lewis Wolpert Page 42 C1672/06 Track 2

Well, I was talking about science at home when they had to do exams on science and I would be cross with them because they hadn’t done enough revision. But I don’t think they were at all interested in what I was doing, no.

[29:03] Did you bring any work home in terms of writing or…

Yes, I was writing all the time. Oh yes. Oh yes.

And this is papers and…

Yes, just papers and things, yes of course. Oh yes. And then I had to stop going to Sweden, you see, because I got married and I couldn’t go to Sweden every summer.

You haven’t told me about your experiences in Sweden before that point. This is the marine station…

Yes, I told you, working with Trygve Gustafson, it was a lovely marine station and lovely swimming and really very, very nice.

Yes, you said that you went there because you found Wales…

Well, I didn’t find it, it was alright but it didn’t seem terribly exciting and I saw there were a lot of people were working on sea urchins in Sweden so I decided to go there. It was lovely.

[30:03] To what extent in the sixties and seventies did you follow the way in which science tended to be talked about just in newspapers or in other kind of popular media, on TV, on the radio?

I can’t remember, but I got into science on the radio quite early. I can’t remember the dates, I should really keep my CV in front of us here. [laughs] But I was interviewed, when I was doing my experiments on the sea urchins, someone came to interview me for the radio, to talk about sucking the bulge out of the sea urchin egg, that was quite early. And then I got quite Lewis Wolpert Page 43 C1672/06 Track 2

interested in doing, you know, public understanding of science and I did a series of interviews on Radio 3 with scientists which were then published as A Passion for Science, that was one of the things. And I did quite a lot on radio at various times, at one time or another. I don’t think it had much real impact and I’ve been on many radio shows, I’ve been on Desert Island Discs, I’ve been In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, I’ve been in A Passion for Music – it’s not called that, whatever it’s called, I’ve forgotten. I’ve done quite a lot on radio. And I did – we haven’t got round to the depression yet – but I did do a big programme, a television programme on depression, which wasn’t a great success, but I did do it.

[end of Track 2]

Lewis Wolpert Page 44 C1672/06 Track 3

[Track 3]

What I’d like to do to begin with today is to ask you some questions based on things that you said yesterday and based on the unpublished draft autobiography which you’ve lent me. So could we just start, to give some context, by saying when and why you wrote the draft autobiography so we get a sense of the document that we’re looking at?

Don’t really know why I wrote the draft autobiography [laughs] but it’s been quite a, I think it’s self-indulgent, thinking about myself, and I wanted to try and remember, and I don’t know who I wrote it for in particular. The children have seen it, I don’t think they’re mad about it. My son, for example, doesn’t think, you know, he thinks that all the relationships with women, I don’t really explain why I was so involved or anything like that. No-one really likes it. It’s not too bad.

He wants to know more about why you liked each particular…

You know, what was… he says it’s ‘emotionally free’, my autobiography, almost he feels, and he feels that’s bad about it.

Do you think that that’s a feature of your writing or a feature of your actual living?

It could well be a feature of my living that I don’t, I’m not a great writer, but we’ll come on to books I hope at some stage. But I think, well I just don’t recall what the emotions were, I don’t think in emotional terms.

So when you felt that you liked one person rather than another, what was it about that person that made you like them?

Well, I left one because she abandoned me a bit, she would leave me alone over holidays and that’s how I left her for someone else.

Yes, that was…

Lewis Wolpert Page 45 C1672/06 Track 3

Although I like her and we’re still very good friends.

I see, okay. And at one point in the autobiography you say that you lack empathy, is that in any way…

I don’t think I’m very… that empathetic. I’m very involved in mental illness and things like that. I don’t think that I’m someone who is very good at being empathetic with people when they have problems, I just don’t know. I just don’t know. And as the book is called Trying to Understand, [laughs] and I don’t understand that much.

What makes you suspect though that you might not be someone who is very…

No idea. No idea whatsoever.

[02:44] Thank you, okay. So I’ll go on to questions based on last time and inspired by reading the book, and I wonder whether you could describe your bedroom as a child, because you didn’t last time. Describe your bedroom as a child?

Oh, as a child. It was very dark. The worst thing about my bedroom is that it was on a sort of pathway outside which was covered in bushes, so you had to put the lights on when you went in the room. There was no sunlight in my room ever, it was very dark. But I had a bed and I had a desk and I had a little bookcase and a wardrobe, yes.

Anything else in your bedroom?

Nothing of great interest. My chemistry set and my electric trains and things like that, and I was very untidy, very untidy, which my parents didn’t like at all.

Did you have toys that were not of that sort of proto-scientific kind, so toys that were other than sort of mechanical things?

No, I don’t think so, I don’t think I did. Lewis Wolpert Page 46 C1672/06 Track 3

Thank you. You talk…

Also there was a mirror, it was quite important. The wardrobe had a mirror and I didn’t like the look of myself and my big nose, from an early age.

[04:05] Other thoughts about your appearance as a young…

No, not really.

You talked last time about losing faith and said that it was noticing the ineffectual nature of praying for things.

Yes, I did, that is absolutely right.

What did you feel though about the sort of content of Judaism, about stories and…

I didn’t feel much about the content of Judaism at all. I was pro-Jewish, I mean I certainly was Jewish and I think when I was at university or just at the end of school, I was part of a Zionist organisation, yes, I was. Yes, I was sort of pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, yes.

What did you do in the organisation?

I think just publicity, trying to say, you know, we must look after Israel and things like that. It was when I was really quite young, I didn’t continue it at university, no.

[04:58] Thank you. You said a couple of times last time and you write it in your autobiography that you found your mother unattractive.

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 47 C1672/06 Track 3

Now, because this is quite an unusual thing for someone to say or write…

I know.

…could you say more about what it was about her that to you as a child was unattractive?

Well, she was physically fat. She was just too fat and a bit too lumpy. She had quite a nice face, but physically she was just too fat for me. I can’t tell you why I am attracted to thin women, but I certainly am.

Well, you’ve got a theory about it in the autobiography, haven’t you? A theory about why you might prefer thin women. You say…

Because they’re more like boys. What was the theory? Was that my theory?

I think it was, yes.

Yes, I think it probably was, yes. Because I did have a slight homosexual relationship with other boys, yes. You know, wrestling with them and things like that, but no real homosexual relationship.

And that was at school?

That was at school times, yes.

[06:12] Thank you. Now can you tell the story, and this I think must be significant in your life story because, again, from reading the autobiography, you wrote an essay about it while at school, and that was the experience age five of being left in a car while your mother went shopping.

Yes.

Could you tell that story, where were you, what happened? Lewis Wolpert Page 48 C1672/06 Track 3

Well, my mother took me shopping in town in Johannesburg and left me in the car and she left me for ages and I got very worried about it and after about an hour or so I left the car and found my way to my father’s office. She was very cross about that.

What was your father’s response?

Can’t remember, you know, why had your mother left you so long.

And do you remember, when you say that you were worried about it, do you remember in particular how it felt, what you were worried about?

I didn’t like being left alone like that, yes. Nothing terribly to worry about, but I didn’t like it.

[07:11] Thank you. Can you say more about your mother’s attention to your sort of physical health as a child?

It was non-stop. My mother was always involved in my keeping clean; did I have a handkerchief in my pocket, you know, had I been to lavatory, do I have a cold. And if I had a, you know, had to stay in bed and couldn’t go out, out again. She looked after me, and I did have various illnesses of one sort or another, and she looked after me very nicely, drove me mad, but she certainly did look after – that was the one positive thing she did about me – she did look after my health. It was positive in terms of my health, but I hated it.

What was the problem with the overhanging jaw and having to go to a dentist every Saturday morning?

[laughs] Well, my teeth, I just had a very bad lower jaw. I think it wasn’t the right shape and I had to go every Saturday morning for the dentist to… and then I’d go to the Plaza Cinema, which was nice.

Lewis Wolpert Page 49 C1672/06 Track 3

What did the dentist do when he…

I can’t remember, but I was there for ages. I had plates in my mouth and all sorts of things like that.

Okay, thank you. Another thing that, according to the autobiography, that your mother set you on was elocution lessons.

Yes, she did and she gave me extra lessons, well I was having Hebrew lessons, and she also sent me to elocution lessons and for that I’m very grateful, because I don’t have really a strong South African accent any more. And that helped me with public speaking, yes, that was very nice. It was someone just down the road who I went to, who was very nice, yes.

And what was your mother concerned about in terms of the way…

I have not the foggiest. She wanted a nice Jewish boy. And I also remember now what she wanted me to become when I didn’t know what to do, she wanted me to become a plumber and then join a friend of hers’ son who had a plumbing firm. She wasn’t mad about me going to university.

What did your parents think about your choice of civil engineering?

They had no views whatsoever, that I can remember.

Did they themselves show any enthusiasm for science in general?

Absolutely zero.

But on the other hand any enthusiasm for the arts or for literature?

No, no. That wasn’t what they had enthusiasm for, no. They had enthusiasm for themselves.

[09:54] Lewis Wolpert Page 50 C1672/06 Track 3

You say that your mother was Jewish in a…

A social way.

A social way but not a spiritual way.

Not religious really. I mean she went to synagogue and all that sort of thing, but what she really cared was about the social Jewishness, Jews being looked after. One of my favourite stories is that she thought one of the worst things anyone had done in South Africa was a woman called Betty Pelz, who had played golf on a Jewish, the major Jewish holiday.

[10:27] Thanks. Oh, and then your cousin’s conviction that your mother was a lesbian. On what grounds?

Yes, that’s Stephen, yes, that’s one of my cousin’s views. He thought that… And when they stayed with her, she had to look after them sometimes, she treated them very badly and they can tell terrible stories, how sadistic she was with them.

But on what grounds does he think that she was a lesbian?

Well, Stephen is a homosexual and that was his view, that she didn’t really like boys. It was girls she liked.

[11:06] Thank you. Two things that you didn’t mention yesterday, but which are in the autobiography are stamp collecting and your dog. So could you tell me about each of those?

Ah yes. Well, I liked stamp collecting, I wasn’t mad about it, but I liked it very much and I collected stamps. And I had a dog called Jollyboy, who I loved, and Jollyboy was a great friend of mine. And it was a badly behaved dog, it used to chase cats and I have to say that I helped Jollyboy chase cats and he would try to kill them. But I loved Jollyboy, I loved… And when the children were growing up, I used to make up Jollyboy stories for them. Lewis Wolpert Page 51 C1672/06 Track 3

Were these stories of things that he actually had done?

No, no, just that was Jollyboy stories.

Where did you go with Jollyboy?

You couldn’t go anywhere because he would fight with other dogs if you took him out, so I kept him locked in the garden.

Where did he sleep?

He used to sleep in a box which was by the kitchen.

What did your parents think of…

Sorry?

What did your parents think of him?

Oh yeah, they liked him, I think my father liked him. My father liked dogs. Don’t think my mother gave a hoot.

Thank you. Could you describe, is it Mimi, who was the white nurse who looked after you…

Yes. Can’t remember her terribly well, but she was very nice to me, Mimi. That’s when I was quite young and I can’t remember her very well.

Do you remember anything you did with her?

I think she took me to her farm once, but I can hardly remember it. I was very young.

Lewis Wolpert Page 52 C1672/06 Track 3

[12:43] You mentioned farm there, your dad, you say, took you for walks sometimes and talked about buying a farm.

Yes, he did. That’s exactly right. And that sounded… but he wasn’t really serious about it, no. But he thought it would be quite nice to get… But that was one of the things that he told me that really pleased me that he thought along those lines.

It pleased you to think that he…

He was thinking along that way, yes.

What did he say about his work, about his job?

Just how good he was at it. He was very arrogant about how much he’d achieved, considering that he had no education and he was a senior manager.

It seemed to be that it was your mother who was wanting you to do your homework, in spite of the fact that she’d delayed your reading, when you were actually at school she was encouraging you to do homework.

Yes, she did.

What was your, given your dad’s lack of education…

I don’t think he paid much attention. No.

So it was your mother rewarding you with pocket money for doing well and that sort of thing?

Yes, that’s the sort of thing, yes. Precisely that.

Lewis Wolpert Page 53 C1672/06 Track 3

This is a bit of a general question but it might bring something out. Do you remember what you were frightened of as a child, what sort of things you were frightened of?

The only thing I think I was frightened of, I was a bit frightened of birds, I don’t know why. Can’t tell you why. And I was frightened of heights from quite an early age. I don’t think anything else really, or something that I was really frightened of, no.

[14:21] You say that you are a hypochondriac, was that evident as a child?

I simply can’t remember. I don’t think I was then, but I am a bit of a hypochondriac, but not too bad, and I do have my problems.

When do you know that, when do you remember it as being evident, if not in childhood?

No, I can’t remember. I think other people call me a hypochondriac [laughs], it wasn’t me who decided that I was a hypochondriac.

And do you have any specific memories of childhood sort of things that you might tend to dream about or have nightmares about? And childhood is quite broad here, and this can be…

Well, one of the things I had nightmares about was seeing the movie of Hound of the Baskervilles and that was a very frightening movie and I had nightmares about that movie. That’s about the only one I think I had nightmares about.

I think you mentioned seeing a dead relative?

Ah, I did see, yes, one of my sort of uncles and that was the first time I’d seen a dead person, at the funeral and that did cause a few nightmares, you’re quite right.

Because, why?

Lewis Wolpert Page 54 C1672/06 Track 3

Well, I’d never seen a dead person before and he was so ugly in life and even uglier in death.

[15:45] Thanks. To what extent did your parents compare you to members of your extended family? In particular, I was thinking of the large number of…

Cousins.

…cousins on the maternal side?

They didn’t compare me at all, no. And my father had a brother and I had a cousin on my father’s side, Raymond, with whom I was very friendly. You know, we got on very well.

Did you compare yourself to these cousins in any way?

No, not really. Well, Jack, I was competitive with Jack in a very friendly and very close way.

Do you remember the sorts of things that you were competitive about? You mentioned one thing yesterday about it.

Well, that he got two firsts in matric [laughs] and I only got one. And he understood, I think, electricity earlier than I did.

But there was none of the sort of, oh, so-and-so’s going to university to do this, you ought to consider this, or so-and-so’s doing that and…

No, nothing like that at all.

[16:45] One bit in the autobiography which seemed to present your dad in a slightly uncharacteristic way compared to what you told me yesterday was him telling jokes, doing sort of finger shows, puppet shows on the wall, shadow puppets…

Lewis Wolpert Page 55 C1672/06 Track 3

Yes, when I was very young.

