NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

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

Steve Jones

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/12

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/12/001-006

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

Interviewee’s surname: Jones Title:

Interviewee’s forename: Steve Sex: Male

Occupation: Date and place of birth: 24th March 1944 Aberystwyth, Wales Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Scientist

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 14/10/2015 (track 1-3), 15/10/2015 (track 4- 5); 01/12/2015 (track 6)

Location of interview:

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 6 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 6 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 06:50:24

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: Track 6 between 12:59-13:42 closed for 40 years until 2 December 2055; the rest of the interview is open Interviewer’s comments:

Steve Jones Page 1 C1672/12 Track 1

[Track 1]

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

I was born in Aberystwyth in west Wales on the twenty-fourth of March, 1944, at the very moment when the Great Escapers were escaping from Stalag Luft V.

And as much as you can about the life of your father?

My father was a scientist, and actually in the end I think a rather competent one. He came from an environment, a small village called New Quay, on the coast of what was then Cardiganshire, which was filled with retired sea captains. And his own father, my grandfather, had been a sea captain for many years, he was a tanker captain for Shell, although he retired early and wasted the last forty years of his life playing bowls. And so that was that year, which I was very fond of, we spent a lot of time there, I got very interested in things marine. He then, my father then did his degree in chemistry at the university, what’s now the University of Aberystwyth, it was then the University of Wales and Aberystwyth, and which was then a really very distinguished chemistry department, now of course ruthlessly closed down during the days of Mrs Thatcher. He was interested in surface chemistry, which is really quite a technical field. Mrs Thatcher herself actually worked in that area, amazingly – not that she ever achieved anything. And he got a job for Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers, initially as a rather junior member of their research staff, but he rose to be head of their research division in his later years and was much involved in new detergents, including the stuff which was once sold as Jif and is now sold as Cif, which is a thixotropic scrubbing agent. Some people remember when you used to get cleaning fluids for your kitchen and so on, you had to shake it up, because all it consisted of was a sort of abrasive in a liquid and you spread the abrasive through the liquid, it was all very primitive. He had the idea of turning it into a gel, which was chemically quite difficult to do. So you had, the abrasive was throughout the whole liquid. So that was his life, which was in what I think of as real science, in other words, anything but biology. And he was quite a hard-line scientist actually, he was very much wrapped up in his work and defined his life really. But quite surprisingly, in fact oddly enough, somebody sent me a picture of his retirement party just a few weeks ago, he retired rather early, I think he must have been about sixty. I think he found the high pressure, the head of a big technical research department too much, and once he retired he promptly returned to the village in Wales and spent the rest, over twenty years, doing nothing.

[02:58] Did he tell you about his childhood?

Not very much, he was a rather reserved character, I would say. My mother was much more open. It clearly was a very happy childhood. There was a slightly strange event which I never quite fathomed out, where he fell out finally and terminally with his younger brother, and they had been quite close as far as I could see, and they had a terrible row about something and didn’t speak, never saw each other for forty years. But it was a childhood… New Quay is actually the place where Dylan Thomas set Under Milk Wood. Laugharne claims to Steve Jones Page 2 C1672/12 Track 1

be – in south Wales – claims to be the location. That’s where Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, but if you look at the geography of Bugger All or Llareggub, the village, it’s clearly New Quay. And really, it was an uncannily close portrait, I mean there was a blind sailor, and there was a blind sailor. There was a pub, The Black Lion, where my dad used to drink moderately, unlike his son, and knew Dylan Thomas slightly and regarded him as a terrible snob. So it was that kind of environment, it was a very Welsh and Welsh speaking environment, which is really pretty cut off from what you might call the civilised world. And I think for a young boy with an interest in sailing, it would have been heavenly.

Thank you.

[04:19] Could you do something similar for the life of your mother?

Well, my ma came from slightly further north in Wales, in a village with the English name of Bow Street, which is near Aberystwyth. And her parents were, my maternal grandfather, used to somewhat strike terror into my soul. He too was a very capable guy. He was the headmaster of a large grammar school in Aberystwyth and had been the headmaster of a grammar school in Pontycymer in south Wales. He was very religious, as indeed were my father’s parents. At least they did what people in Welsh villages then did, they always went to chapel, everybody went to chapel, I did myself. But my grandfather, David Owen Jones… that’s my paternal grandfather, John James Morgan, my mother’s father, was deeply religious, deeply interested in religion. Welsh was absolutely his first language, he didn’t like to speak English at all, although he spoke it perfectly and was a highly educated man. I found him rather overwhelming but I greatly admired him, and his wife, my grandmother, was a most charming and delightful woman. And he had had nine children altogether, so it was a very busy kind of household. And again, because my parents didn’t have much money when I was born, we spent a lot of time living there. And again, I remember that as being fairly idyllic.

[05:49] Again, did your mother tell you about her childhood? Give a sense of her early life?

Well, yes. I think it was a rather oppressive childhood because they lived on a farm, true of many Welsh families. The Morgans had been established in that area for many, many years, probably many centuries, and the families owned farms, two farms – quite big farms actually - where the children used to play, and they had to work too. And I think, unlike my dad, my ma found it rather oppressive. It was a very closed environment. Girls were not expected to do much. And my perception is that she found herself rather trapped.

Could you tell me about her education, because she herself…

As far as I’ve been able to fathom it, it was slightly odd, she went to the grammar school in Aberystwyth, which was problematic, of course, with her father being the headmaster, I think that was part of the problem. She had an identical twin. It’s rather odd that I’m a geneticist. And I think she graduated with whatever they called it Steve Jones Page 3 C1672/12 Track 1

then, the equivalent to A levels. But, you know, only a tiny proportion of people went to university in those days and it was very small when I went too, and she didn’t go to university. She did, very oddly, some kind of diploma in dairying, because that’s what people did, you know. But she never did much with it and then she met my father and the rest is history.

So she didn’t go to university?

No. Again, you’ve got to remember, I mean leaping forward a little bit, I mean when I went to Edinburgh, 1962, it was still only five or six per cent of the population who went, and my brother didn’t. My brother failed his eleven-plus, he became a bricklayer. So, you know, we’re in a different environment now, it’s very hard to look back, particularly for people who didn’t go to private schools, which none of us did. But they lived in a different universe, to an extent they still do, but things were very different in those days.

How did they meet?

I’m not entirely sure. Somehow through the university college in Aberystwyth, my father was a student there. I was born in 1944 and he had started his PhD, and if I remember it rightly, he then was dragged away from his PhD because he was interested in chemistry and became involved in munitions research in Bridgend where there was a big munitions factory. And so he was involved, I have vivid memories of him when I was young of him very avidly destroying all his lab notebooks from the munitions days because they might be dangerous. They probably weren’t dangerous, but I think what he was doing was pretty risky. He had a big scar down one side of his face which had happened through an uncontrolled explosion and he was deaf for the same reason. But then he went back and finished his PhD and I think they met about then.

Thank you.

[08:51] What memories do you have of time spent with your dad when you were yourself young, a young child?