Oh, okay.

Very young, I must have been about four or five, yes. And that was very nice, I do remember that. That was one of the few positive things that my parents did.

[17:14] Can you tell me as much as you can remember about something you didn’t like, which was the cadet corps at the school?

Yes, I hated being in the cadets at school and putting on the cadet uniform. I just didn’t like it. And one of my friends was the sergeant of the platoon that I was in and I tried to lead a revolution and sort of go the other way. But the people I was involved with were fine, yes. I didn’t like all this marching nonsense.

Yes, can you tell us what you did, because most people listening in fact, I imagine, won’t know what cadets did in a cadet corps.

Well, we would have to line up, put on the uniform and then we would have to go marching on the cricket field.

That’s all?

That’s all.

[18:07] Oh, and if you don’t mind…

Not at all.

…it’s not a positive memory, but you mentioned the bullying of boys across the road, could you say what that consisted of, how it felt, what involved? Lewis Wolpert Page 56 C1672/06 Track 3

Well, they bullied me a bit, yes. I just think that they didn’t like me and they would say nasty things about me and I did have quite a difficult time with them at one stage or another. Yes, I didn’t… Sometimes was alright, other times, whether they were jealous because I was a Jewish boy and had more money than them or whatever it was, they could be quite nasty to me.

Was it clear that that was the reason?

No, it wasn’t clear what the reason was, no. I didn’t really know, but they did bully me a bit, yes.

Thank you.

Which I didn’t like at all.

[19:00] You attended, or at least witnessed demonstrations against apartheid, could you describe those, tell the story of those?

Well, there were marchers marching through the streets and just marching through the streets, nothing more than that.

You said that it was frightening though.

Well, because there would be, you know, the police would, you know, it was anti the government and there were people who were for apartheid, would threaten to attack us. They didn’t attack us, but I found it quite frightening. So that was something I was frightened of.

And this was you marching as a student, taking part in marches?

Yes, absolutely.

Lewis Wolpert Page 57 C1672/06 Track 3

Having left home and gone on this journey up through Africa then to Israel, over this period, who did you write to?

My parents, once a week. I wrote to my parents once a week and they wrote to me once a week and I’ve got all those letters. Yes, I’ve got them all.

To what extent did what you told them about in the letters match what was actually happening?

Yes, no it was pretty accurate. They didn’t know that I was hitchhiking, I didn’t tell them how I was travelling. They thought I was taking trains or buses or things like that, but I did tell them where I was and what I was doing, yes. And I’ve got all those letters, miraculously.

Did you write to them jointly in a single letter?

Yes, oh yes, in a single letter.

And do you remember the sort of thing that they would reply with, what they would be telling you about?

What they had been doing and hoping I was alright, and who they’d seen recently and so forth. They were quite positive letters, yes.

Thank you.

Yes, I did keep in touch with them all the time.

[20:52] Could you tell me more about the decision to change from soil mechanics…

To cell mechanics. [laughs]

Lewis Wolpert Page 58 C1672/06 Track 3

…to cell mechanics, especially in terms of your sort of identity and sense of yourself? At one point in the autobiography you talk about wanting to make a positive impression on girls, for example, and biology being better than cell mechanics, so…

That wasn’t the reason I was changing. It’s just that I just found telling people about that I was a soil mechanics wasn’t very attractive, and I didn’t find it terribly interesting, it didn’t seem to relate to anything that I cared about. That’s really why I changed.

Could you describe and tell any stories that you can remember of your sort of social life in Soho at the time that you’re working at King’s on soil mechanics?

Well, I was seeing Rosalind a great deal, all just friendly. There were just many people that I vaguely knew in the pub that we would go to. I’ve forgotten the name of the pub now. And it was just quite nice to go and drink there. So it was quite nice wild time in Soho, yes.

What sort of sights and sounds do you recall?

Sorry?

What sort of sights and sounds do you recall? I mean if I was going to make a sort of film set in Soho at that period, what would I need to have the people looking like, doing, how would they talk?

Well, they were drinking heavily, drinking a great deal. And there’s a picture on the wall over there, one of the people in Soho who really became quite well-known, the middle one, the one next to my ex – another, we’ll come to her later – the other one there, he was short of money and so he sold me that and it’s probably worth quite a lot of money now. So there were all sorts of strange people in the pub in Soho and I enjoyed going there.

What, apart from drinking heavily, what else happened?

Well, I was always looking for women and things like that, nothing else really.

Lewis Wolpert Page 59 C1672/06 Track 3

Any sort of music and dancing and…

No, nothing like that.

How did people dress?

Very casually. Very casually. That was nice about it too.

Were there, as far as you knew, any other scientists?

Not that I can remember, no.

And the group of people that you were with in the department where you were working on soil mechanics, how did their social life compare to yours? Were they also doing this sort of thing in the evening?

No. No, they weren’t connected with me. And even when I was doing biology and went occasionally to Soho, none of my science friends went there, it was something I did on my own.

Did you tell them about it?

No.

Why not?

I don’t think they were interested, it’s not the sort of thing one talked about.

What did they, do you know what they did of an evening?

No idea. Sorry. You can see I’m quite a boring [laughs] old man.

Lewis Wolpert Page 60 C1672/06 Track 3

I wondered whether, because one of the things you say is that you don’t suffer from sort of embarrassment about talking about things…

No.

…so not telling them was simply not telling them, or was it avoiding telling them?

No, not at all. Oh no.

[24:30] Okay, thank you. Could you say something about what you think the role of luck is in life, especially with reference to two things: one is the letter…

The letter I got from Wilfred?

Yeah, and particularly…

Funnily enough, I had an email from him this morning.

So Wilfred’s letter, but also, less dramatically, Sydney Brenner meeting you in the, you know, swimming in Woods Hole, but…

Yes. I’ve never thought about luck, frankly. It never entered my mind, but I was very pleased that these things happened. And of course it was amazing that Wilfred had – and I’ve thanked him many, many times for changing my life.

And just so that we’ve got this story, tell the story of how that happened, the…

The letter?

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 61 C1672/06 Track 3

Well, he knew that I wanted to change and didn’t know what to do, and he read in the newspaper about Swann and Mitchison actually, had a theory – read in a journal, sorry – that they were studying the mechanical properties of the cell and cell division and they had a model for it and he said, Lewis, if there is something about – and he was going into cell biology – he said this is something that you could work on.

So that explains why he found that journal, because he was himself going into cell…

No, no, no, he read… No, no, no, no, no. He read it in a journal, yes. Or he read it somewhere, I can’t… No, he was looking through a particular journal and he saw them doing that and therefore he said that’s what I should do. And then I went to see the professor that he was going to go and do his postdoc with and that’s Danielli who helped me, got me into a PhD.

What do you remember of the meeting with Bernal, which happened around that time?

Well, Bernal, I was sent by Danielli to Bernal because Bernal was very interested in clays and the origin of life and things like that and Danielli thought that Bernal might be interested in me because I knew about soils. And I went to Bernal, I didn’t understand a word of what he said and he was very nice to me, but it wasn’t what he was looking for or what I was looking for.

Do you remember anything particular about him – appearance, manner, that sort of thing?

No, not really. And I know his son; Michael is a good friend of mine.

[27:12] Thanks. Now, what was the effect of your training in engineering and perhaps in particular in soil mechanics on…

Oh, I think it changed, the way I looked at things I think was different. You know, because I came as an engineer and with a very mechanical approach, yes. Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 62 C1672/06 Track 3

Can you say a bit more about that, for those listening who don’t know the field of biology at the time…

[both speaking together]

Well, I could measure stresses and strains and there’s something called Young’s modulus which is, you know, how much force you have to put on something to deform it, and I could do all that quite easily. And also I was quite well mathematically trained in civil engineering so if there were things mathematically to solve with cell division I should be able to do it. But I wasn’t that involved in that, no.

Did it make you a different kind of biologist, did you…

Yes, I think it did. I think it made me… I think it gave me, you know, it’s hard to say exactly how, but I think it did give me a different way of thinking, yes.

Being one way…

Being trained as a civil engineer, yes.

[28:25] Thanks. Could you tell me how the films of sea urchin embryo development were made by your…

Well, by Trygve Gustafson.

Gustafson in Sweden?

Yes, he just had a camera which looked down the microscope and filmed the embryo developing. And then we’d look at these films and analyse them and try and understand what’s happening. And that’s what I did with him. And we published – if you look at my list of publications - there are a lot with Trygve at quite an early stage.

Lewis Wolpert Page 63 C1672/06 Track 3

Given that this is the first point at which you’re really working on…

Development.

…development, can you say (a) what the films, what you remember the films looking like and (b) what the effect of that, of looking at them was on your thoughts about life, matter, you know…

Well, I realised how important cells were and I could see them changing shape and one of the most interesting features about them was them putting out these long processors called filopodia, which could contract and pull cells or whole groups of cells from one region to another. There were also single cells that moved from one region to another and did this because they attached better at one site rather than another site. It was rather, as I said, like coming out of the sea where there’s a rock and you came out where you got the best grip. So my mechanical thinking as an engineer really had quite an important impact. But I did make a serious, I missed a serious point; I didn’t recognise local constriction of cells as an important mechanical event, I missed that.

How is local contraction of cells different from the sticking out of the…

Well, the single cells at one end of the cell would contract and just change the shape of the cell, and I missed that. It was bad.

But in the films, could you actually see these structures…

Yes, you could see all these structures, oh yes. And also I think I was fascinated from the beginning that we came from a single cell. I still think [laughs] that it’s amazing, you came, you and I come from one single cell, the fertilised egg. It’s absolutely bloody amazing and I’m still fascinated by it.

[31:05] Thank you. Oh, can you say more about not seeing yourself as English?

Lewis Wolpert Page 64 C1672/06 Track 3

Yes. Although I’ve been very happy in England, I’m not English, I don’t have the politeness that English have and I don’t suffer from embarrassment in the same way [laughs] as the English do! So I’m certainly British and I’ve loved being in London and I’ve loved being in Britain, but I’m not English, no. You know, I don’t have, you know, the consciousness of one’s social relatives and things like that. Yes, I like my relatives and all that, but I’m not English in that sense, particularly in terms of manners. I speak my mind.

And in terms of the British class system which you mentioned as being sort of alien to your way of thinking, to what extent was that manifest in departments of biology that you worked in or that…

No, there was very little, very little class system in the biology departments I worked in. No, no, that was all perfectly alright.

And in… was there something sort of peculiarly English about British science, because you were encountering it from the outside, having been a scientist…

No, there was nothing peculiar about British science. And really, I hadn’t done that much science, you know. Alright, I’d been trained as a civil en… no, there wasn’t much difference at all, absolutely not.

[32:41] Thank you. Could you talk about your work on, the detail of your work on the development of the chick limbs in terms of – and this is at the…

Middlesex Hospital.

…Middlesex Hospital. And we know that at this point you are no longer conducting experiments but are designing…

I’m designing experiments.

…designing and encouraging others to do the work and then writing up together. Lewis Wolpert Page 65 C1672/06 Track 3

Sure.

But could you talk in detail about that work, and I know you’re conscious of the challenges of trying to describe technical science to the non-scientist, but could you attempt to describe some of the detail of that work in terms of, you know, the cells and how cells know their position and the development…

Well, that’s exactly it. I was interested in the development of the limb and the application of positional information. That is, the cells acquire their position because there’s something, gradient and therefore they know they’re at a high point or a low point and that determines how they behave. And so two of the main things we had to do was to try and understand how these gradients were set up, and there was evidence, and we had experiments to try and identify this, that there was a signalling region at the posterior margin of the limb and that signalled and you were a digit four if you were close to it and a digit three if you were – or digit two – if you were a long way away from it. And if you grafted another one of these signalling regions to the opposite side, you’d get extra digits. They’d go four, three, two, two, three, four. And that was one of our key experiments, some of the details. And then for the proximo-distal axis, that is going from the shoulder upwards, we invented a totally new mechanism and that was the idea that there was just under the tip of the limb, there was a region where cells divided, and we called that the progress zone. And the way the cells knew their position, they measured – all the cells in there were dividing, so cells were continually leaving that zone, and how long they remained in that zone determined their position. Those that came out very early were very proximal, near the base, those that came out later would give rise to digits. And that was the model that we worked on. And that worked quite nicely.

[35:24] Could you describe the experiment that you designed in order to test or verify that idea that it’s the time that they leave the progress zone that determines where they go?

Yes. One of the experiments I designed was to irradiate the limb at a very early stage. The idea was that I wanted to kill many of the cells in the progress zone. So, when cells came out, there were so few there you wouldn’t get proximal structures, but it would gradually fill Lewis Wolpert Page 66 C1672/06 Track 3

up again, you know, alright there were dead cells, but the progress zone would gradually get back to normal. And so my prediction was that when I did this experiment I would lose proximal structures but the digits would be alright. And this seemed to fit, also not only did I show this to be true, but also that this could help to explain thalidomide where there were children, as you know, whose mothers had taken thalidomide, who lost the proximal, but just had a hand sticking out from a bit of the arm.

[36:34] How far did you get in understanding sort of how – obviously knowing is a kind of metaphor here because cells don’t really know – but how cells know that they’re a two, a three or a four, how they, is it chemically or…

No, I didn’t make much progress at that. We just knew that it was related to the signal from the posterior margin. But the details of that even today I don’t really know. [laughs]

So it seems to work, but it’s not known sort of chemically how?

Not properly known chemically how, no.

[37:11] Could you now talk about the development of your thinking about the way in which your work relates to biological evolution? To give you a context, this is inspired by the bit in the autobiography where you say you once upset Richard Dawkins because you’re on a platform with him, and said you wish you believed in intelligent design because it would solve problems, especially about what could be the adaptive advantage of intermediate form?

Well, I do have a problem with evolution, if that’s what you think. So, for example, it’s… If you think about flies, they were originally water animals and they came out of the water and as they did they had a special structure when they were in the water to help them with their breathing, and when they came out the structure stuck up in the air and eventually developed into wings. But what was the advantage in the intermediate stages? Or if you think of the intermediate stages, for example, of one’s jaws, there were structures at the ends of the vertebrates thing, but there were no jaws but a series of sort of structures down there from Lewis Wolpert Page 67 C1672/06 Track 3

which the jaws developed. But it was the intermediate stage, you don’t jump from one structure to another, it goes gradually, and I have quite a lot of difficulty in many cases as to what the advantage of the intermediate stages were, but that’s possibly due to my ignorance, but I’ve always found that really quite difficult.