Well, quite a bit. I mean he was a slightly distant figure. I mean it was a perfectly happy childhood, I would say. I was left, the thing which is most bizarre about it, my memories are, and it’s really stuck with me for most of my life, is that it was the classic benign neglect, really. I mean I, most of my memories of those days aren’t of the rather unpleasant inner Liverpool or Liverpool’s ‘left bank’ suburb which they’d moved to when I was about five or six, my memories are nearly all of going back to Wales, which we did a lot. And when I looked back on it I was amazed what they let us get away with. I would just disappear off in the morning in New Quay, I couldn’t swim a stroke, they never dreamt of teaching me how to swim, I still can’t swim. I couldn’t ride a bicycle, didn’t cross their mind they would teach me to ride a bicycle. But myself and my chums would borrow a boat and we’d just row out to sea and we’d go out of sight of land sometimes, didn’t seem to – without life jackets – it didn’t seem to bother them in the slightest. And then I used to go off for long rambling walks all day with them having no idea where I was, but I always came back. So it was benign neglect. Part of that, I think, Steve Jones Page 4 C1672/12 Track 1

explained why I spent most of my waking hours, or many of my waking hours, in the local library, particularly in Bebington, which is a rather unpleasant suburb on the Wirral Peninsula. And I used to go, my memory of it really is, my ma used to ring up the library and say, ‘Is Steven there?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh yes, he’s always here’. And she’d say, ‘Send him out to play!’ So of course the library staff would think this was very funny and they’d send me out and of course I’d sneak back in within twenty minutes. So it was in some sense a slightly solitary childhood, I would say. But perfectly contented.

[10:46] And are there other things that you did with him that you can remember, places he took you…?

Well, not very many. I mean we never went on holiday together, apart from New Quay and Bow Street, and I used to go fishing. All his friends from school, and he stayed close to his primary school friends throughout his life, in fact, they all came back, nearly all of them, many of them did. Many of them became fishermen, mackerel fishermen, lobster fishermen. Some of them became well-off because, you know, lobsters became a very… now of course, they of course destroyed the lobster stocks. And his ambition clearly was to stop work as a researcher and become a fisherman, that’s what he wanted to be, a commercial fisherman. But his great friend died from, he was overweight, I remember him, what was his name? Meurig Lewis. And he had a sudden heart attack when he was pulling up an anchor, and died. And they had a scheme which I was never fully inducted into, that they would buy a fishing boat together and would make a living as fishermen, but that didn’t come off and I think that’s why my dad retired and did nothing. And we used to, you know, occasional things. I used to go fishing with him, that was the main thing I used to do. Apart from that, not very much.

On those occasions fishing with him, do you have any memories of the sorts of things he might talk to you about or be concerned with?

No, not really. I mean I was just somebody who was on the boat really, as far as I remember. I mean it sounds… it certainly wasn’t what you would call a conventional bourgeois upbringing, by any means, particularly given that my brother was rather problematic and, you know, he’s a nice guy, but he was often rather difficult. I think, you know, it was a self-contained, two child, two parent unit of the kind that happened in those days, and I was part of it. There was certainly none of this sort of enrichment which you hear about and going to museums and that kind of stuff, forget it, none of that at all.

And so, if I ask you then about time spent with your mother, are you going to say a similar sort of…

Oh, she was slightly more involved. I think she was pretty good at it. She was a terrible cook, I remember that. And we used to go out for walks and that kind of stuff. But again, I think you were expected to make your own, have your own interests, and I did.

[13:08] The house that you moved to in the Wirral, could you take us on a tour of that? I’m asking… Steve Jones Page 5 C1672/12 Track 1

Wouldn’t take very long. [laughs]

Okay, yeah. And if you can, in doing so, if you sort of picture your mum or your dad, or your brother, in a particular place in that house doing a certain thing, you know, to give us a sense of where they tended to be in the house and what they tended to be doing.

Well, it was a very, I mean in retrospect – I haven’t been to it for many years – it was a very ordinary 1930s small, semi-detached, three-bedroomed house. But in retrospect, actually, the houses, it was a classic petit bourgeois house really. I don’t know how much they paid for it, certainly was less than a thousand pounds. But in retrospect they were actually rather pretty houses. They were semi-detached with a bow front, very small rooms of course. There was a front room and a living room and a little tiny kitchen on the ground floor, and then three bedrooms on the first floor. I had the back bedroom, my brother had the very tiny front bedroom and they shared the big middle bedroom. Quite a long garden, although my dad had no real interest in gardening. And then on the side, a garage. And after, when I was about twelve or thirteen, I suppose, he bought his first car, a Rover. And my memory of him would be fiddling with the damn car, which was constantly breaking down because it was already ten years old then, it was a primitive piece of British design. My ma would be in the kitchen opening tins.

Thank you.

[14:46] What did you play with in your room inside?

I read enormously, really. That’s what I basically did. Somewhat later, slightly later in life I began to teach myself the guitar, so I used to play guitar. But I didn’t really play with much. When I was fifteen, rather uncharacteristically they gave me a very valuable birthday present, which was a pair of binoculars, and I was interested and this allowed me to become more interested in birdwatching. They knew I was keen on birdwatching, because I used to read a lot of bird books. And I did a lot of that, but that was a completely solitary vice. And I was no good at all at it. I mean I have friends, biologists, who are really effectively professional birdwatchers. I mean they can tell you anything without binoculars at a distance, I could never ever do that. But I enjoy doing it and I used to go out and do a number of quite risky things, going out to the little island, called Hilbre, where I was nearly drowned a couple of times, by myself. So I did a lot of that. Beyond that, not very much. I used to play canasta with them a little bit, and I’d get furious when I lost and it gave me a lifelong loathing of card games. My grandfather taught me how to play chess, I played chess with him quite a bit, that was my mother’s father. And I have vivid memories actually, ironically, of my mother in a very concerned way saying, you’ve got to let Dadcu – it’s Welsh for grandfather – win at chess. And I thought, that’s ridiculous, why should I let him win at chess, because the poor guy by this time was beginning to get Alzheimer’s Disease. And then I started winning and I was stopped from playing with him, and I was too young Steve Jones Page 6 C1672/12 Track 1

to realise what was happening, but I think they were right to do that. So they’re the kind of memories. I think I had a toy train for a bit, but I wasn’t very interested in it. So that was basically it, I would say. [16:42] Oh, I had an extraordinarily bizarre fad for a while, a boy’s like thing, of collecting cheese labels. And it was the early 1950s, the time of the Young Elizabethans, as they were called, and I remember it well, where boys collected things: stamps and so on. Well, stamps struck me as too bloody obvious, so you could send off for these books of cheese labels, of which I collected hundreds, god knows why. And I glued them into albums in different countries and different kinds of cheese. I had no interest whatsoever in cheese, but it was just the labels. And then very characteristically, as soon as I left home and went to university, my parents immediately threw all these out without even crossing their mind that they might want to keep them. So that’s another way I spent my time.

Did you tell me whether your brother was older than you or younger?

He’s younger than me.

[17:39] Did you, as a child, have a sense of how you might have differed from him or been like him?

Oh, I think we differed in many ways. I mean there was, he’s five or six years younger than me, and that’s a difficult gap, because when I’m getting into adolescence he’s being an annoying five or six year old. And we weren’t particularly close as children. I mean he failed his eleven plus and went to a very, very poor secondary modern school, which was rough. I went to, oddly enough, I have some friends, still have some friends who went to my grammar school, Wirral Grammar School, and they had been at primary school, this particular friend, had been at primary school with Kendall – my brother’s name – and he apparently had been a fearsome bully and had bullied all the other children, which I hadn’t known. And I can kind of see why, because he was the small element of the household really, I mean I was the do-gooder, passing his exams and that kind of stuff. But, you know, Kendall to me - and we’ve grown very much closer over the years, although he’s never made a career really, he’s been a bricklayer, doing short-term jobs - he to me has always made me a passionate supporter of comprehensive education, because, well, although my grammar school was certainly not a particularly great school, if you didn’t get to it at the age of eleven, in those days, then you were finished, it was as simple as that. In fact, the day you sat your eleven-plus was the most important day of your life. [19:19] Now, my primary school, in England, Grove Street Primary School, was, in retrospect again, a very, very good school. I mean I couldn’t speak English really when I got there. I could, but it certainly wasn’t my prime channel of communication. But I learned it almost immediately, which children do. I have no memory of the process of learning it. But in those days it was banal, you know, when Liverpool was booming and the docks were going and all that kind of stuff, it was very common to have Welsh speaking kids appear in English speaking schools and they would just deal with it. But my memory of it is one of being impressed by it, actually. It was, you know, it was the standard 1940s/50s primary school. There were forty-two kids in the Steve Jones Page 7 C1672/12 Track 1

class, you sat at desks in alphabetical order. You had a jotter, you chanted your eleven times table. You learned how to spell ‘accommodation’, which I still can. And it was a very formal and old-fashioned kind of education, but I think it did me a lot of good.

Those memories of primary school are very detailed.

Yeah, they are.

What else can you remember of this stage, because very often people can’t?

Oh, I remember a lot about it actually. It was a fascinating school, really, because the Wirral Peninsula was, and to some extent still is, a bit like, it’s the only way it’s a bit like New York, otherwise it’s not like New York at all. But New York used to be, it used to be the case in New York, and was the case until 1979 when the country fell apart, in London that you could walk five streets and you’d be in a totally different environment, okay? And our house in Bebington was, it was quite a way, it was about two miles, a bit less, from the school – I used to walk it there and back every day – and the primary school was in a very poor and really deprived, rather deprived part of that area, New Ferry, and it was very, very working class, most of the kids were extremely working class kids. But you don’t notice, you know. I have no memory of being bullied or anything like that. I thought the teaching was good. I mean, rather blowing my own trumpet, they used to, when I was in the last year, I didn’t try to be a teacher’s pet, but I tended to be. I mean they were always sending me out to do things, to go to the library and pick up a book or go to Birkenhead and deliver a letter. And again, they showed a lot of confidence in kids there. I thought it was very good actually. I certainly wasn’t unhappy there, I was never bullied there, I didn’t bully anybody there. I thought it was, yeah, it was generally a pretty satisfactory experience.

And did you have a sense of being like or different from the other children, your peers?

No, not really. I mean, you know, we were just kids. It was a mixed school, primary schools always were. I have very specific memories. I remember sitting on the coke in the middle of winter, reading a book. I never played games, we didn’t have anywhere to play games, there were no playing fields or anything like that. We used to run around, there was a yard with a pile of coke in the corner. We had school dinners, I didn’t like egg custard. No, I think it was a successful school. I mean you felt safe there, there was no pressure. But again, if I remember rightly, of the forty-two-odd kids in my last year, I think two of us got to grammar school, myself and a guy called Ian Tyson that I was friendly with, and of those two, one, that’s me, got to university. So that shows the difference. The guy who was my tutor at Edinburgh, Bryan Clarke, who was a very nice and very good tutor, very nice guy, I remember talking to him about this and I’ve always been a rabid leftie and somebody with a passionate hatred of public schooling, and Bryan used to get really annoyed about this and we used to shout at each other. And he went, he had a rather difficult life, his father was killed in the war, killed in the Café de Paris bomb which landed in the West End, and Bryan went to the Dragon School in Oxford, which is a very grand preparatory school in Oxford, then a public school, I can’t remember which one, then went to Steve Jones Page 8 C1672/12 Track 1

Oxford. And I used to say, compare and contrast, how many of the kids in your preparatory school went to university? Ninety-five per cent. Mine, two and a half per cent. So, that’s always loomed hard in my imagination. [24:27] One of my main memories – leaping ahead a little bit – I remember the first public school boy I ever met, which is at my first day at the University of Edinburgh, I’d never met a public school boy before then. I’m still struggling to recover from the experience, I have to say. But it’s odd to say that now, because of course I’m surrounded by the buggers now, but again, it’s a kind of statement of what a different life it was for most people. You know, we were the submerged ninety-five per cent. Now, that sounds self-congratulatory, but it was true.

Thank you. [25:04] What do you remember of any outdoor education at primary school, or if not that, geography or nature studies in the classroom?

Oh, nature study, well not so much at primary school, but I was very interested in nature. It sort of pre-empts my scientific career, because I was a field biologist for thirty years, I did large amounts of field biology, or nature study, to give it its correct term. But it was very odd, because I used to read nature study books in primary school and I used to read them all the time. So I had this great theoretical knowledge of nature without much practical insight into it. We used to go and collect insects in the ponds and that kind of stuff, myself and various, you know, friends. But I knew much more about them in theory than I did in practice, which isn’t really the traditional way you’re supposed to do it. You’re supposed to, scientists are supposed to pick up these insects and the like and find out about them, but no, no, I did it the other way round. And actually, that’s what’s happened, I spent the last third of my career writing about stuff I don’t really know in practice. So it’s rubbed off, that’s rubbed off to a degree.

[26:15] And are there particular outdoor spaces that were significant in childhood? In fact, I must admit that I know one, because you took part in a programme, The House I Grew Up In, and as part of that you went out to a particular fort, a particular sort of relic.

Yeah, hillfort, yeah.

So do include that, but that and any other outdoor places?

There are indeed. Certainly New Quay, I spent all my time every day, whatever the weather, on the pier, as we would say, or on the beach, basically on the shore. And I did all kinds of things; I used to rent out rowing boats. The miners used to come in the early 1950s in south Wales, and of course, this is when the coalmines were still going, and I have vivid memories of it, it actually was rather idyllic. They used to have, you’d have two or three hundred miners standing on the pier singing in perfect harmony, and then going and getting completely pissed in Steve Jones Page 9 C1672/12 Track 1

the pubs of course. So there was that. And then when we were up in Bow Street, in Llandre, I used to wander round the countryside, which is extremely beautiful up there, often alone, sometimes with my cousin, and we’d go on a farm and we’d work on the farm and I’d muck out and we had to do various things on the farm. I was very good at castrating lambs, I remember. Sbaddu, the Welsh to castrate, I’ve never had much use for the word since. Yeah, so I do. Now, when we moved to the Wirral, which I never warmed to, I did find a few places, there’s little streams and so on, which reminded of Wales, so I used to go down there. And I used to go for long solitary walks a lot, often rather pathetically to the south, to the Deeside side of The Wirral, because I could see the Welsh hills over the water, you see, where I wished to be. So it all sounds a bit nostalgie de la boue, but that’s the way it was.

[28:21] How do you perform that castration that you mentioned?

With a rubber band and a thing that opens up like that and you put the opened rubber band over the poor lamb’s balls and then you close it and you pull it out again, and then they drop off. [laughs]

Thank you.