[39:05] Have you talked to evolutionary biologists about…

Not much really, I’ve not done much in evolution. I’ve had some evolutionary ideas about, for example, as to how multi-cellularity developed. I think I told you that already, no?

You haven’t, could you tell me about that?

Well, I don’t think anybody takes it seriously, but my idea was, there were single cells, yes. [pause] I’m just trying to remember. Oh yes. There were single cells that went around in groups, yes, and they stuck together and then broke off, but they didn’t interact much with each other. But, and that was important, when they ran out of food, they did something rather strange, they ate each other. That enabled them to survive and those that were in a situation where they ate each other were the ones that were able to survive, and that led to the development of a single cell in the group that would eat the others and then survive, because it would then divide. And that was the origin of the egg. I’ve no idea whether it was right or not, but that was my idea. I quite liked it.

Can you tell me about that particular occasion where you were on the platform with Richard Dawkins – why were you there and what were you talking about?

No, we were talking to a group of people, advancing the theories of evolution, you know, against the religious group. And Richard’s not too hostile to me, he’s not mad about me, but it’s alright.

Why is he not mad about you?

I think he finds me rather arrogant and difficult, a bit rude at times. [laughs] Lewis Wolpert Page 68 C1672/06 Track 3

But it’s not your particular ideas on science and religion?

No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, not at all, not at all, not at all.

So when you say that you upset him by saying that you wished you believed in intelligent design, it’s not… you don’t feel that you seriously upset him with that argument?

Not really, no. Just irritated him a bit.

[41:46] Thank you. Can you tell me also about your teaching of a course on Darwinian medicine, which is another way in which you were concerned with evolution?

Yes, evolution. I got involved when – there’s a man called Randy Nesse, and he came to University College, he was there and we became quite friendly and he was very interested in the evolutionary basis of certain medical illnesses. And so I got quite involved in that and went ahead and started teaching that to medical students, yes.

Could you tell us about some of the content of that?

God. I was just looking at it actually again. You know, that shows how dim I am. I can’t think of it just at the moment, I might think of it a little later.

Sure, yeah.

I can’t think of it at the moment.

That’s fine.

I’m just trying to think of a good example. Can’t think of a good example offhand.

Lewis Wolpert Page 69 C1672/06 Track 3

[42:59] When you describe yourself as being less prone to sort of politeness and embarrassment as other people, are you able to think of occasions when that has been clear in relations with sort of colleagues, in other words, at work?

On the whole, no, I think I got on pretty well with colleagues. The only colleagues I didn’t get on with were those who, there was a colleague who came to work with me and then went off while he was working with me to do some experiments which attacked my own work. [laughs] I was quite cross with him. No, on the whole I got on very well with my colleagues and certainly, I don’t think when I was at the Middlesex I ever had a row with anybody that I can remember, no, no, it was all very peaceful. No, I don’t get into big arguments. Yes, I get into disagreements, but no rows really. No, I got on very well with them.

[44:03] And I wonder to what extent you are conscious during your life of the fact, and I think it is a fact, that your sort of personal and social life is quite different from the personal and social lives of the scientists of the same generation?

I have no idea whether that’s true [laughs], I’ve never thought about it, no. No idea. Sorry, just shows how self-involved I am, don’t think like that.

Thank you. Could you then tell me the story of the development of relationships following your separation, which you talked about last time?

Yes, I did separate from my wife and then I got involved with another lady and we had some lovely trips together. We went to Peru together and had a wonderful trip there. But what happened with her was that she, you know, she had children already and she would go away, for example, over Christmas and I would just be left on my own and I would go to certain friends of mine, and I found this unacceptable. And I eventually, there was another friend of mine who I had met, Jill Neville, who I met, and I got involved with Jill and we got married. And I left this other lady, with whom I’m still friendly and whom I went back to after Jill died, because Jill and I got on very well, she was a writer, a well-known writer, and we had a very happy marriage, but she died of cancer and I found that very, very traumatic. But it was Lewis Wolpert Page 70 C1672/06 Track 3

when I was with her that I had my depression. Do you want me to talk about my depression now?

Yes.

[46:09] Well, I was already sixty-five and I wasn’t feeling very well and I began to get lower and lower and having difficulty sleeping, and eventually I went into a very, very severe depression. I didn’t understand what was happening, there was no reason I should feel depressed, I was a professor at the university, I was happily married and I was quite healthy. But I felt worse and worse and worse and my point about depression is that if you can describe your severe depression, you haven’t had it. Because it was just a feeling I just couldn’t understand at all, and I became actually very suicidal, I wanted to kill myself. And I was put into hospital at the Royal Free, just round the corner here, and I was there for three weeks and I was given anti-depressant and when I came out I started on cognitive therapy and I didn’t go back to work for something like, I don’t know, a couple of months, but I eventually did go back to work, I gradually got better, but it took a long time. And what was interesting, that when I came home after three weeks, Jill hadn’t told anyone that I’d had depression, because of the stigma, she didn’t want anyone… and I thought that was ridiculous, why shouldn’t everybody know that I’d had depression. And the stigma of depression is a very severe problem. And it was because of that I didn’t have a clue what depression was about and for that reason I decided to write a book about it, in order to understand what depression, and it’s certainly my most successful book, and I came up with the idea of malignant sadness, that what depression was, it’s sadness for various regions that has become malignant, got out of control.

From what you’ve said, it would be difficult to describe the feeling of it, because as you say, if you can describe it, you…

Well, severe depression. Moderate depression, you just feel very low, you’re very tired, you’re negative about everything and you have negative things, but very severe depression, you’re in such a strange mental state that it’s indescribable. That’s my experience anyhow.

Lewis Wolpert Page 71 C1672/06 Track 3

In that state, what would you have been doing?

Lying in bed mainly. Not being able to do virtually anything.

And at the hospital, what did you do during your period there?

Just lie there, lie in the bed. They were very nice to me in the hospital.

What did the cognitive therapy involve?

Cognitive therapy involved – I couldn’t deal with it at the beginning when I went to hospital, but when I came out… It would be to discuss what you really were thinking and feeling and to see whether your negative thoughts – and there are many negative thoughts – were true or not. And, for example, one of the things – and you keep a diary – and one of the negative thoughts you have is that you’re never going to get better, and then the therapist can point out, but look in your diary on Tuesday, you felt slightly better. And so just being able to discuss these feelings and to show you that your negative thoughts weren’t really justified, when you say that nobody loves you, the therapist will say, what about your dog? [laughs] I know that sounds trivial, but I’m sorry, it’s not. Cognitive therapy is the best way to treat depression. I still take an anti-depressant. God knows why, but it was cognitive therapy that really saved me.

What were the other negative thoughts that cognitive therapy helped you to sort of unravel or to challenge?

I’ve no idea. No, that I would never get better was the main thing, that I just couldn’t do anything. And I just had to be patient to get better, and I did eventually.

Did you have negative thoughts about things you’d done or about things that were going to happen or…

Lewis Wolpert Page 72 C1672/06 Track 3

No, negative thoughts that I was in. No, I can’t even remember what my negative thoughts were. I was in such a strange state and just feeling, it was really talking about how I was feeling at the time.

What are your thoughts about the causes of it…

I have no idea what caused it. I did change my medication for a minor heart problem and it was known to initiate, but why I should have gone into such a severe depression from just changing a little medication, I have no idea. And I had various episodes since then and in fact I went on to the anti-depressant recently because I felt I was getting into a negative state.

What has been your experience of psychology and psychoanalysis, either directly in attempting to treat yourself or…

Well, one of my girlfriends, the one girlfriend when I was in depression insisted I go to psychoanalysis and if I did not she wouldn’t look after me. And I went and I found it totally useless, didn’t help me one iota. And I read widely on psychoanalysis and I think it’s absolute junk. Now, it may help some people, who knows why, but it has, for treating depression and things like that, it’s certainly the wrong thing at all. And also there’s no attempt to see whether you’ve really got other illnesses or things like that and there’s no evidence for its justification. So I’m very hostile to psychoanalysis, and I’ve been in debates with psychoanalysts and I’ve written things against psychoanalysis too.

Yes, I think in The Unnatural Nature of Science, I think you argue that psychoanalysis might be a science that is like a kind of early kind of embryology where the technology wasn’t there to see the things, you know, to see what you would need to see in order to verify it, was that…

Well, it’s not science based. Cognitive therapy, by contrast, has been enormously successful.

Does cognitive behavioural therapy involve…

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 73 C1672/06 Track 3

…you have a scientific base?

Yes, yes. I really think that’s really science based. And I met the man who invented it on one of my trips to America, Aaron Beck, and he was a psychoanalyst and he realised that his patients who were depressed had all these negative thoughts and he switched to dealing with their negative thoughts.

[53:10] Thank you. What was the response of, apart from the fact that your wife didn’t tell people why you’d gone to hospital, more widely than that, how did people around you respond to this first depression?

I told them. Didn’t get much response one way or another, but I was quite public about it. I was on the radio, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair and things like that.

What would your wife say to you about it?

Well, she just thought it would be very bad for my career.

More generally?

Which I thought it was just ridiculous.

What was the response of colleagues when you told them?

Very little. Sorry that you’ve been ill, didn’t say much at all. But, having written my book, I’ve been in contact with many people who are severely depressed and they have, there are many, I mean there are many examples. Well, I’m going to Abu Dhabi next week. Did I tell you that? You know, to talk about depression. And there are many people with severe depression who don’t go for treatment, they’re too embarrassed to go for treatment, which is terrible. And if you think of all the Members of Parliament who are depressed and won’t admit to it. You know, it’s so common. It’s about one in twelve people are suffering from depression, something like that. Lewis Wolpert Page 74 C1672/06 Track 3

[54:36] How did it, how do you think now that it relates to other times in your life, for example, in your autobiography where you talk about yourself feeling low and even…

No, that wasn’t depression.

…depressed.

No, no. You know, I felt low at various times, but nothing like that depression, nothing like that at all, no.

And have the subsequent episodes been as severe as that…

No, nothing has been so severe. Quite bad, but nothing near as severe as that. I was really suicidal. I really wanted to kill myself, but was too frightened to jump from the hospital window.

Is that what you considered doing, jumping?

Yes, yes. No, I was very bad.

[55:20] Could you tell me now about your motivation for getting involved in the popularisation of science in the sort of later eighties?

I don’t know why I got involved with the popularisation of science, but I did. And I, one of the first things I did was to do a series of interviews on Radio 3 with scientists in which we went around and interviewed various scientists and we published it as A Passion for Science and I don’t think it had much - it was broadcast on Radio 3 – I don’t think it had much impact. It’s a nice book, but whether it really had any impact, I’ve no idea. And then we did a second lot called Passionate Minds and it was quite interesting. We prepared very carefully the questions before we went to interview people and we also did some in America, but I Lewis Wolpert Page 75 C1672/06 Track 3

don’t think it had a great deal of impact, but at least it was done on Radio 3. And then I got involved at a later stage, and then I did the Christmas Lectures once at the Royal Institution. You know, that’s six lectures on television. It was called Frankenstein’s Search or something like that. What was the subject, something like that it was called. In which Frankenstein is searching to understand the nature of life. So that was more about science for the public. And then I got involved with being the person in charge of a committee at the Royal Society for understanding or for trying to deal with the public understanding of science. I don’t think we made any progress, we made very little progress, at all, whatsoever. And of course, I think it’s important to realise that, I can’t… remember I told you that I’d been to a Waddington meeting in Lake Como, you know, yes, I did, remember I told you at Woods Hole.

Oh yes, yes, yes.

But before that I’d been to a meeting organised by Waddington, which had been positive. And Waddington had put me up for the Royal Society, and I eventually got into the Royal Society, which made a very big – that’s one of the big events. Getting into the Royal Society is a truly major event in one’s life. I had to wait seven years though. You only have seven years in which to do it, and I got in on my seventh year.

Why is it so important in terms of your life?

Well, it’s just, you know, very difficult to get into the Royal Society and it’s a wonderful Society and many people would love to get in, and it’s very competitive. They only take forty members or forty-two members a year in all subjects and it’s very difficult.

[58:34] When I asked what was your motivation for getting involved in sort of popular science and…

Oh well, I quite like performing. And I thought it was interesting, I cared about science and it was something, you know, that I thought was very interesting and very important and Walter Bodmer got me on to this committee at the Royal Society and I worked quite hard at it, but I don’t think I achieved very much. It’s very difficult to know what to do about Lewis Wolpert Page 76 C1672/06 Track 3

science and the public and I’ve just been to a meeting now where I argued that one shouldn’t bother. Partly because of the unnatural nature of science, they don’t understand it anyhow. Well, there are scientists in the public, but if they don’t understand science, because science is so unnatural, you know, force doesn’t cause movement but causes acceleration. I still find that just absolutely amazing.

But at the time when you felt that it was worth bothering with, what did you think of the kind or level of public understanding of science? In other words, we can imagine you joining this sort of movement as it’s now thought of, because you felt there was a problem with the way the public understood science, or because you felt there was a problem with the way science was perceived by the public, or its status?

I think it was the way the public perceived science and wanted them to have a good feeling about it and understand what it was about and why therefore when they learnt about progress in medical things that they would understand what was going on. But I don’t feel that any more, funnily enough.

Is the timing important, because you were getting into these sorts of things in the late eighties and early nineties?

Yes.

Was something happening in terms of public understanding of science that had sort of lured you in in the way that it hadn’t in the sixties or the seventies?

No, I don’t think there was anything particular. Don’t think, not that I remember.

[1:00:49] What was the first committee that you worked on, which was from 1983, which was called the Scientific Information Committee of the Royal Society, so this is before the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science?

Can’t remember. Lewis Wolpert Page 77 C1672/06 Track 3

There was another one earlier called the Scientific Information Committee.

No idea. Sorry.

[1:01:12] Okay. Now, leaving aside the fact that you don’t think you achieved anything, could you nevertheless tell me in as much detail as you can remember what you did on the Public Understanding Committee?

I think I tried to get people to give lectures and things like that and get people to try and find out how much the public knew about various things, surveys, but I don’t think I ever made much progress.

Who else was on the committee with you?

Can’t remember.

Was Walter Bodmer still involved?

No, no. He was involved but as an outsider.

And do you remember anything about the surveys that you designed to…

Little bits, but not much. I think the public didn’t understand. There were quite a lot of the public who didn’t understand the difference between a virus and a bacterium.

And that was something you established from surveys?

I think… you know, I don’t remember any more. Sorry to be so dim.

No, it’s okay. Did you have a view on what, at that stage, when you thought it was still worth trying, did you have a view on what, having understood what the public do understand, could Lewis Wolpert Page 78 C1672/06 Track 3

be done in terms of enhancing public understanding of science? What was the solution you thought then? What did you feel might be done to, at this stage, to improve public understanding of science? On the one hand you’ve got surveys to understand what it is, you know, what the public understand, but…

Well, then you could try and find ways of giving them a better understanding. But the one thing where I wanted – and this was later, in relation to my mental illness – that the one thing I wanted the public, I wanted children at school to be taught about mental illness. Because mental illness, as you know, is one in four of us – we’ve discussed this – and I thought it was essential that the children at school be taught something about mental illness because they would know something that people had mental illness, but wouldn’t have a clue about it. And I think the government is at last going that way now, but that was the main one that I cared about.

And what have you done in terms of encouraging that?

I’ve just… I never knew where to go in order to do it, but I’m pleased to see that, I heard recently, that that is the way they’re going to go.

[end of Track 3]

Lewis Wolpert Page 79 C1672/06 Track 4

[Track 4]

To what extent and how, during your scientific career and after retirement, have you followed developments in other scientific fields?

Well, I’ve been very involved because of depression in mental illness and I’ve even drafted a book on mental illness, but whether it will ever get published, I don’t know. But I’m very involved with mental illness because of depression. That’s the main one that I had any interest in, yes. Other development and that, yes. And also, I have written a book on the origin of religion, the evolution of religion, so that was another area that I was interested in. Do you want to know the…

Tell me about that now then, yes.

The basic idea is that what makes us different from other animals is we believe in cause and effect. We understand physical cause and effect. I know if I throw this ball it will thing… I know that in order for this cup to move, I have to move it, and things like that. And that took quite a while for humans to… and that led to toolmaking, and that was very important in human evolution. And then when people realised that cause and effect were so important, they wanted to understand how the world came about and things like that and they thought that a cause could have been some superhuman being and I think that’s God, and that’s the origin, I claim, of religion. I don’t think anyone takes my idea seriously, but there are a few people who liked the book, it’s called Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. I don’t think many people buy it or are interested in it. I still like it and occasionally I lecture on it, but no- one takes it very seriously.

Do you remember the response to it in reviews or in articles, in things people said to you?

Can’t remember any more, but I know that psychologists don’t take my ideas at all seriously.

Because…

Lewis Wolpert Page 80 C1672/06 Track 4

Well, I think they claim that animals also have a good sense of cause and effect. They simply don’t. I mean, but I don’t know why they’re so negative about this particular view, because I’m quoting someone else who pointed out that seeing the wind blowing a fruit tree and the fruit falling off would never leave an animal to go and shake the tree in order for the fruit to fall off, but for humans it would be absolutely obvious. But they don’t take me seriously.

How and when did that idea about the origin of religious belief develop?

I’ve no idea. Oh… can’t remember where I got it from. I think I was reading… I know where it was. There was a man who’d done quite a lot of work with chimpanzees and shown that they didn’t have a, you know, if they wanted, they couldn’t tell, if you showed them a picture or a thing about getting a carrot or something, or a piece of fruit, that they wouldn’t know which to choose in order to knock it into the right place. Yes, I think that was something, someone told me to read about that and that’s what led to my ideas.

And can you say why you wanted to write it, why you wanted to publish it?

Well, I’m interested that so many people are involved in religion and it is something that has affected humans widely. I mean I don’t believe in it, not for a single second, but as I pointed out, as long as they don’t interfere, I don’t really mind at all. So I really wanted to understand it and so I got involved and I worked really quite hard on that.

What did the work for that book involve, what did the research involve?

I just had to read the literature on the subject and I think I might have consulted the odd person, but on the whole, no-one really liked [laughs] what I was doing, no.

When you say no-one really liked what you were doing, who…

I consulted various psychologists and they didn’t like my ideas at all.

And that was because they felt that animals would understand cause and effect or might?

Lewis Wolpert Page 81 C1672/06 Track 4

No… it’s hard for me to understand why they were so hostile, but they certainly were hostile.

What do you remember of reaction to the book or to lectures on the book by people who are Christians or have faith in other gods?

They didn’t like it either. It’s never… there are a few people I know who’ve written to me and said that they do like the book, but I don’t think anyone has taken it seriously as an academic achievement, no. But I think I’m right and I persist with it and there’s nothing that anyone has told me to show me that I’m wrong. But, that’s it. I tried to publish it in an academic journal, they wouldn’t accept it.

Which journal did you…

Some psychology journal or other, they wouldn’t accept it.

So you attempted to publish it there before you published it as a book?

No, after the book was published, I think. I was writing it as an academic article, no, they didn’t accept it at all.

[06:15] And this might seem a naïve question for someone who’s published a lot of books, but how did it get published – how does anything get published – but how did that book get published, who were the people involved and…

No, that was my same publisher, Faber, who’ve given me up now.

Because?

Oh, I think it’s partly because a recent book I wrote, it hadn’t given full references and someone accused me of plagiarism and the book had to be withdrawn and I had to revise it to get over the [problem] and I think that upset them, so they don’t want to publish anything of mine now. And that’s a book that I think it’s a very interesting book, which I worked very Lewis Wolpert Page 82 C1672/06 Track 4

hard on. It’s called Why Isn’t a Woman More Like a Man and it’s the biological differences between men and women, but nobody… been very few reviews and no-one buys it. Would you like a copy? I’ll give you a copy if you like.

Yes please.

I’ll give you a copy before you go.

Tell me then about the development of your ideas for that?

I just researched it, I didn’t know the answer, of the biological difference between men and women, and I just went to the literature and searched for it.

Where do you do that?

On the web. Well, I suppose I look at Wikipedia, I look all over, but I hadn’t given… and reading original papers, millions of original papers. But an original thing, I hadn’t given the references for things and so some woman accused me of plagiarism and I wasn’t really stealing the ideas, I just hadn’t given the references. So I then revised things and put in the references, and it is published, but nobody buys it. It’s totally ignored. And I think it’s such an interesting thing, because I point out that there are really quite small differences between men and women. I’ll give it to you, I’ve got a copy, I’ll give it to you.

[08:15] Thank you. I wonder whether, when I originally asked the question about following science in other fields, I wondered to what extent you read things like New Scientist and sort of general science…

Yes, I do, yes. I think I’ve stopped taking it, I must revise, I must get back… I did take the New Scientist and I do look at it and I take Science and Nature, you know, I subscribe to them and I glance at them. There isn’t a great deal of interest for me in them. And I’ve stopped taking my Developmental Biology journals because they’re just details now and I’m Lewis Wolpert Page 83 C1672/06 Track 4

not involved any more. And I’ve just had a new volume come out which – you haven’t seen it, it’s in the entrance hall. Do you want to see it?

[09:04] How aware was it necessary for you to be professionally in developments in evolutionary biology throughout your…

It wasn’t necessary at all, but I mean I like evolutionary biology and I have these tiny little ideas about evolution, but it’s not a subject I really worked in, no. But I think it’s very important. I mean evolution is really based on changing development, at least in terms of vertebrates, of multi-cellular things, it’s really a change in the developmental programme, so development is a crucial feature for understanding evolution.

Do you find that evolutionary biologists take that seriously, take the…

I just don’t know, I haven’t been involved with it very much, no, I haven’t. But they have to, they’ve got no choice.

I suppose what I’m getting at is during your career would you have known when new arguments in evolutionary biology were made through…

Not really, not really. I haven’t followed that very closely.

[10:19] We’ll talk more about your work in popular science, but can you comment on other prominent examples of popular science writing in your own field of biology, including I suppose the most prominent, perhaps because it was one of the earliest of its kind, The Selfish Gene, what was your view of that?

I know, yes, I wasn’t that enchanted by The Selfish Gene, but you know, it’s an important and interesting book. But it doesn’t really deal with development so it’s not my favourite, no. Cellular molecular biology books have been very helpful.

Lewis Wolpert Page 84 C1672/06 Track 4

Are there other popular science writers that you read?

Not… There must be, if I could remember them. Can’t think of anyone offhand. If I thought about it long enough I’d remember someone. The molecular biology and cell biology textbooks are very important for understanding development. I mean it is cell biology that is really the basis of everything; we are essentially a society of cells and so understanding cells is absolutely crucial, but they are so bloody complicated, it’s really difficult to understand what’s going on. Can’t think of a… cell biological or science books that I’m mad about, no.

Do you listen to radio programmes and watch TV, or have you listened to radio programmes and watched…

I don’t listen to the radio much. I watch a bit of TV. I don’t see much science on TV that interests me. A little, occasionally.

And what do you read if you’re not reading science?

I quite like to read novels really. And I’ve got a whole set of my favourite books, if I could remember them. The thing is, I remember nothing any more.

Ah. Oh yes, that would be interesting, yes please.

Do I remember books? Just let’s have a quick look. Books. Books, well I’ll tell you the books that… James has a wonderful book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I think is terribly important. What are the other ones here? [pause] There’s a very good book on risk by John Adams, which I like very much. There’s a very good book on the brain by Ramachandran, and Blakeslee, which I liked very much. And Lloyd has a wonderful book on the origin of Greek science. And then medicine and evolution, Randy Nesse has a very good book – do you want to hear all these?

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 85 C1672/06 Track 4

And Simon Baron-Cohen has a very good book, The Essential Differences Between Men and Women, I think that’s a very good, important book. I think that may be them. That may be the last one. Yes, that’s the one lot there. Let me just see the other one. No, no. No, that’s the lot really. And then of course I’ve written these other books, like How we Live and How we Die, but that’s just about cell biology for the public, and I wrote one on ageing, You’re Looking Very Well, nothing of great interest there. And I also think that David Hume wrote a wonderful book, you know, I know he’s very religious, I think he’s absolutely brilliant, I just love what he wrote. I thought I had other novels that I have read. I can never remember [laughs] what they are.

[16:01] Could you – thank you for that – can you tell me now about your own view of the way in which the media relations between science and religion tend to be discussed, with the media meaning sort of ordinary newspapers, television, radio, that sort of thing?

I don’t see much about that in the newspapers, frankly, there isn’t a great deal that I see about religion and science. It’s not something that is greatly discussed. It’s when the Church or something like that objects to something, some new principle for example. I think there was a new medical treatment for people who have a problem with the structure in their cells, the mitochondria, which is involved in energy production, and in order to have offspring you really need three parents because you need the structure also to be inserted, and the Church was very against it. And I’m very against the Church, the Catholic Church, saying that one’s a human being from the moment one’s born, you know, and so forth. Not whether one’s a human being, but that you’re really, you know, you really have a total identity from that. But I don’t think there’s much discussion of that and I do have debates with religious people, but it doesn’t interfere, nobody pays any attention now.

[17:43] It’s those debates that I’m interested in hearing about, sort of why you do it and your experience of them?

Well, I quite like, you know, I like to persuade people to believe in science and to give up their religion and face the world. And I had one in some big city hall, there must have been Lewis Wolpert Page 86 C1672/06 Track 4

500 or 1,000 people there, with some priest or other, but you know, nothing that he said is of the slightest… there’s just no evidence for thing… and I have my own theory as to the origin of religion.

Do you remember that debate, I mean what was said and the response of the audience and so on?

I don’t think you persuade people to change their minds, it’s very difficult to get people to change their minds. People are very stuck with their own opinions and to get them to change their minds is very difficult. Particularly if they’re religious.

Why then take part in the debates?

Why not? People ask me to do it and since I’m anti-religious, or don’t believe in religion, I feel I must do it. And I don’t mind debating, I don’t mind public talking. Maybe it’s the elocution lessons from my childhood. [laughs]

What experience have you had in debating with people who are concerned to show that science and religion are compatible, which is different from simply debating with people…

I’ve not had any debates, but they’re certainly not compatible in my view, they’re totally incompatible.

Could you go into that, go into your views on this?

Well, there’s no evidence for God whatsoever, there’s no evidence for miracles. And even David Hume who is [laughs] broadly… points this out, that there’s just no evidence for him. I mean the essence of science is that it’s based on evidence and there’s just no evidence for any of these things. And when you think how many different religions there are, why should one just think of the Christian one, there are many, many different religions. By contrast with science, there’s only one science. And science can change. You know, you could show that some basic idea is actually wrong and things will change. Religion’s completely different, and just consider how many different religions there are. Lewis Wolpert Page 87 C1672/06 Track 4

So are we saying that they’re different or that they’re not compatible, because…

I don’t know enough about religious now, I think they’re incompatible, probably.

[20:30] But I think you say in, for example, The Unnatural Nature of Science that it’s quite possible for someone to be religious and a working scientist.

Yes. There are…

You don’t mean that they’re incompatible in that way.

No, there are scientists who are religious, and Newton himself was religious. I find it amazing, but that’s the way it is.

Have you known colleagues who were religious, colleagues in…

Yes, yes I have.

Did you talk to them about…

Yes, a bit. That’s their view and, you know, they stick by it. And they were good scientists. I’ve forgotten his name at the moment.

[21:21] Thank you. Could you tell me about your views on two things, including anything that you’ve done in arguing for or against certain things in relation to them? The first one is euthanasia.

I’m totally for euthanasia and I am a patron of Death With Dignity, I think that’s what it’s called. I’m absolutely for it, that one has the right to choose the time of one’s own death, particularly if one’s ill, I’m totally, totally for it, and I will do anything to support them. Yes, yes, absolutely for it. Lewis Wolpert Page 88 C1672/06 Track 4

And the other one is abortion?

I’m totally for abortion. I think mothers have absolutely the right to choose if they don’t want to have the child, not to have the child.

What have you done in terms of making these arguments in a sort of political way?

Well, I don’t think I’ve done much about abortion, but I did become a patron of Death With Dignity, but I haven’t done much about it. I may have been in the odd debate, but I can’t remember anything particular at the moment, but I’m certainly totally supportive of them.

[22:37] And could you tell me about the origins of your membership of the British Humanist Association?

Well, I now am a Vice President, but I don’t, once again, do very much. If they want me to give a talk - I’m going to a dinner there I think in a few weeks’ time - I don’t do very much any more for them, but if they want me to do something, I will do it, yes.

When you say you don’t do much for them any more, does that mean at one point you did?

No, I don’t think I ever did a great deal for them, but they know that my views with regard to religion, I think, you know, that I’ve written about the origin of religion and this, and I’ve written extensively on there’s no relationship between religion and science.

How are your views on relations between science and religion similar to and different from other sort of prominent members of that society?

No idea, no idea.