Just the thing an eleven year old boy should be learning to do.

[28:42] And could you describe the site of the hillfort that you visited in that programme?

Well, the hillfort, I used to believe – it’s called… what’s it called now? Can’t remember what it’s called. How can I forget that? It’s in that programme. I used to believe, west Wales, there were many, many hillforts, Celtic hillforts, whoever the Celts were, that’s another question. And there were two or three of them which I used to go to, and there was one particularly grand one which – Castell Gwallter, Walter’s Castle – and I used to go up there because there was a magnificent view, as you would expect, because of course that’s the point of a hillfort. But in fact it wasn’t a Celtic hillfort, it was much later, it was Norman and Walter was one of these Norman thugs who came and oppressed the natives. But I used to spend a lot of time up there fooling around. So that I did a lot of.

What might you, in fooling around, do you remember the sort of thing you might have been doing, and who with?

I had, my cousin Alun was there, I’d go up with him. He had a dog, we used to take the dog up. I used to collect what I foolishly thought were archaeological specimens, they were stones, and take them to school and say this is an archaeological specimen, but no, it was just a bloody stone. I’d started birdwatching a bit by then. So it was just basically mucking around in the countryside really.

Steve Jones Page 10 C1672/12 Track 1

[30:12] And your birdwatching, did it involve recording in any way?

Oh yeah. I had, at great expense I bought The Handbook of British Birds, saving up my pocket money. And Peterson’s bird guides. Oh yeah, you want to tick ‘em off, god yeah.

[30:29] You’ve given us a sense of your political outlook and some of the reasons for it, can you tell me about your parents’ interest in and engagement with politics?

I think they were rather conservative, with a small ‘c’. I remember, strangely, the ’51 election, which was the one in which Labour lost. And I remember I was then in primary school and they had the election on the wireless, and I was very interested in it, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but we did listen to it. And certainly my dad was keen on the Conservatives. But of course the Conservatives then were far to the left of the Labour Party now, so I mean you’ve got to… And I saw myself, insofar as I thought about it, as a natural conservative with a small ‘c’, in the sense that one wanted to conserve things. You know, I mean we lived in the time when the Conservatives built far more houses than the Labour Party had ever built, the health service just went cruising on. I mean, until the sixties, the Conservative Party was the Labour Party, effectively. So that was the time. I never really thought much about politics, but then when I was in school, which because it was Wirral Grammar School, which was really a very second… the science teaching was appalling, dreadful. The arts, the English and history and French and so on was good, even very good. But we were sort of kind of taught, or it was assumed that we would sneer at the people who went to the secondary moderns. We never really sneered at them and that was the expectation, that you are special. And a very odd memory which occasionally comes back to me is that where the school was, and it was a huge school, it was one of the biggest schools in Britain at the time, and on the corner opposite was an enormous ramshackle building that was called ‘The Orpho’, for the orphanage. Now the Orpho was of course, what happened was, because Liverpool and Birkenhead had a strong Irish population and Ireland was then still in the Middle Ages really, lots and lots of Irish girls who got pregnant were thrown out, and they came across and their children were just abandoned. And these poor kids, who obviously must have had a terrible life, being looked after by nuns in this frightful building, as far as we were concerned, they didn’t exist. You know, they were on a different plane from us. We saw them every day, I don’t think anybody ever spoke to them, and it never really crossed our minds who they were. And it was that kind of sense of, pathetic as it seems as I look back on it, that sense of entitlement which they tried to instil into us. They may not have wanted to instil it into us, you’re different, you’re special. Which is a thing which in the end turned me strongly towards the Left.

[33:38] Thank you, and can you tell me about your experience of religion in childhood?

Well, formerly, a hell of a lot. It was a bit, I mean I used to go to chapel every… Ysgol Dydd Sul, Sunday school, every week under parental and grandparental pressure. And it was really very odd, because, that was Steve Jones Page 11 C1672/12 Track 1

partly because in west Wales and Welsh Wales that was the centre of the community, everybody went. I mean I don’t know anybody who didn’t, really. And it was also certainly in my mother’s area, which was very traditional, it was the centre of music, absolutely. So I used to go, and the irony is it became a bit like the Roman Catholic Church, in fact it was a Welsh Presbyterian Church, because the point of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages until really quite recently, was that the priest would speak in Latin, so that the poor old congregation had no bloody idea what he was talking about. Probably didn’t have much idea himself, if the truth was told. And of course I used to go to these sermons in Welsh and I was beginning to lose my Welsh already. And of course there’s two kinds of Welsh – there’s three kinds of Welsh – there’s Welsh, there’s BBC Welsh and there’s chapel Welsh, in ascending order of difficulty. And chapel Welsh is, you know, I mean Welsh is a difficult language and I really couldn’t understand it. The days I might have understood it, I was too young to understand it, and then as I became older I might have understood what they were talking about, I began not to be able to understand what they were saying. So I had plenty of that, and my parents, when they moved to bloody Merseyside, they insisted that I continued to go to a Welsh speaking chapel because they wanted me to keep my Welsh. But it was a hopeless task really, they meant well, the people in this chapel, because they wanted to keep people speaking Welsh. But it just evaporated and I stopped going. And I never really had any strong feeling for religion at all. We had, as every British school used to, we had morning assembly, which was a perfectly cheerful event. I always regarded it and my chums regarded it as a bit like a polio vaccine, you know, you had a small dose early in life and that cured you. And I’ve never been religious, really, at all. I’m not passionately anti-religious, but I just don’t… it just leaves me, you know, it’s like people who are really interested in cheese labels, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

[36:19] And did your parents, or did all of you do any sort of worship at home in any way?

No, no, god no. Oh, in my grandmother’s house, yes, of course, before eating, always. But no. My parents were non-believers, if the truth were told.

[36:39] And before we get to grammar school, could you just tell me something about your relations with your grandparents, bearing in mind that this has been covered to some extent in other interviews, but I know that there’s an attic in the paternal grandparents’ that’s significant. So if you could tell me about your relations, because it seems to be that until the move to the Wirral, you lived sort of alternately in the grandparents’ home?

Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They rented a little tiny cottage in Aberystwyth for a while. I mean, you know, this is a long time ago. But that’s where we, certainly physically, lived much of the time and I mentally lived most of the time in that part of the world. My relationship with my paternal grandparents was close but not very close. My father’s father was a rather stern sea captain-y kind of man. His wife was rather, I think, rather browbeaten and was the classic, you know, the boy doesn’t go into the front room, kind of story. They had the parlour where you didn’t go. And so I mean they were perfectly nice people. I used to go to bed bizarrely early, I used to go to bed, until about the age of twelve, I used to go to bed at seven thirty every night. Steve Jones Page 12 C1672/12 Track 1

And then I’d read in bed, of course, until midnight. But they were perfectly nice people, there’s no question of it. And we had lots of extended family there, so that was nice too. I was much closer to my mother’s parents. My grandmother was really rather a saintly figure, if the truth were told. Very religious. Very, very good with children. She’d been a nurse during the time of the First World War in Poplar, in the East End, where conditions were dreadful. And she used to talk to us about the poverty in the East End. I remember that vividly. No, I mean they were very positive, I would say.

[38:39] Thank you. Could you describe the grammar school, to start with, and then…

Wirral bloody Grammar School. I have mixed feelings about it. It was a strange place for a grammar school, in retrospect, although I go to plenty of schools now, I always have done throughout my career, and they’ve got to be much more relaxed places than they were in my day. But – which it simultaneously is and is not a good thing. Wirral Grammar School was an absolutely bog standard suburban grammar school, built in the 1930s, long low red building on a corner. A big school, about 1800 kids, which is one of the biggest. It was both male and female, but crucially, the boys’ school and the girls’ school were separate, they were in the same long double building but there was a Berlin Wall with an electric fence between them. And there was very little intercourse, in the social sense, and as far as I was aware, none in the physical sense, between the two schools. We got there and it was kind of in aspic. I got there in 1955, I think. And my main feeling was one of dustiness, really. The school was very shabby, I mean we’re still in the post-war years really. My memory is that the internal walls in most of the rooms were just painted brick, they weren’t plastered or anything like that. It had been thrown up, a very undistinguished building. The labs were in a dreadful state. It had a big, big playing field, that was good. We used to roam around, it had a wood on it, which you went into and played there. The standard of teaching, in retrospect, was extremely mixed. I mean what it tried to do, as so many of those schools did, was to pretend it was a public school and the masters all wore gowns all the time. We had to stand up when they came in and sit down and call them Sir. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. They had corporal punishment, which was quite extensively used by some of the weirder masters, and my god, some of them were pretty weird. And that I think was a bad thing. And I remember, I was on Any Questions with the guy who’s just failed to be elected to lead the Labour Party, Andy Burnham, who’d been to another school in Liverpool. And he’d been to the Christian Brothers in Liverpool and the Christian Brothers were famous for beating the hell out of their pupils. And he agreed, we talked about this on Any Questions, and I said all that did to me was to make me hate my teachers. And he said that’s what it did to him too. And that’s gone. But, you know, as I look back, particularly on the mathematics teaching, it was desperately bad. It was just desperately bad, it’s the only word for it. I mean this, was his name CD Jones, a man with no interest at all in teaching elementary maths. I mean Pythagoras’ Theorem he could do, but he never explained why Pythagoras’ Theorem might be interesting. And I got to do, I taught myself some calculus. But there was no, oddly enough I have one exceptional memory of that, was we did for some reason, the only maths lesson I remember, the thing on the shape of the catenary curve, and the catenary curve is if you have a heavy chain and you hang it, it follows a particular curve. And we did this and we did our chain, then hung it, it followed a curve. And then he told us that this was used in Greek architecture and if you looked up, it was a pillar, and you looked up, because the Steve Jones Page 13 C1672/12 Track 1

shape of the curve was such that it looked straight, rather than… And I thought, that’s bloody interesting. And I remembered that, I remembered it actually, I made a television programme, I did many years ago on Seven, Seven Wonders of the World. One of my Seven Wonders was Greek architecture with a catenary curve. So that just tells me that if you can spark some interest in somebody, they will remember it. But this guy couldn’t spark interest in a pornographic film, you know, I mean he was just deadly. And the same was true with physics, I mean it was just reading out in a monotone what was going on, copying down formulae from the board. And of course if you’re copying down formulae, you make mistakes, and my dad used to find my physics books and go mad and start shouting and say, you haven’t got that right, you haven’t got this right. So I hated that. Chemistry was just the components of an unknown mixture. Who in the name of Christ wants to know the components of an unknown mixture? And all I remember about chemistry is saying we’ve done unknown mixtures and we’ve done some salts and we’ve made some red salt and a blue salt and a green salt and I said, we want a yellow salt now. And the chemistry said, well put these two together and they make yellow. That’s five years of chemistry in my memory, okay? And since then I’ve actually read quite a lot of chemistry and I’ve written about chemistry and it’s a deeply interesting subject. [43:33] Biology, on the other hand, was different, because it’s what I wanted to do. And a lot of the teaching was awful, but there were one or two really good biology teachers. I dedicated one of my books to a guy called ‘RC’, Richard Simpson, RC Simpson, and he had the ability to interest people. And in fact it was rather touching, he discovered the book was dedicated to him – I hadn’t seen him for forty years – and he wrote me a nice letter and so on. But he could interest people. I have to say it’s much easier to interest kids about biology than it is about maths, unless you’re really good at it. But he sparked the interest and really from the word go I wanted to be a biologist, that was it. The irony is on the other side of the equation when it came to French, say, or English, history, were extraordinarily well taught. All that was good and we used to look forward to those lessons. And I came under a lot of pressure, because I was a kind of glib little bugger, and I could always write essays. I could always write my evening essay in the last ten minutes of a lesson and I would often do the bloke next door, for him as well. And there was quite a lot of pressure by the powers-that-be for me to do arts A levels. I said, forget it, I don’t want to do arts A levels, I want to be a scientist. If you do arts A levels you end up being a bank manager, the last bloody thing I want to do. And I don’t regret that at all. But I do regret, I very much regret the fact that my science is in many ways a house built on sand, in that the fundamentals, particularly the mathematical fundamentals, are not there. And it shows how easily you can get away with it by bullshitting. But, you know, it is a statement of great weakness really.

[45:26] When you say that you wanted to be a biologist from the word go, can you go into that a bit more? I mean was this wish to go into biology, did it pre-date this teacher, did it pre-date this school?

Oh, I think it did, yeah. I mean it was, I don’t know, it was partly a desire to be out in the open air, partly – and I used to, as I say, I used to, as part of that desire, I spent thousands of hours in the local library, which is an extremely good library, the Mayer Library, I remember it well, closed now of course, needless to say. But I used to read improving schoolboy books, okay? Arthur Ransome, which one would be embarrassed to read Steve Jones Page 14 C1672/12 Track 1

nowadays, and I tried to re-read one a few years ago, it made my flesh creep, it was practically pederastic in tone. But there were always out in the Lake District, you know, doing all these exciting things, and that’s what I wanted to do. And that’s what I did really.

[46:27] So Wirral Grammar School, what would you have known about careers in biology?

Well, not very much. Ironically enough, one of my dad’s university friends, if I remember it rightly, was somebody called Alan Gemmell, who was one of the early presenters of Gardeners’ Question Time and, if I get this right, I may have got it wrong, he had been at university with my father. And Aberystwyth University had been very, very strong in plant science, and still is actually, I’m on their external board now. But Alan Gemmell had become a professor at Keele University and when dad sent me down to talk to him when I was doing my A levels, about careers, and there was a thing, the Institute of Biology, which I’m now a member of, Fellow of, God help me, had little booklets about careers in biology. But they were rather… they were very uninformative, they were about being a lab technician and that kind of stuff. And, you know, I didn’t really think about a career, it didn’t really cross my mind. I automatically assumed that I’d become professor of biology, which is a foolish assumption, but those were the days when you could assume that and it would be true, and of course now things have completely changed.

[47:42] Could you say why the teaching of RC Simpson was good?