So does the British Humanist Society get together in any sense?

Lewis Wolpert Page 89 C1672/06 Track 4

I’m sure they do, but at my stage I tend not to be that involved any more. No, not that much. I know I’m a Vice President, but I don’t do very much for them. They should really drop me at some stage.

I wonder whether your writing about the sorts of things that you’ve written about, including about the origin of religious belief, has that provoked any sort of unsolicited mail from…

No, not really.

…from Christian groups or Christian scientists?

No, not really. Not that I’ve ever come across. I’m sure there must be the odd email disagreeing, but nothing serious.

Thank you.

[end of Track 4] Lewis Wolper Page 90 C1672/06 Track 5

[Track 5]

Given what you’ve said today in response to questions about science and religion and so on, can I ask how you see yourself in relation to what the media refer to as the New Atheists, whether you see yourself as one of them or as separate from them, how you feel about them?

Who are they? I’ve never heard of the New Atheists.

Well, it’s Richard Dawkins and then a sort of small group of people like him arguing sort of against religion with books like The God Delusion.

Well, I’m not so strongly against religion, so long as they don’t interfere. I think you can’t really interfere with what people believe, it’s what they do that matters. So, for example, my secretary, as I told you, who I speak to every day, is very committed to religion. Why would I want her to give that up, that’s her right to have those beliefs, but if when she uses those beliefs to support certain religious views which interfere with other people, then I’m totally against it. So, on the whole I think that religion does help quite a lot of people, so I’m a little nervous about making them give it up altogether.

Other than your secretary, is there anything else in your life experience that’s led you to that sort of reticence about encouraging people to give up…

No, I think it’s just a general view. If you look at society as a whole, I think that what’s true of her is true of many people. You know, it’s jolly nice to be able to pray for something in a story, you know, I think it does help them. And if you think how widespread religion is, you see, I do think it helps people. But when they try to impose their religious beliefs on how society is run, then I’m totally against it.

Given that you’re in the same field as him, have you discussed your sort of position on this with Richard Dawkins?

Not properly, no.

Lewis Wolper Page 91 C1672/06 Track 5

[02:09] And the other thing that I wanted to ask before I go is, could you say what had changed in the period between first getting involved in public understanding of science to what you said you argued very recently in a lecture, that there’s no point doing it. What had you seen in that…

Well, I just think that it’s very difficult, there doesn’t seem to be… what is the point of getting the public involved in science? Because of the unnatural nature of science, if they don’t have any training in science, they’re going to have great difficulty understanding it. What I want them to believe is that science is the best way to understand the world, that’s what I wrote, that’s the point that I would like to get across to them. But that’s quite thing. And funnily enough, I’m writing a little book at the moment, or a little essay – I don’t think it’ll be a book, I think it’ll be an essay – called What Science Has Done For Us? so that people can see how science has absolutely made our lives immeasurably better and all the things that science has done for us. So I really feel that trying to, giving lectures or things like that, I think it’s quite nice to have it on television and radio and so forth, but I don’t think it will make an enormous difference to the public understanding of science. I think the scientists understand science, but that’s about all. But the important thing is, that they understand that science is the best way to understand the world.

What progress do you think you’re making?

I just don’t know. And there are not many recent surveys about what the public really think about science.

[end of Track 5] Lewis Wolpert Page 92 C1672/06 Track 6

[Track 6]

You talked last time about the letter that changed your life, the one that encouraged you or gave you the idea of changing from engineering to biology.

From Wilfred Stein, yes.

I wanted to ask what your views are about the role of luck and chance in your own life.

Well, I think it was very fortunate. I was trying to change from engineering to biology but didn’t know how to do it or what to think. And it was a bit of luck, or the fact that I did tell a close friend of mine about it, so that reduced the luck element, and then he had the luck of having seen this particular article in the newspaper. I never thought about that, but it did change my life. I still think I would have changed, but how I would have done it, I don’t know.

And are there other things like that in your life that you recognise, other times when you think chance and luck has played a…

Well, meeting my ex-wife when I was doing soil mechanics, and she lived near Imperial College, that was lucky, because I don’t think I would have got involved with her if I hadn’t bumped into her there. That was a chance event.

And in your career? Certain things going a certain way?

I don’t think I’ve had great luck in my career, I’ve been fortunate in having very good students and collaborators, but I don’t think that’s particularly lucky. [laughs] I think that what I was doing was something that interested… I was fortunate, but I don’t think it was luck. I don’t think it was luck.

[01:52] When you were talking, especially last time, about your early career, you tended immediately to emphasise your own mistakes, things that didn’t go well, you talked about the astral Lewis Wolpert Page 93 C1672/06 Track 6

relaxation theory turning out to be wrong, you immediately talked about making incorrect pH measurements and that affecting the conclusions you made, you talked about the Woods Hole talk not going well…

But then Brenner rescuing me.

You say that the model for hydra development was just moderately well accepted, and things like that. Why do you think that you sort of initially and immediately sort of admit to things that went wrong?

Well, because I think that one should. As a scientist, if things are wrong you must admit it at once, and I certainly did. I haven’t made that many mistakes. No, those were the major ones, I don’t think there was much else. And although my theory for the cell division, the astral relaxation was wrong, the measurements I made were correct.

[03:10] Okay. And I thought I detected, and perhaps I’m wrong about this, a similarly sort of self- depreciating view of yourself more generally, when you’re talking about yourself as a writer you say I’m not a great writer, when you talked about yourself as a father you said no, I don’t think I was a very good father. When you talked about yourself as a lover you said no, I’m not a great lover and…

I’m afraid that’s all true, [laughing] I regret to say, that’s all true, I wasn’t a very good father. I’m not a good lover, you know, my sex is, you know, I’ve had impotence on many occasions.

Why I’m not a great writer, why would you…

Well, nobody’s ever admired my writing. I don’t think it’s something that comes particularly naturally to me, I was never trained as a writer. It’s moderately competent, yes. I don’t think I’m a very good writer, no. Not bad, but not great.

Lewis Wolpert Page 94 C1672/06 Track 6

And when you comment on your broadcasting, you say things like, I don’t think anyone really took any notice of it, or I don’t think…

Well, I think I was quite a good broadcaster, quite a good one. I’m quite a good lecturer, I can speak, but that’s about all, yes.

Thank you.

My backhand at tennis is good.

[04:32] Another thing that you talked about last time was the fact that you were jealous when cousin Jack knew more about electricity than you, can you sort of transport yourself back and think about why that was, and the related question is, if he had been more knowledgeable than you about anything would you have been jealous, or was it because…

No, it was things that we were both interested in. No, I wouldn’t have been jealous of him being… well, I would have been jealous of his enormous general knowledge or other people’s general knowledge, because my general knowledge is rather poor. It was both because we were both interested in the same thing and the fact that he got two distinctions at matric and I only got one, I was jealous.

What were his two in?

Maths and science. And I only got mine in maths, I made a mistake in science. That’s when I sent him a letter saying I hate you.

So was it a competition only over certain kinds of scientific and technical…

Yes, it was. Well, yes, I think… or in any particular game that one played. I wasn’t particularly jealous, no, just competitive.

Lewis Wolpert Page 95 C1672/06 Track 6

[05:44] And more generally, as an older child and as a young adult, how did you sort of see yourself in relation to other people your own age, you know, when you compared yourself, did you think you were more confident, less confident, more this, more that?

I think I was good at talking in public. I didn’t think that I was particularly gifted in any particular way, I thought I was competent, but I didn’t think I was particularly good, no.

Could you talk about the debating at school, because you mentioned the medal…

Yes, I did.

…and I wonder whether you can remember something of how debating was taught and…

No, there was no debating taught, no.

Okay, how it was organised then, what you…

It was just organised; proposer and a seconder and things like that. But the particular debate I had, he proposed something and I opposed it. I can’t… it was about Napoleon, I can’t remember exactly what it was any more, but no-one had trained us at all, no.

So there was no, at this King Edward School?

King Edward School.

There was no sort of teaching on…

No.

…presentation or public…

Absolutely not. Lewis Wolpert Page 96 C1672/06 Track 6

But you did mention you had elocution lessons.

When much younger though.

[07:06] Okay. Thank you. Would you please tell me more about specific memories of time spent with and conversations with Helen Suzman, either as a child, or perhaps you met up with her later as an adult?

I didn’t really know much about her as a child, but when they went travelling I stayed in their house and Helen and I shared the thing that we both disliked my mother, and we talked about that. I didn’t talk much politics with her ever, I’m afraid. I just admired her political position.

What did she say about your mother?

She didn’t like her. My mother didn’t like Helen, she felt that she wasn’t Jewish enough, and I don’t know what it was, but she didn’t like Helen. And my mother, I think, was critical of Helen and that irritated Helen like mad.

Other than the politics, what else did you share with Helen?

Nothing really.

[08:04] Thank you. Oh yes, one of the things you said last time is that one of the motivations for moving from soil mechanics to biology was that you saw it as being more closely related to sort of humanity.

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 97 C1672/06 Track 6

But I wonder how close you think you got to humanity by being an embryologist, and I ask because I notice you’ve got that poster near the door and…

Gastrulate…

Yes, where you say that far from marriage and all of that and meeting your first girlfriend, gastrulation’s the most important event of life, which seems to depend on embryology sort of taking you quite far from everyday, sort of everyday humanity, if you like, sort of.

Well, it’s a bit far from everyday humanity, but it is… but once you’re in biology you can try to understand how people behave, why they behave in particular ways, and things like that. And the fact that we come from a single cell is so remarkable and so much determines how we’ll be, so this did take me, I think it takes one quite close to humanity, yes.

Because it alerts you to the extent to which people are determined?

Well, I think quite a lot is determined and how they respond to things, yes. And it leads one quite soon into evolution, you try and think a lot in evolutionary terms how things have happened, yes. [09:45] And I haven’t spoken to you, I don’t think, about my book on the origin of religion yet.

No, we can zip to that now though if you’d like to, if you think now’s the time to…

If you like.

This is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Why not? Okay. Now, well could you start then by telling me how you came to write that, how you came to want to write it, I suppose.

Lewis Wolpert Page 98 C1672/06 Track 6

Well, partly it was the fact that a colleague of mine told me about the work that someone had done on animals and they didn’t really have very good cause and effect. So, for example, they didn’t really… they could learn about, you know, to make little tools and things like that, but they didn’t… all other animals other than us weren’t very good at that. And that made me think about things and come to the conclusion that one of the characteristics of humans as distinct from animals which other people don’t – I mean my ideas have not been accepted at all – that compared to other animals a major human characteristic is the concept of physical cause and effect and this is present in young children from really quite a young age. And this led to toolmaking and it was toolmaking that had a major effect on humans. And I also realised that once they’d got the concept of cause and effect for toolmaking, they began to think about cause and effect in their lives, and this I think in early stage led to religion, because the one thing they knew did have a cause and effect on people’s lives were human beings and this made them think that there was an amazing human being who could do all these things, and that was God. So that’s my claim about the origin of religion. I don’t think anyone’s taken it seriously.

Tell me about the research for it, because I know that it…

The research was really looking at the literature on the subject.

Well then, how do you choose which literatures to consult in writing that book?

No, there was, no, there was no literature that I came across that gave good evidence for animals having cause and effect. Yes, there are some chimpanzees can use occasionally a stone to break a nut and things like that, and certain birds can do some quite amazing things of getting things out of a jar, but in general they don’t have a concept of cause and effect whatsoever. So the literature was really, when I came to the literature it supported my ideas completely.

And the study of animal behaviour, that would be sort of one field that you looked at, but you also looked at cognitive science and the stuff in the psychology of religion and work in the humanities and history and all sorts of fields, so how…

Lewis Wolpert Page 99 C1672/06 Track 6

Well, a little bit, yes, I just read the literature as best I could and wrote this book, but I don’t think… and I tried to write a scientific article for a journal on psychology, they wouldn’t accept it.

Did you get a sense of exactly why not, why it wasn’t acceptable?

They didn’t like, I think they didn’t like the idea that we were so different from animals. But they’re just wrong, you know, animals, I’m terribly sorry… they don’t have a concept of… And there is somebody else who’s written, I can’t remember his name now, saying that no animal seeing the wind blow the branch of a fruit tree and the fruit falling off would go and shake the branch, but a human certainly would.

Who was the friend who first you put you on to this observation about…

I can’t remember her name, she was a psychologist at University College. She put me on to the book which described animals’ difficulties with causal effects, yes. It’s in my book, it’s quite a while since I wrote it, so I can’t remember his name now.

And in writing it, to what extent did you have discussions with…

Nobody.

…cognitive scientists and psychologists and…

No, I didn’t have any discussion with anyone, I don’t think, no. I just used the literature.

[14:31] Okay. On the motivations for writing it then, I notice in the introduction to it, not many lines into the introduction you talk about there being in Britain at the time – I don’t know whether you meant more widely than Britain at the time – a strong anti-science movement, and it seemed that to some extent you were writing against that.

Lewis Wolpert Page 100 C1672/06 Track 6

Yes, I think I was. I think there was a slight, there is a slight anti… there was a slight mystical movement that I didn’t approve of at all.

Do you remember…

No, I don’t remember what it was about.

Okay, thank you.

[15:11] Yes, can you tell me more about, you’ve said that you don’t think, that psychologists don’t like it and the evidence is they didn’t want it in this journal, what else do you remember about feedback on it…

No, virtually nothing.

Discussions leading from it?

Not much, no. I’m afraid not.

Even friends and colleagues who read it?

No. Very little response, I’m afraid.

Are you able to give us a sense of how well it sold, you know, so if we’re thinking about the impact of it…

I think quite a few people that I know have read it and have found it interesting, but it had no real impact whatsoever, no.

And the publishers, how did they…

They never talk about it, they don’t talk about these things. Lewis Wolpert Page 101 C1672/06 Track 6

About content or… okay.

Not a word.

Oh, and in the book, I don’t know whether you can remember what you were referring to, but you say you have ‘a close and highly intelligent artist friend who has reported to me that she’s seen and communicated with ghosts on three separate occasions with no feet’.

Oh yes, she’s in a mental hospital at the moment. She’s got dementia. Yes, she was, she believed that she’d seen ghosts – what did I say, ghosts…?

Ghosts without feet, on three separate occasions.

That’s right. Yes, she was quite convinced about it. And there were many people who had mystical experiences and had strange ideas about the nature of the world.

[16:56] I wonder whether you now follow, since the publication of that book, whether you follow current work on the sort of cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of sort of mythical beliefs, supernatural beliefs and religion?

I haven’t followed it. There is quite a literature on that, is there now?

There is a bit. I don’t know whether you know the work of someone called Robert McCauley who…

No, I don’t.

…who uses your work.

No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I haven’t followed that at all, I’m afraid, no. Sorry, that’s bad, I haven’t followed up on that. Lewis Wolpert Page 102 C1672/06 Track 6

And given that you’re someone who in this book and others relates material from really quite different fields, do you have any views on how different fields can sort of talk to each other, contribute to each other?

I think it’s very important that different fields should contribute to each other and look at it. And there are obviously people like Rupert Sheldrake who have strange ideas about the nature of the world and evolution and I argue with religious people in public debate quite – I haven’t done so recently – but I’ve had quite a few debates with religious people. I’m not against religion so long as it doesn’t interfere. I mean I think religion does help people because it provides explanations, and I think we all want explanations for things that affect our lives and I think religion helps some people and so long as they don’t try to interfere I’m not against it, but I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever for the religious beliefs.

And have you, do you know any more about the reasons for opposition to this idea that you have about there being a sort of a mythical part of the, or sort of a myth seeking part of the brain or the idea of…

Well, I’ve looked a little bit at the evidence for that and I haven’t followed up that more recently, no.

[19:04] Thank you. I’ll just go back to where we were, and I was going to ask what struck you about the difference between sort of non-living and living material, when you moved from soil mechanics to biology, you talked last time about the affinity between the two subjects because you were doing a sort of mechanical kind of biology, but what struck you immediately as different about sort of…

No, it didn’t strike me at all. [laughs] It was just that the properties were, I mean living things are really so remarkable, whereas I find soil’s not that interesting, I’m sorry to say. You know, the sea urchin egg, which I spent a lot of time on, the way it develops into a sea urchin is so beautiful and the films I made with my friend Trygve, were just amazing. It really is. I mean the cell is just the most remarkable evolutionary thing ever. Lewis Wolpert Page 103 C1672/06 Track 6

What do you find remarkable?

The origin of life, and we still don’t fully understand the origin of life. But what cells do, as I say, that you come from a single cell is absolutely amazing. We understand quite a lot about it.

And when you say that the films are beautiful, what are you thinking of when you remember it?

Well, I worked in Sweden, I worked with, for several years, with a colleague, not a colleague, I met there Trygve Gustafson and he filmed, he had a machine for filming the development of the sea urchin and the films were just amazing to see these cells moving around, sending out processors and tugging and moving to specific sites and things like that, it was remarkable, absolutely beautiful.

[21:02] Thank you. Can you tell me about the reasons for your general opposition to philosophy?

My opposition to philosophy is that I think philosophers are clever, but I don’t think that anything when it comes anything close to science or anything like that, that they have anything useful to say, that if they had something useful to say it would possibly be science. And I think all the stuff on the philosophy of science is pure junk, so… and maybe there are philosophical issues in economics and things like that, but when it comes to the nature of the world, anything about philosophy I think tells you absolutely nothing.

What kinds of philosophy are you thinking of when you say that?

Any, philosophy of science I particularly think of.

Because?

Lewis Wolpert Page 104 C1672/06 Track 6

That it doesn’t tell you nothing that you didn’t know before and it’s not useful in any way whatsoever.

Which bits of it? I mean are you thinking of particular philosophers of science?

I just think that it’s about doing negative experiments is the key to be able to… and that’s all just nonsense.

Can you tell me about the significance of two people who repeatedly come up, not only in sort of interviews, but also in your books, two people that you admire, one of whom I think is a philosopher of… the first is Hume, so why do you…

Sorry?

Hume.

Well, David Hume was religious, but he took a very good stand with regard to science and didn’t believe in miracles or things like that. And so I was very impressed by his philosophy in a way, by his statements and his views, and I thought it was so intelligent for someone at that particular… probably the other person’s Peter Medawar, I don’t know whether that’s right.

He wasn’t the other one I was going to ask about, but tell me about…

Who is…?

I was going to ask about William James, because he’s someone else who you…

Well, also with regard to religion, William James talking about, his book on religion I think is terrific, just terrific and so sensible, trying to understand how people come to these ideas.

When did you encounter these two?

Lewis Wolpert Page 105 C1672/06 Track 6

Oh, it’s a long time ago, thirty, forty years ago.

So before writing the Six Impossible Things, a long time before that?

You know, I can’t remember. I can’t tell you whether it was before or after. I think I read them before, and I may quote them, I think, in the book itself.

And you mentioned Peter Medawar then because…

Well, Peter Medawar was a very distinguished scientist who was quite supportive of me and he was very nice and he had a very… he wasn’t keen on the philosophy of science either.

He was supportive of you, how?

Sorry?

How was he supportive of you?

No, he wasn’t particularly supportive of me, but I did know him. But I think his views about science, and although he was a very famous scientist, he had no interest in the philosophy of science that I can think of.

How did you know him?

It’s a good question. I can’t remember [laughs] how I knew him, but then when he was ill I actually, when he was dying I used to go and visit him. I think he was at one stage up at Mill Hill – I can’t remember how I got to know him, no idea. Sorry, my memory is terrible these days.

That’s okay. Do you remember anything of what you, when he was older and when he was dying, what you would talk about when you went to see him?

No, I can’t remember. Sorry. Lewis Wolpert Page 106 C1672/06 Track 6

That’s okay.

Pathetic.

No, not at all.

[24:55] Yes, this is… Why have you studied – there might be a really obvious answer to this, in other words it might just be a naïve question from a non-scientist – but why have you studied the organisms that you have studied in your work, so why sea urchins, why chicks?

You choose them because they have characteristics which make experiments possible. So sea urchins for my cell division, I mean I didn’t choose them, it was my supervisors that told me, but you can get their eggs, you fertilise them and they divide into two, so you’re looking at cell division, that’s the thing. Also, they’re quite transparent and so you can film them and you can see exactly what’s happening. And then much later when I was at a medical school I chose the chick limb because I wanted something that related a little bit to medicine, and it turns out that the chick limb is something which is very accessible to manipulation and to experiments, and so that’s one of the reasons why one chose that.

Why is it accessible to manipulation?

Because you can open the egg of the chick as it’s developing and you can manipulate… I wasn’t good at that, but the people I worked with were very good at moving bits around and grafting pieces in, or taking pieces out, and then closing the egg and see how it develops.

So you chose the chick limb, rather than it being imposed on you as in the case of the sea urchin?

Oh yes, I chose the chick limb.

What other possible organisms did you look at as candidates? Lewis Wolpert Page 107 C1672/06 Track 6

Well, hydra I looked at, so I was looking around for something that would be useful to understand gradients and positional information, and I chose hydra. Once again, it’s an animal, very easy to keep lots of and very easy to do experiments on.

Again, sorry if this is naïve, but why is it an animal that’s easy to keep lots of? There’s probably an obvious answer.

Because you just feed them a little bit and they grow very happily. They don’t age and if you chop their head off they just make a new one. So if you want to understand regeneration, they’re a wonderful animal to look at. Yes, no I chose the animals because of the experiments one could actually do on them.

Did you ever work on another organism and then abandon it because it didn’t sort of seem to have the…

Yes, I started with slime moulds for a bit.

What are they?

Slime moulds. But I decided that that wasn’t what I… that they weren’t going to tell me anything very useful.

Why weren’t they good?

Well, I thought they were a specialised group and were quite good for movement, but I couldn’t quite see what I would get out of them, yes, what experiments would be really useful. So the chick limb was very helpful to me there.

So at what stage were you trying slime moulds? Was that…

That was before I got on to the chick limb, really.

Lewis Wolpert Page 108 C1672/06 Track 6

So the, you were doing sea urchins and hydra and trying slime moulds?

A little bit of slime moulds, yes. Yes.

Is it because they’re not transparent in the way that…

No, no, it’s just, I think the specific thing that I became interested in was positional information and there’s no good evidence for positional information in slime moulds and in hydra it’s not particularly good either, whereas in the chick limb I was pretty sure it would be there because it’s such a well-structured system.

So it might be that slime moulds do operate with positional information but you wouldn’t be able to…

No, I don’t think they do. I don’t think they do. Not really.

So that it’s important in things that are structured in spatial ways?

Absolutely.

Okay. And in your lecture that’s online on how you get from a cell to an embryo, you talk about the use of particular organisms in evolutionary biology, and is it again obvious why fruit flies, and you talk about a particular worm, why these are the organisms that are worked on rather than any others?

Just people found them convenient to do experiments on and to do the genetics on.

Thanks.

[29:36] Now, the argument about science being the most successful way or most productive way of trying to understand the world around you…

Lewis Wolpert Page 109 C1672/06 Track 6

Sure.

…does it, I can see why that’s certainly the case for say, understanding how cells form a digestive tract in a developing embryo and that sort of thing, but is it so good for things like love and, you know, what is love or how people feel…

For everything. If you want to understand, fully understand, then science is the best way to do it, whether it’s love or sex or anything you like, or the weather, science is the way to understand. But it’s very difficult when it comes to human behaviour, understanding human behaviour, even though with science it’s very difficult, we really have a pretty poor understanding so far of the brain.

But are the things that we have a poor scientific understanding of because science isn’t the thing you need to understand them?

No, no, certainly not. Science is the best way to understand anything.

So how do you respond to sort of critics of reductionism who say that there are certain kinds of experience of reality that can’t be explained by science because what it amounts to can’t be accessed by sort of scientific study?

No, they’re just wrong. We haven’t found a way of getting access. No, no. And when we understand the brain properly, then it’ll all become clear, but we don’t understand the brain.

So you think with more work on the brain, even what consciousness is, what sort of…

That will all become, at some stage, will be understood.

Okay, thank you.

[31:37] I notice in the unpublished autobiography that you lent, you connect sexuality and love in a way that many other people don’t. So when you’re talking about your mother, perhaps she Lewis Wolpert Page 110 C1672/06 Track 6

wanted a daughter, you relate that to feelings that a cousin had about her sexuality, and what are your, I suppose a more general way of asking it would be, what are your thoughts on the relationship between sexuality and love, you know, are they the same thing or different?

Well, I’ve always been very attracted to attractive women and so my love has been closely linked… I’ve found it difficult to be in love with someone who wasn’t attractive. I did have a girlfriend when I was at university, who I liked enormously and she loved me, but she wasn’t attractive and that was the end for me, I’m afraid.

Because this might explain the parts of your life story that might seem curious to an outsider, such as when you say that you found it difficult to love your mother because you found her physical unattractive, because most people would say love is a feeling that’s got nothing to do with physical attraction.

But unfortunately, that wasn’t my case. My mother was very unattractive and I wanted an attractive mother and I didn’t have one. I know that’s ridiculous, but I’m sorry, that’s the way I felt and I find it… I can be friends with someone who’s not attractive, no problem whatsoever, but I cannot love them, I don’t think. Strange.

[33:34] When you…

You’d better become my psychotherapist. [laughs]

When you started to write books for non-scientists and appear on debates on the radio and TV and that sort of thing, what did your colleagues, strictly in science, you know, in academic science, say about that?

They never made any comments at all. [laughs] Very few comments at all.

Not, I heard you on the radio this morning…

Not much, no. No-one was terribly interested one way or another. Lewis Wolpert Page 111 C1672/06 Track 6

Is Rupert Sheldrake someone that you knew? I notice you were in a – it was on the Today programme for about ten minutes talking about whether the human genome project is going to be able to answer, you know…

Is he talking recently?

No, I can’t, I don’t know if…

Ages ago? Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

It was you against him and he was saying it’s a waste of money because it can’t answer the whole nature of reality, and you were saying it just needs more money.

Sure, I do remember that.

But I wondered whether he was someone who you’d never interacted with before that point, or whether…

I had met with him on previous occasions and had serious debates with him, yes. And, you know, I just think his stuff is absolute rubbish, to put it bluntly.

Have you had a conversation with him about that?

Yes, morphic resonances, yes. And, you know, the way the embryos develop is that they’re really taking it from the development of other… it’s just such nonsense I can’t take it seriously.

What about, if not colleagues, how did just friends who weren’t scientists, what did they say about your media…

I don’t think… they were faintly interested, but not terribly interested in my being in the public domain, no. Don’t think anyone really cared terribly, no. Lewis Wolpert Page 112 C1672/06 Track 6

And did you have any concerns about…

I didn’t have any concerns, I quite liked doing it. Yes, I like being in a public…

What do you like about it?

I like to be well known. [laughs] It pleases me that my birthday is always put in The Times, you know, they have the birthday… I’m very pleased that I’m there each year, yes.

Do you know, are you able to…

I know that sounds ridiculous, but I’m afraid that it does please me.

In what sort of way does it please you?

It means that I’m not unknown, that I really have some general identity in society. Getting a bit old now, but earlier I, you know, I did a lot of broadcasting and things like that.

[36:40] Now, can you please, if you can, say more about exactly how you ended up as chair of the Royal Society Committee on the Public Understanding of Science in 1993? Last time all you said was, Walter Bodmer put me on to it, but can you say a bit more about how exactly that…

No, he suggested, he knew that I spoke quite a lot about science and he put me on to that, he suggested that I become the chairman of that committee, yes.

Did you have any, did you contribute in any way to the Bodmer Report, or was that too early, it being in the mid eighties?

No, I didn’t contribute.

Lewis Wolpert Page 113 C1672/06 Track 6

And can you – I know it’s difficult, it’s quite a long time ago – but are there any specific memories of things you did on it, who was around, what you talked about?

I don’t think I achieved anything, frankly.

I know you think you didn’t achieve anything, but what did you do? Because at the time you must have thought perhaps we can achieve something, therefore…

I tried looking at newspapers, you know, to see how much there was in the press and discussing it with various people, but I don’t think we made much progress. And in fact I just gave a talk a few weeks ago saying that it’s not so much the public understanding of science, I don’t think public understanding of science is not an interesting issue, I think if you’re worried about the young having to understand something, what they really need to understand is economics, because that’s actually what will affect their lives. Understanding of science is not necessary. I gave this lecture, yes.

I suppose, is the argument then that you think that scientists will just carry on doing the science…

Scientists will carry on doing that and, you know, the press are quite good at telling us what’s doing and politicians will, and there are people who will be around to make sure that what the scientists are doing are not dangerous, but I think the general issue of the public understanding of science is not that important. The public don’t really need to understand it. I think it’s much more important that they understand economics, because that affects our lives much more now.