He was engaged, he didn’t hit us. He took us out and we did quadrats, you know, throwing those squares in and collecting. We went on walks in north Wales, I remember that. I got very interested in geology actually, for that reason. And he engaged us, you know, that’s the central thing. I mean I now know as a teacher myself, and I boast accurately that I’m a very good teacher, that it’s possible to fake that. You know, I fake orgasm in front of classes all the time. But most of the students don’t realise that I’m faking it and they get engaged and that makes a big, big difference. I could, I start my first year university lectures in genetics by saying, I’m a geneticist and my job is to make sex boring, and they look at me blankly. But you can certainly make sex extremely boring, I can tell you. You can make cell biology extremely… and I’ve been to biochemistry lectures that make you want to shoot yourself because they’re so boring. But they don’t have to be like that. The beauty of biology is you can always do something terribly boring about the Krebs cycle, say, which is a metabolic cycle, and you can say, well, people used to try and slim by decoupling this part from that part, but then their body temperature would shoot up, why would that be, and they’d die of hypothermia. And you can always put something in which, you know, it’s like a bait on a hook. And it’s much easier to do that in biology, but you should be able to do it, a good teacher will do it in maths or chemistry, or physics. But my teachers in those subjects couldn’t do it. I think once you’ve lost a class, you’ve lost it forever, and I think that was the problem.

[49:33] What sort of extracurricular activities did you get up to at Wirral Grammar School? Steve Jones Page 15 C1672/12 Track 1

Going to the library. [laughs] I used to go, one of my ongoing resentments really was, I’ve always been very interested in music and that was obvious from an early age because my grandparents, both sides, had pianos and my grandmother’s mother used to play the piano and sing hymns. And it was obvious I wanted to play, because I used to sit and play tunes and I learned a few chords. Then I learned, I taught myself to read treble clef music, I could never quite manage the two clefs. And I bought a guitar from my pocket money when I was about thirteen, I suppose, and taught myself to read music and to play classical guitar. And I spent a lot of time doing that, I did that throughout my university career, I practised at least an hour a day for about ten years, more. I was never any good because I was never taught. But that was a bit of an ongoing resentment, somewhat of a statement of the kind of household it was, which is it was clear that I wanted to do this but it never crossed anybody’s mind to do anything about it. So I occasionally used to go to Liverpool, to the Philharmonic in Liverpool, by myself. I used to go to Gilbert and Sullivan in Liverpool when I was in my teenage years, again by myself. And again, a sort of iconic memory, and we’re talking about Liverpool in about 1956/57, when it was still pitch black, dirt poor, still bombed flat, much of it, and I remember going to – what the hell was the theatre called? Can’t remember. The Empire, was it? With the D’Oyly Carte, where these poor people who had obviously sung The Mikado 5,000 times who are utterly sick of it. And of course it was all new to me, I thought it was wonderful. And I remember getting back to the underground, Mersey Rail as it now is, filthy dirty black place, and getting on to the train back to Liverpool’s ‘left bank’, to Bebington, and seeing this bloke in a dinner jacket with his violin in his hand and thinking god, that life, that guy has an exotic life. Must be a marvellous life being a musician, going around. Of course the poor sod was playing Gilbert and Sullivan in Liverpool, going back to a bed and breakfast in Birkenhead, he was obviously on the edge of shooting himself. So, myself and my friends, and I had a lot of very good friends and I’m glad to say that’s true, and I’ve kept in touch with some of them, as soon as… we used to go into north Wales a lot, either by bus or later one of them borrowed his father’s car, it’s amazing we were never killed. And we used to go up in the mountains, go walking and that kind of stuff. So I did a lot of that.

[52:28] What would you do after school, as you’re getting to be an older child, even an adult, at grammar school?

Go to the library and then sneak off to the pub afterwards. Yes, my alcoholic habits started young. Yes, that’s what we used to do, basically.

So this was sort of at A level sort of stage or…

Even a bit earlier. Probably A level stage. I mean they were very forgiving, probably too forgiving, about serving underage kids in Liverpool, and myself and my mates used to go to the pub and drink quite a lot at the age of… [laughs] I had one friend, a very close friend of mine, still is, now lives in Sydney – John McCririck, who’s a doctor – he now drinks less than I do and I don’t drink to great excess, but I certainly drink too much. But John came from, again, a very religious family and his mother, who was a very keen Presby… He’d never had a drink in his life and I had begun furtively to drink lager and lime – you remember, don’t you – lager and Steve Jones Page 16 C1672/12 Track 1

lime was probably since your time, and myself and a couple of my chums would sneak into the local pubs and pretend to be eighteen, then probably sixteen, fifteen even, and have a lager and lime. And we persuaded John, who was very, very dubious about doing this, he thought he’d get into terrible trouble at home, we persuaded him to join us one night, and I have vivid memories of it and so does he. And he came for the first time into a pub and said, ‘I’m going to have a half of bitter’, I said. And he said, ‘I’ll have a half a bitter. Ooh, I like this’, and he drank it and he drank three pints of bitter. And he went home completely drunk and of course this was my fault and I was banned from his house for the rest of my life. But we often laugh about that. So that’s what we used to do, really.

Did your parents know that you were doing…

Oh, I think it was pretty obvious, yes. But they didn’t drink at all. Occasional sherry, that would be it, yeah.

[54:30] What then were your parents’ expectations of you? What sort of things did they approve of and what sort of things did they disapprove of?

I don’t think they noticed in particular. I mean I was a rather conventional schoolboy really. I didn’t play football. I used to go out collecting golf balls with my mate John McCririck who then became very keen on playing golf, but I never did. No, I think I was conventional, well behaved and rather dull.

Were other boys of your age doing this drinking?

I would say yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think so. I was lucky really, I mean I was in with a bunch of half a dozen entirely male friends who were a nice lot and we’d do a lot of things together. And the school from that point of view was good, there was no bullying, as far as I was aware. I never bullied anyone, I was never bullied. I think it may have been a tiny bit to some of the most vulnerable kids, but it was very, very small. I had a PhD student once, ten years ago, more than that, twenty years ago, who’d been to Wirral Grammar School, and actually looked uncannily like me and spoke with, I mean my Liverpool accent’s more or less gone, but he spoke with an accent which had elements of Liverpool, as mine slightly still does, and people used to think he was my son. It was rather embarrassing because he looked very much like me. And I said, ‘Well, what’s your memory of Wirral Grammar School?’ And he said, ‘I fucking hated it’. And I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because I was bullied all the time. And then when I got older I used to bully the kids below me’. So that’s changed and what caused that to change, I don’t know.

[56:09] Could you tell me then about the decisions made about going to university, including conversations that you might have had with your parents about the wish to go?

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Oh, I mean I think my dad’s assumption was that I would go. I mean, you know, he’d gone. His father, he used to boast – I think rightly, actually – that there hadn’t been for six generations or what have you, a Mr Jones in the family. He was Dr Jones, his father had been Captain Jones, his father had been Captain Jones, his father had been Captain Jones. And if you went back to my mother’s side, my grandfather I think had a doctorate, but his father was the Reverend Morgan, then the Reverend Morgan, the Reverend Morgan going back for three or four hundred years. So there was a kind of an assumption that you would go, and I assumed I would – probably wrongly – I assumed I would go. But I almost didn’t. I mean I did A level maths, physics and chemistry – sorry – I did A level physics, chemistry and biology. Did rather badly, particularly in physics and chemistry because I was crap taught. Then, as I remember rightly, it was all very complicated, it was all aimed at the unattainable dream that somebody from my school might go to Oxford, which almost never happened, you know. And of course the Oxford/Cambridge system was utterly corrupt, because you couldn’t get in unless you’d done Latin. Now - even if you were going to do chemistry, right? And in fact I did Latin – go back a little bit – I was taught Latin by, not that I remember much of it, although it did me a lot of good when I did remember, by the most remarkable guy, Ebenezer Titus Ebenorufon Fury, by name, who was the first African teacher in a British grammar school. And I, for some reason, took a great shine to him. I don’t think he ever realised it, I think because he was so exotic, and he was a great guy and he was a strong believer in tactile teaching. In other words, if you did anything wrong, he’d beat the shit out of you, and he did it to hurt. But he was one of those, and I went back to see – he was a Sierra Leonean. This is slightly off the point, but I remember him well, he’s the one I remember most of all. And he’d come - I disentangled his career a little bit – he’d come to Britain in order to become a lawyer and to earn enough money to do his law, he’d become a supply teacher and he was teaching Latin in our school. And he was a very African, very upright kind of chap. And Sierra Leone had been, the Creoles as they call themselves, they were the educated class of West Africa then. Things have now changed, but of course Sierra Leone’s gone down the tubes, but it was then, you know, it was the Hampstead of Africa. And he left a mark on me and I actually went back to Sierra Leone many years later to try and find him, and I did find him, and I found him living an old, sad man in a slum in a corrugated iron hut. I thought he would remember me, and of course he didn’t remember me at all, but I did remember him. But anyway, university entrance. I wanted, I was desperate to get back to Wales so I applied to all the Welsh universities, of which there were only four: Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea. All of which turned me down. This was in the days before what is now UCAS and was then UCCA, where every university had its own application system, they were independent of each other. And if I remember rightly, you were only supposed to apply to four, and I applied to those four, all of whom turned me down. And I think they were probably, in retrospect, justified because my A level marks, apart from biology, were lousy. They had a thing called general studies, in which I was told, blowing my own trumpet, that I had the highest mark in Cheshire. And I could believe that, because I mean it was all about literature and so on, that stuff, I knew that stuff, but that didn’t count. So almost in despair, I then re-did, if I remember rightly, there was some complicated timing stuff, I can’t remember. I then re-did my biology as zoology and botany, which I taught myself. I went to Liverpool, Picton Library in Liverpool, every day and basically learned the zoology and botany out of a textbook and did those again, got better marks in them. Went round the houses again and the University of Edinburgh accepted me, thank god for that.

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So was this an application the following year or later…

I can’t remember. There was something very complicated about it where you could apply after two years… it was a three-year sixth form and it was all very complex. You could apply after your second year and if you didn’t get in you had another year and you could apply again. But there was something very odd and I don’t remember how it worked. Because in your third year you’ve more or less left school by then, you didn’t have to come because you were more than sixteen. So I also had a job in a power station, part-time, so I did quite a lot of that too. So that… I learned an awful lot without really learning it, I became very good at rote learning, you know. So that’s how I got in.

[1:01:34] What were you doing in the power station?

I was a… well, I was doing all kinds of things in the power station. I mean in the end it turned into a rather well paying vacation job, but we all did vacation jobs, there was lots of work in those days. So I started as a fitter’s mate, and that actually is what turned me really, it moved my political views [laughs] absurdly far left, because as soon as I got into the power station – it was a steam power station, part of the Unilever system – and Unilever made detergents which involved huge vats of chemical fluids, which they used to heat with steam. So this power station, the Merseyside Power Station, the MPS, was an oil-fired steam station which also had turbines, had electricity. And it was really a very dangerous environment. It was quite modern, built in the fifties, but full of asbestos and full of, you know, roaring – I lost a lot of my hearing there. And I was in with all these like, these here blokes, like, and it took me about a week to realise that these guys were doing things I could never dream of doing. You know, you’d have a turbine with maybe a thousand parts in it, every one of which had to be completely in place, none of which could be allowed to break as it would blow up, could kill somebody. You’d have electrical circuitry, which was terrifying, which they could simply do. And that made me think, you know, these guys have skills I haven’t got, I might have skills they haven’t got, but there’s no real difference between us. They were also extremely funny. It’s an odd thing to recall, but it was the case that the stereotype – most stereotypes are in fact accurate – you know, the stereotype of the dour Scot, having spent ten years in Scotland, I can tell you is dead right, the stereotype of the rather crafty Welshman, speaking as a rather crafty Welshman myself, is correct, and the stereotype of the funny and sardonic Liverpudlian is a hundred per cent right, or was a hundred per cent right. And these guys were funny. They were very, very obscene. I don’t think I uttered a sentence without the ‘f’ word in it for five years. And that did me… that was arguably the best thing I ever did, actually. It gave me a feeling I could do things hands-on, which I hadn’t had before, because being a fitter’s mate involved, you know, undoing valves and doing the simple stuff for him and being told what to do and holding welding rods. No great skill, but it gave me a sort of sense that I could do things and much later in my career I then began to build scientific instruments, did a lot of biochemistry on machines I’d built myself, which I wouldn’t have been able to do with my school training, I would have thought it was below me. So that was very useful. But that’s what I did, there was a kind of long gap of six months or so before in the end I went to Edinburgh and most of that I spent in the power station, and then every vacation after that for three years.

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[1:04:32] And what was the degree that you were reading at Edinburgh?

Well, it was called zoology, it was a BSc in zoology, but that was the time when really biology as a science was invented. You know, in the old days there’d been degrees in zoology and botany and biochemistry and ecology, but that was all in the midst of – and genetics – that all really began to collapse when I was there. And now most universities will have degrees in biology, as we do. And my degree was in zoology, but in effect it was in genetics and evolution.

[1:05:07] And what was your parents’ view of this choice?

Are you going to work in a zoo? [laughs] Yes, that was their view of it. They couldn’t quite see the point of it, but I enjoyed it. I mean it was, again, again, I mean University of Edinburgh I owe an enormous amount to. And in fact I was just thinking as I was walking through the crowded corridors of UCL, I mean UCL, god almighty, what a peculiar place. I’m glad I didn’t come to UCL, not because we don’t give them a good education, I think we do, but because the experience is so different from mine at Edinburgh. I mean Edinburgh was an odd place in many ways. I mean Edinburgh had been established, as I’m sure you know, in the sixteenth century as the ‘Tounis’ the Town’s College, and its history was one, that the boys of the town, Edinburgh, would come to the local college and they would be taught the Latin and so on, and law, and that’s what the University did. And it still had remnants of that attitude. Most of the students were locals, many of them lived at home. I’m talking about 1962, by the way. It was changing and it changed rapidly. But the University had effectively almost no interest in the students’ welfare at all. It had a health service, which I never knew about really, I didn’t need it. I spent my, not my first, but my second night and my third night in Edinburgh on the station, Waverley Station, sleeping, because they’d given me to live, some digs, which was a commercial traveller’s hotel, out in distant Portobello – grisly bloody place – and because I had my guitar she threw me out. So I just slept on… then I wandered around and found a bedsitter in the small ads. You know, there was no pastoral care of any kind, they had no student housing, they had one tiny amount of student housing. And in some ways you could sink or swim and to an extent I kind of almost sank, initially, but then in the end you swim. And the great, the most impressive thing about it really, even in second year, they regarded you as an adult, and they gave me a key to the Zoology Department – gave us all – keys to the Zoology Department, which we could enter twenty-four hours a day. You know, all the rooms were open, all the experiments were running. I often used to spend the night in the library, used to sleep in the library now and again, so did other people. Some people, myself included, because they had nowhere to stay, would go and sleep in the library just because it was a convenient place to go and sleep. And that level of sort of confidence was something which was very important to me. You were your own boss and if you wanted to bugger it up, you go ahead and bugger it up, we don’t care, we’re not going to help you. But if you’re going to make the effort, we’ll make the effort as well. And that’s totally different from the way things are now, it’s all homogen… I mean it’s inevitable, but you know, occasionally I go to Oxford or Cambridge – Oxford worse than Cambridge – and I think this isn’t a university, this is Disneyworld, you know. And I have, somewhat to my shame, large numbers of my friends Steve Jones Page 20 C1672/12 Track 1