You must presumably then though have thought that the public understanding of…

Yes, I did at that stage. But on reflecting back on it, when I gave this talk about a month ago, I decided it wasn’t really that, I didn’t think it was terribly important.

Why do you think you didn’t make the sort of progress that you wanted to make on that committee? Lewis Wolpert Page 114 C1672/06 Track 6

I didn’t know how to do it, it’s very difficult. There is quite a lot of public understanding, you know, there’s quite a lot of science publicity in the press and on television, but how much the public really understand about science I think is very limited. You can be a scientist and religious, but there are quite few that are. So that already makes that quite difficult for the public, you know, for the religious public, and you don’t want to really change their views on that. Yes.

I think surveys was one of the things that you were trying…

I think I wanted to do surveys, I don’t think we got round to doing much. Maybe some little ones. Can’t remember now.

[40:16] And have you followed the development of what’s now called The Public Understanding of Science Movement since this time when…

Yes, if I read about it in the papers I do, and there are surveys, surveys of what the public understand about science, and I am conscious of that. And there are, the public understanding of science is really quite poor and there’s quite a lot of people who think that tomatoes don’t really have genes unless they’ve been genetically modified.

What’s your view on things like Masters courses for science undergraduates on the communication of science and the sort of professionalization of that industry?

Don’t even know about it, but I don’t think it’s really terribly important, frankly.

[41:10] Does it connect with your book on the unnatural nature of science that you think it’s…

It possibly is, because I think it’s really very important to realise how science doesn’t fit with common sense and it’s very difficult for non-scientists to know what you’re really talking Lewis Wolpert Page 115 C1672/06 Track 6

about. I still even am amazed that force does not cause movement, it causes acceleration. You know, these things are so counterintuitive that it’s very difficult.

Because the Bodmer, part of the Bodmer Report’s arguments is that citizens need science in order to make political decisions and consumer decisions and you…

I don’t think so, I think that citizens need to be rational and make sure there aren’t contradictions. Don’t really think they need science though.

[42:04] In 1996 you may remember you appeared on Desert Island Discs and you were then chair of this committee at that time, and you refer in the beginning of that to the BBC’s then current obsession with the paranormal – do you remember what you were referring to?

Sorry, I don’t.

And now, yes, what did your – now presumably your friends and family must have listened to that and perhaps also the Private Passions thing, because they were very sort of, well they were not very personal, but more personal than other things you’d done in this public domain…

No-one ever commented on it.

Even your children didn’t say…

No, I’m afraid not. No-one’s taken [laughs] very much interest in what I do on there.

Now, this is important, I think. It’s Sue Lawley, isn’t it, who was the presenter?

For Desert Island Discs?

Yeah.

Lewis Wolpert Page 116 C1672/06 Track 6

Yes, I think so.

She’s saying at one point, why can’t scientists leave God alone, and you reply by saying, ‘I have to say, I’m not the one who raises it, I’m the token atheist approached by those involved in religion all the time. It’s not me going out and singing my song’.

[laughs]

Can you say more about this, about this claim that you feel that you tended to be sought by the religious side for public debates rather than…

Yes, I have not gone out, I have not gone looking for public debates, it was they who came to me to have the public debate. They wanted to try and show that science really couldn’t provide the explanations, you know, and that religion really was very important.

Why do you think that, at one time anyway, you tended to be the person chosen?

Because I was quite a good broadcaster and I spoke quite well. I don’t think there was any other reason. I didn’t do much anti-religious broadcasting. I don’t know why I got involved in that, but I did. And once you get caught up in one bit of it, then people follow you more and more. I really don’t know.

And can you recall exactly how it happens, how were you contacted by…

People would just get hold of me and say will you come on to this programme. Or maybe I wrote somewhere, well maybe my book on religious belief, you know, on origin, Six Impossible Things, from there they see that, you know, I think that religion is just a mythical business and maybe that’s where they wanted to attack me.

Was it then that certain religious figures were seeing your book, say, as a threat or something?

Maybe, yes. I’ve really no idea. No idea. Lewis Wolpert Page 117 C1672/06 Track 6

[45:35] Now, are you able to remember a couple of particular debates? It doesn’t matter if you can’t, I’ll just see how much… There’s – I think you might remember this one because it was really quite big, okay – it was in 2007, it was called Is God a Delusion, and it was in the City Hall in Westminster…

Yeah, that was an enormous crowd.

And it was with William Lane Craig, organised by the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship and chaired by John Humphrys. Do you remember how in that case it arose?

Not the foggiest.

Were your publishers keen, not keen or neutral about you taking part?

Totally uninterested.

So they weren’t saying… so no-one at say, Faber said this might be quite good publicity for your book if you…

No. Faber have never taken any interest in my public performances.

Okay. Now, can you remember anything about that occasion that would not be apparent to anyone watching the debate on YouTube?

No. I think what was amazing was how many people there were in the hall and how many were religious and how little I thought that the religious man contributed, you know, that the ideas didn’t fit with anything.

To what extent did you interact before and after, you know, so after the camera was off, you know, was there a…

Lewis Wolpert Page 118 C1672/06 Track 6

No, no.

…green room before and…

Not at all, no.

No going out for dinner afterwards?

No, no.

Do you remember if any of your friends and family were there? A partner or…

I don’t remember any of them being there, no. No.

And you say you were amazed at how many people and how many of them were religious, how were you able to discern that?

Sure. There were a lot of religious… apparently, I read in the paper that the number of people in the Church have gone down quite significantly over the last ten years in this country, yes.

But what made you think that the people there on that occasion were many of them…

I can’t remember why, but I think there were a lot, and that’s why they came.

[47:57] And then another one, which is not in public in quite the same way, but it was a radio debate and it’s Premier Christian Radio in 2010. So five years ago, somehow Premier Christian Radio would have contacted you and said will you do… and this was with William Dembski, who’s the intelligent design, American intelligent design…

Oh my God, yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 119 C1672/06 Track 6

So you were in the studio with the compere of Premier and it was called Unbelievable, I think, their programme, and then he was on the phone. Do you remember anything about that? Okay. I notice that in the sort of public debates, anyway, well this one on the phone, Premier Christian Radio, you seemed to be less jovial, more serious, perhaps more… you felt there was sort of more at stake in that one than the one before. Because you were really very… in the John Humphrys one, you were really quite…

Have you listened to all these?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Good God, poor boy.

But the style is very sort of relaxed, whereas I sensed on this Premier Christian Radio one that really the intelligent design argument was quite annoying for you.

Can’t remember. Sorry, don’t know.

[49:29] Have you at any point in your career been asked to comment on medical ethics?

No.

Not taken… because scientists are often invited on to committees to talk about how foetal material should be used, stem cell…

Well, I have spoken about medical ethics quite often and one of my standard positions was that people were very against cloning and my argument was, I would give a bottle of champagne to anyone who will give me any ethical reason why cloning should be banned, and no-one has ever come forward. And I’m against cloning because a person will be damaged. The evidence is that if you try to clone someone, that person will be abnormal. But I’ve offered, you know, all the stuff has been against cloning, there’s no ethical reason not to do it. Lewis Wolpert Page 120 C1672/06 Track 6

You were on a committee for the Genetic Approach to Human Health, Medical Research Council, in the nineties.

Yes, I think so.

Did that…

No, it didn’t come up, no.

…have an ethical dimension? Okay. So how do you feel about the fact that on these committees, like the Warnock Committee and others that are discussing medical ethics, there’s very often, I think almost always, a sort of Christian contribution?

I never found that, I don’t think, no.

People like John Polkinghorne have been on the committees and Sam Berry.

I don’t think we had any problem there.

Okay, good good.

[51:10] One thing that I was not clear about last time was that you said that you ended a relationship with a woman because she had family and had to go away and see them at Christmas. Various questions about this: (a) why couldn’t you have gone with her, (b), why did it matter so much to be left alone while she did other things, that sort of… so just to investigate that a bit, because I think it might be revealing about you, I don’t know. But why couldn’t you have gone with her, for example?

She never invited me.

Okay. Lewis Wolpert Page 121 C1672/06 Track 6

I just had lunch with her last week, actually.

Why wouldn’t she have…

I don’t know. I think she also… we have discussed this, and I think one of the reasons why she didn’t… we had very nice times together and we had a wonderful trip to Peru together, for example, it was really enjoyable, but I think part of the thing was she felt that I didn’t behave very well with her friends and I didn’t take a great deal of interest in and her family. I also didn’t have much money [laughs] and also that I was on many occasions impotent, but we’ve remained very good friends. As I say, I had lunch with her ten days ago.

When you say that she doesn’t think you behaved very well with her friends…

Yes, she did say that.

…what does that mean?

That I didn’t take much interest, you know, I didn’t really try to be very friendly with them or very nice to them.

I can’t imagine you not being nice, how would you have not been nice?

Well, just not giving them much attention. That’s what she felt anyhow.

And what was, I suppose a related question is what was wrong with being left for a certain amount of time to do your…

Oh well, I didn’t like being left alone. You know, over Christmas or thing, and how I am with my present partner, she left me alone over Easter and I bumped into this friend of mine and we got together, and have remained together.

Do you particularly not enjoy being on your own, is there something about… Lewis Wolpert Page 122 C1672/06 Track 6

I’m not mad about being… I don’t mind being on my own during the day, but to spend all my time alone, I don’t like it, no. I don’t like that.

Thank you, that’s great.

[53:47] Now, would you like to tell the story of the trip to Peru before I ask the next question, which you mentioned there, but didn’t…

Well I was invited to a lecture in Peru, I think it must have been on depression or something like that, and she came with me and then we went to Machu Picchu, which I found quite frightening because I’m frightened of heights, but we had a nice time there. And then we took a little aeroplane to the Amazon, or near the Amazon, into the forest and it was really wonderful. We were with a group, a little group of us, and we would see these strange animals and walk in the forest and so forth, and I would go jogging in the forest and the guide would say, remember to keep the river on your left. [laughs] And it was very, very enjoyable. It was an exciting trip. We also went to India together, she’d arranged a very good trip there and we had a very good trip there.

[54:55] The last time you, because we quickly got on to your experience of depression, you didn’t say, well really much at all about your relationship and marriage to Jill Neville, other than the sort of very first sort of days of it, and then we quickly got on to your depression. So I wondered whether you could tell the story of that relationship and give us a sense of you two together, with Jill.

Oh, we had a very happy relationship and we did get married, as you know, and you want to know what our relationship was like. It was absolutely excellent and we lived in this flat. And she was very beautiful and she had sort of quite difficult stepchildren and one of them, Luke, lived with us, he lived in a room just around the corner, and we would go to – because she was Australian, because she was married to Richard Neville, the hippy, you know who I mean by Richard – and so we would go to Australia and I enjoyed that very much, and she Lewis Wolpert Page 123 C1672/06 Track 6

also had a little house, she’d bought a little house in France and we’d go there for holidays. It was all very good. And then I had this very severe depression, the worst thing in my life, and I was very suicidal, and I didn’t know what to do and she did say if you aren’t better in a year I’ll help you die. But then she got this terrible cervical cancer and died, and that was just too terrible, just too terrible.

Did you read her work?

Sorry?

Did you read her work?

Yes, I read her work. Can’t remember the titles of all the books, but I did read quite a lot of her work. She was a very good writer and she was very beautiful. Where’s her picture? There must be a picture somewhere here. There will be a picture of her up here somewhere.

And she must have had… I just imagine that she must have had very different ideas from yours about the best way to understand reality.

I don’t think it was something we ever argued [laughs] about. I don’t think we ever argued about that at all, we got on extremely well. Don’t think we ever really had arguments really, of any sort whatsoever.

What did you do together?

I can’t remember.

Like in this flat, you know?

Well, she would spend her time writing, you know, and I’d spend my time working. I can’t remember what we did. Go to the theatre. And she was writing a play, she was very involved in writing a play. And we went out socially quite a lot. No, didn’t do anything particular. Lewis Wolpert Page 124 C1672/06 Track 6

Would you talk about science to her?

No, not really. Not really.

And so the idea that the issue of whether, the distinction between science and art was not something that you discussed as a couple?

No. Not that I remember.

[end of Track 6]

Lewis Wolpert Page 125 C1672/06 Track 6

[Track 7]

One thing that you mentioned last time that I didn’t pick up upon was you said there was a maths teacher at King Edward School and you said he was the only one who took an interest in you.

Yes.

What can you remember about him and…

Well, we were doing ratios and I was doing quite well, and he actually praised me. And that’s the only praise [laughs] I ever got at school. It was quite funny. And, as I told you, the headmaster giving out at my final year, handing out the history paper for matriculation, handed one to me and said, ‘Wolpert, last but not least’. [laughs] Oh God. There was no praise ever at my school for me. And as I said, they beat us up a lot, but we all did pretty well.

Why did you, given your experience of being a child, your relations with your parents, I found it difficult to understand quite why you wrote to them every week while you went up Africa.

Because I felt a bit guilty about not liking them and I think they were upset that I’d left, although they didn’t fully approve of me, they did look after me, they did give me money and I’ve got all those letters, and that’s how I partly have done my autobiography, going up Africa. So I think they expected a letter from me once a week and I did write them. And they wrote to me once a week, so that was kind of them. You see, but it’s a measure, on my twenty-first birthday party in Johannesburg, none of my friends were invited, it was only their friends. For my twenty-first birthday party, not a single friend of mine was invited.

And why did you keep them, the letters?

Why did I?

Lewis Wolpert Page 126 C1672/06 Track 6

Why have you kept the letters?

Oh, out of interest and just didn’t want to throw them away, and they, I think either my father, I think my father, you know, tidying the house, put them all together. And since he’d done that I’ve kept them, yes.

Ah, so you’ve got your letters as well as the replies from…

Yes, I’ve got them all. Yes, and that helped me write my autobiography. My autobiography’s not that bad is it?

No, no, it’s good.

No-one’s interested in publishing, I haven’t tried it really. Do you think I should try and get it published?

Yes. Who have you tried?

Well, my agent thinks that it’s very difficult to get autobiographies published. But I’ll think about it more at some stage.

[03:01] And to what extent did you continue to write to your parents…

Sorry?

To what extent did you continue to write to your parents, having got to Israel…

Oh, in London I wrote to them regularly, from here, yes I did.

Again, what was, because from what you’ve said I could quite easily imagine you… I can more easily imagine you not writing to them than writing to them, so why are you writing to them in London? Lewis Wolpert Page 127 C1672/06 Track 6

Well, because they expected, out of guilt, and if you remember, I got married in what, 1950 or something and I didn’t get married in synagogue and that killed my mother, I think, she wasn’t well but that killed her. And I’d been writing regular till then and I regularly wrote to my father, yes.

What sort of, I mean how did you, what did you put in these letters?

I can’t imagine much of interest.

Would you have included sort of comments on your feelings and thoughts?

No. No, no. Just what I’d been doing, I think.

[04:04] Thank you. Can you say more about your own impression of the significance of your public debates and talks on the relations between science and religion, the sort of the significance and the impact?

I think the impact was zero. I think you can’t persuade people to either become religious [laughs] by public thing, it’s not the way things work. And so I don’t think it had any impact. And I still speak to my secretary, who when I was at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, I speak to her every day and she’s a deeply committed Catholic, and I speak to her every day and I don’t interfere with her Catholicism in any way whatsoever. She doesn’t mind, she knows that I’m an atheist. No, no, I don’t think it had any impact at all.

What do you talk about every day?

Just what I’ve been doing during the day. Only for a couple of minutes, see if he’s alright, what she’s doing, but it’s mainly me dis… and I like that conversation. I’ll phone her at about half past five every day and just to bring her up to date. Well, she was my secretary for thirty, I don’t know, thirty-five years, or so, so it’s nice that we keep on this contact.

Lewis Wolpert Page 128 C1672/06 Track 6

And you, although you don’t interfere with her beliefs, have you ever had a conversation about religion with her? Given that…

Not properly, no.

But she presumably knows you’ve appeared in…

Oh yes, she knows exactly. There’s nothing for us to discuss really. No, no. And her religion is very important to her, very important to her.

[05:55] [section closed until 2115] [07:31] Now, one of the – I know that you ended up regarding cognitive behavioural therapy plus drugs as the way to treat depression - but you did, nevertheless, at one point go for psychoanalysis, and we know your general views on psychoanalysis, but could you, in as much detail as you can remember, tell me about your particular experience of it? And you’re talking to someone who hasn’t been to a psychoanalyst, so I’ve no idea what would happen, I want you to try and remember what they said to you, to what extent they attempted to explain your problems.

Psychoanalyst I went to, it was only for a few months, because the friend that I went to Peru with, she said she wouldn’t stick with me unless I went to an analyst. And I don’t think he said anything to me of the slightest interest. It was me talking about things that I don’t think… I don’t remember him saying anything, because psychoanalysts don’t give explanations, as I remember. They try and… your conscious and unconscious and I don’t think he said very much, I can’t remember him saying anything to me of any interest. And fortunately he went away over Christmas and I never went back. He was going on quite a long thing and I gave it up. I didn’t find it at all helpful. Now, I think psychoanalysis is… one of the things about psychoanalysis, they don’t give you a diagnosis, that’s not what they’re there for at all. They’re just there thing… And it’s not like cognitive therapy in any way whatsoever, nevertheless, some people are definitely helped by psychoanalysis and maybe any verbal treatment when you’re in one of these depressions will help you. You see Lewis Wolpert Page 129 C1672/06 Track 6

we just don’t understand, that’s why I’m calling my book The Mysteries of Mental Illness, because we don’t really understand what’s going on.

Was he though interested in certain things?

No, didn’t show anything, no. Not that I can remember at all, no.

And whether or not you pay any attention to the existence or not of an unconscious and all of that sort of thing, what would you, just in general, say about your childhood that might have contributed to you, you know, who you are as an adult?

Well, there is… well, there was the fact that when I was just under two years old they went, my father one night – I think I spoke about that didn’t I? They went away, oh I don’t know, four or five months, or six months, you know, went to Europe, but they had to go by boat and so forth, and when they came back I didn’t recognise them. And that could have had an effect on me, I don’t know whether it did or didn’t.

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to try, to link up that experience, being left in the car when your mother went shopping, later not being left alone.

Like being left alone, sure.

You’ve thought about that yourself?

Yes, I have a bit. Not much though. [laughs] That’s good therapy you’re giving me now. I mean I can spend quite long periods alone. When I was in Pretoria I was alone for two years.

But didn’t like it.

I didn’t like it, no. I eventually found a girlfriend, but we didn’t spend that much time together. But I liked her very much.

Are you able to say anything specific about what it is about being alone that you don’t like? Lewis Wolpert Page 130 C1672/06 Track 6

I just feel it’s a bit, it’s being very lonely. I think I didn’t, I didn’t hate it that much, but I didn’t like it. You know, I’d like to be with an attractive female. Being attractive is very important to me. Why that is I don’t know. Partly because I found my mother so unattractive.

And how much time do you spend on your own now?

Well, I spend, at the moment now that I’m retired, I spend most days in this flat alone and then I go back to my partner’s flat which is one road away. I’ll go there about half past five, six o’clock each evening. And I also spend Friday with her, so I’m only four days a week here. Yes.

And how long have you spent, in terms of sort of without a partner, if you like, so how long have been the periods in your life where you have spent days and evenings on your own?

Well, that was Pretoria, of course.

Okay, Pretoria, but any other time in your life since then where you’ve been on your own in the day and at night for extended periods?

Not… I always had, pretty, always had someone around, although there were patches where they weren’t, you know, when I was in London in the early days. You know, there were times when I spent quite a long time alone and I didn’t like that very much, but I was taking out, I didn’t have a partner, but I was certainly taking out various females or being with male friends. But most of the time, most of my life I have been with someone or other, yes.

And, because when you say you don’t like it, it could be that it’s boring or that it causes anxiety, or that it… what is…

No, I don’t get anxiety, I just think not something I like doing, being alone all the time. But I don’t mind being alone here during the day, not at all.

Lewis Wolpert Page 131 C1672/06 Track 6

What’s the difference then, why is it okay in the day but not at…

But at night I think it’s more I just like being alone, you know. But I don’t really understand it, I’ve never really thought about it very hard. I don’t like it, no.

[13:58] Isn’t this the sort of thing that, we talked earlier about the way science can’t explain everything, isn’t this the sort of experience that when you say I don’t understand it, isn’t it the sort of thing that isn’t understandable through science, these sorts of…

Of course it’s understandable, because we need to understand how the brain works and then we can tell you, but we don’t.

And the title of your autobiography…

Trying to Understand. [laughs]

And trying to understand things like, because you said last time I don’t understand my relationship with my parents at all, isn’t that sort of thing, you could imagine someone saying that that sort of thing in the end is too complicated…

No, not at all too complicated.

…to be…

No, no. Certainly when we really have a proper understanding of the brain it would be understandable. Perhaps we’ve got a long way to go.

[14:57] So that was psychoanalysis. Now, yes, getting to – this links, I think, to the theme of loneliness – you got to sixty-five and didn’t want to retire…

No. Lewis Wolpert Page 132 C1672/06 Track 6

Can you explain, it might be obvious, but can you explain why in particular you didn’t want to retire at the age of sixty-five?

I didn’t want to be on my own. I had a nice group with whom I worked and I didn’t want to leave them, I wanted to go on doing it. And they did keep me on for a while, but that’s what I didn’t want, I didn’t want to be alone. I enjoyed working with the group, I enjoyed thinking about experiments, not doing them, and just having that very nice group feeling. I enjoyed being with the group enormously.

And so how long were you able to extend…

Oh, they only got rid of me when I was seventy or even seventy-five, but the group got smaller and smaller. I think I only retired at seventy-four, which is not that bad.

And since that sort of formal retirement, age seventy-four, what links have you kept up with the department, with UCL?

None, virtually none. I go in once a week, go in on a Monday to seminars and that’s about it. And if they want me to give – I give the odd, two or three lecture a year that they want me to give, I do it.

[16:19] And can you talk about relationships following Jill’s death? You said at some point you went back to Cynthia, but I think the partner that you’ve mentioned today isn’t that person, so just give us a sense of your sort of relationships in the sort of later part of life, if you like.

No, no, there was Cynthia – did I talk about Cynthia earlier?

Yes.

I suppose her name’s alright in the programme, is it?

Lewis Wolpert Page 133 C1672/06 Track 6

Yes.

No, I ended up with Alison, I told you, that’s who I live with now.

I don’t know how you met Alison, I don’t think.

Well, Cynthia was away at Easter and I was walking in Notting Hill and I bumped into Cynthia, who I knew because we used to go to a friend’s Sunday parties, and we got together. And I stayed with her.

And what was her…

She used to do a lot of BBC, not BBC, she was a film, television producer and then she went on to teach mainly Japanese students English who come to the flat. And she’s still doing that. And she looks after me remarkably well. She keeps me clean and tidy and well behaved. [laughs]

On Private Passions you compare yourself to a dog.

Exactly that, I’m her dog. And I do love dogs. I do love dogs. I’m sorry we don’t have one, unfortunately.

Why don’t you?

I think Cynthia, with her flat, she doesn’t want a dog in the flat.

Alison.

Alison, sorry. Not Cynthia.

But you could have a dog, presumably?

Well… sorry? Lewis Wolpert Page 134 C1672/06 Track 6

You could have a dog here, presumably, couldn’t you, if you wanted to?

I could, yes I could, but it would be quite complicated.

[18:24] Now, you also, I think this was Private Passions, you said if I die tomorrow I’d have had a good life but I can’t say I’ve behaved particularly well. What do you mean?

Well, I think I haven’t treated everyone as well [laughs] as I should have and I’ve had strong views. I don’t think I was terribly good to my parents, you know, even to run them down is quite easy, but I don’t think I behaved terribly well. And I think there are certain people I didn’t treat as well as I might have. I can be quite contradictory and provocative, I think, or some people find me so. I don’t think I behaved terribly badly. And as I say, I don’t think I was a very good father, I think maybe just too impatient with children.

Is contradicting something you enjoy doing?

No, I just do it automatically.

I wonder whether, this is just a theory, but is part of your liking for science, the very unnatural nature of it, is that good because people’s everyday sort of thinking, you’ve pointed out, is very different from the kind of understanding you get from science, so if you are a scientist, you’re very often in a position to be able to correct people when they talk about things.

Well, I do, I am a corrector, I’m afraid, yes. And I’m always checking up on what people say as to whether it’s right or wrong. So I am a bit of a contradictor.

By checking up, what sort of thing would you check up on?

Well, I just check up in my mind whether what they’re saying is correct or not, or is that the best explanation. Yes, I am a contradictor. Lewis Wolpert Page 135 C1672/06 Track 6

I think Jill used to call you a name that involved…

Yes, she did. I can’t remember what it was.

[20:30] Now that we’re on retirement and ageing and things, could you talk about the development of your interest in ageing in general and the writing of that, the book?

Well, the publishers asked me to write a book about ageing and I did do that. I’m not terribly interested in ageing, but it was quite interesting to actually write the book. You’ve looked at the book, have you? Yes. It’s not a bad book, it’s quite a nice book.

That’s the first time you’ve said that the publishers asked for…

They suggested that I write the book on ageing.

Whereas they haven’t made suggestions before…

No, they’ve never made suggestions before. And then I wrote this book on Why Isn’t a Woman More Like a Man and the trouble was that I hadn’t been, carefully referenced the quotations and so it had to be destroyed because I was treated as if I’d plagiarised. I hadn’t plagiarised at all, I just hadn’t given the references properly. And the book was, with the help of Alison, we went through it very carefully to remove and to put in all the correct references and it was published again, but it’s been very little reviewed and really sold very little. You’ve got a copy of that haven’t you? Did you look at it at all?

Yes.

Did you like it?

Yes.

Lewis Wolpert Page 136 C1672/06 Track 6

I think it’s an interesting book, but it hasn’t done very well and there haven’t been that many reviews, and the main papers like The Sunday Times and others haven’t reviewed it.

So you do look for reviews of your books?

Oh yes, I care about reviews. Oh gosh, because that’s how… So it hasn’t sold at all well. Well anyhow, that’s the way it is.

[22:34] What is the process of writing for those books, for the ageing book and for the gender book, what do you do in order to…

I sit on the computer and go to the web, the internet to find references and when I did that with that book, I didn’t give the references properly and that’s why I was accused of plagiarism and I wasn’t stealing the ideas in any way, I just wasn’t giving the quotations for the things, giving the references for that.

How did you react to that accusation?

It was quite upsetting. I got a bit depressed, but not severely so. And then somebody pointed out that I had also, in the ageing book, I put in something without a reference, and so they don’t sell the book any more. So that had quite a bad effect on me and it was quite, my plagiarism was quite widely publicised and that wasn’t good either.

Did you… yes, okay. How did you respond to it?

I apologised for it, but made clear that it wasn’t plagiarism in any sense of the word. I just had been, you know, I hadn’t taken the trouble to put in all the references properly. So that’s what it was really about, so that was bad.

[24:10] Lewis Wolpert Page 137 C1672/06 Track 6

Given that this interview is part of something called An Oral History of British Science, do you have a view on the way in which the history of science tends to be written? I know you’ve got fairly strong views on sort of sociology of science and philosophy of science…

No, history of science seems to be quite good really. Yes, when I look up the history it seems really quite good, it seems very good, yes.

Could you say something about your archives? Where should someone listening to this recording in the future, do you think, look to find your archive material?

Well, I suppose I’ll leave, if I can tidy it all up, I’ll leave a collection of my papers, leave a collection of my papers, they can look at those. And although I’ve just thrown away today, I wrote a column for The Independent on Sunday for quite a few years and I’ve just thrown away all my printed out of those, but I do think they’re on the computer somewhere. So that’s gone. But the papers are there. And of course I do have the books, there’s the textbook I wrote, which has now been taken over by a colleague, I didn’t do the latest edition, my colleague, Cheryll Tickle, took it over. And then there are the books, I suppose those are my archives really. But someone can always… I will leave most of my papers, of which there are, I don’t know, 120 or 150, I can’t remember how many there are of them, I’ll try and get them into a pile and leave them somewhere.

Do you have sort of personal papers that you would leave in an…

No, nothing. No, no personal papers really. It’s mainly about articles that I have written in one place or another.

Any diaries?

No.

Notebooks from scientific work?

No, no. Nothing like that at all. There’s nothing of interest, really. Lewis Wolpert Page 138 C1672/06 Track 6

Is there nothing that you think is interesting, or is there nothing because you’ve thrown it away?

No, I don’t think… I kept a diary when I was young, but I haven’t kept a diary since then. There are all the letters, I’ve kept those, those are there, but I’ve been trying to tidy up a little bit [laughs], haven’t made great progress. Yes, no I’m making quite good progress.

Would UCL not be interested in an…

No, I don’t think so.

Have you asked?

No, I haven’t. I probably won’t.

[end of Track 7 – end of interview]