now are Oxford/Cambridge graduates who went to Westminster School or Eton and so on, and several of them have been in the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. And I’ve been to these various schools and gentleman’s clubs and Oxford colleges and the House of Lords, and I think this is so weird, because all these kids are still in their prep schools, you know, the whole experience is homogeneous from the word go. And the thing I always remember about all these places, they all have the same hooks in the cloakrooms, those nineteenth century rather solid hooks, you know. They’ve been hanging their school jackets on those hooks when they were eight and they’re hanging their ermine robes on the hooks now that they’re sixty. And so it’s all homogeneous and there’s been no development really, in my view, probably naïve view, of their lives. And the great joy of mine and of many of my grammar school colleagues, is there was some sense of progress. And it must be terribly disappointing for these people when there’s no sense of progress, you know, you get up to a high level, you stay on the high level and then perhaps you begin to regress, and that must be awful. So I think that’s the best thing about the story, was the way it was on an upwards curve.

[1:09:39] What did your friends at grammar school, as you’ve explained, most of whom weren’t going, in fact all of whom weren’t going to university, what did they…

Oh, the ones at grammar school, many, many of them, many more of them… from the primary school they didn’t, because they didn’t get into grammar school. Something like, I suppose, of the entrants into the grammar school, I suppose about ten per cent or a bit more, maybe a bit more, one in six maybe, got into university. But of course, only about one in ten, or a bit more than that, got into the grammar school, so the total university input was about four or five per cent. Most of my friends went to university, most of my school friends went to university. Several became doctors or dentists. One of my close friends became, rather bizarrely, a landscape architect. I lost contact with him. One or two of them didn’t get in and were shattered not to get in. But, you know, we were the – how would you define yourself – we were the upper lower middle class who were bettering ourselves, and we did better ourselves, there’s no question of it. So that’s the… Most of us got into university to do something. Teach, some of them became teachers, yeah.

[1:10:50] Could you then tell me about the first year at Edinburgh? What were you encountering, in terms of the subject?

In some ways, the first year in some ways was a bit of a continuation of the school experience, except that we were thrown into this deep end – and by god it was a deep end, Jesus Christ – but, you know, we did physics, chemistry and biology. And the physics and chemistry, again, were bad. The physics was taught by a well- known physicist, what was his name? I’ve forgotten. And he wrote a book called Mass, Length and Time, ,which was an attempt to teach physics without calculus, which is very hard to do, and I was completely baffled by this, because I wasn’t used to thinking in formulae, neither were any of my colleagues really. Chemistry was again, how to extract silver laws, so it was weak. Zoology 1, Zoo 1, was very traditional, but it was, you know, cutting up rabbits and that kind of stuff, I was doing that. But it rapidly got better. I mean the first year, I think, was rather dull, but it got better. And the thing which was good about it was that I at least felt myself so Steve Jones Page 21 C1672/12 Track 1

privileged to be there, that actually, I was always, I mean most of my friends are hard workers, I was always a hard worker. I mean I used to go out and get drunk all the time as well. But yeah, I mean I think it was a very repaying thing, actually. I could have certainly, particularly in the first year, could have been better taught, but that changed, I mean the standard of teaching really began to get much, much better as I went through it.

[1:12:28] You said when you first came that you did nearly sink, what were you remembering?

Well, it was difficult. I mean I was living alone in a bedsitter. My friend who I mentioned, the chap who I introduced to drink, he’d come with me, I saw him. It was a very masculine kind of, there was a boys’, there was a men’s union and a women’s union, and it was a very masculine thing. And [laughs], one of the main reasons, I never really thought of leaving at all, but this was the winter of 1962, this was the coldest winter for 150 years and I just, the Edinburgh climate, my god, you know. That winter I nearly froze to death, I genuinely did wake up in the morning and the water in the sink would be frozen, and you’d walk to work – you couldn’t afford the bus fare – so you walked two miles to college and fall over on the ice, Christ, it was murderous. But I very rapidly adapted to the place, I really did. And again, it was, the lack of pastoral care was very important to me, I mean in retrospect. I did have, I think many students had, in my first year the feeling that I’d failed. I sort of went into a terrible tizzy. I went to see my tutor, who was a nice guy, Ron Kille, who I’d only ever spoken to once or twice, and he was very used to this and he calmed me down a bit. So it was fine.

And what are you remembering when you say that the teaching got better? When do you feel that it…

Oh, because what happened was, zoology was still in a very strange sort of transitional state, because, I mean for example, I spent about, ooh, seven or eight weeks, on a course on sea anemones and corals and that kind of stuff. And they had all these little models, very beautiful glass and models of different sea anemones and corals, which we learned about. And it didn’t really cross my mind as to why the hell are we learning about these fucking sea anemones, you know? And the reason was, I now know, was that in the 1860s or seventies, the Challenger Expedition, which was the first marine biology expedition, had been sent from Edinburgh on HMS Challenger, Her Majesty’s Research Ship Challenger, under – what was the guy’s name? Anyway, it was some grand biologist of the nineteenth century. And they’d worked on corals, okay, and they’d brought all the specimens back, and a hundred years later they were still using these damn things to teach zoology. So it was still dissect it and, you know, where does it come from, where does it fit in, which is kind of a framework you kind of need, but I’m not sure we needed as much as we got. But then very soon, in second year, it got into teaching the real biology and it got good. [1:15:25] I was very lucky because my second year boss, who I later did my PhD with, was a guy called Bryan Clarke, and Bryan, who’d been at Oxford, as I mentioned, and had just started his job at Edinburgh, was really quite a grand character and he had the Oxford background and I never – he’s dead now and I’ve never thanked him as much as I should have done – but his expectation was that his tutees, of whom there were five of us, I think, would get a weekly essay which they would write and we would read them, literally, in his – because there was Steve Jones Page 22 C1672/12 Track 1

nowhere to read them in the college – we’d go to his flat in Albany Street in the New Town and we’d sit around, rather palpitating, reading these essays and discuss them for an evening. And I did that every, whenever it was, Thursday night, for two years. And that was him, he didn’t have to do that, very few other people did, and it was a completely formative experience and that, you know, when I moan and groan about Oxford and Cambridge, I have no right to from the teacher point of view, because they do that. But we can’t do that here, there’s no way in hell we could do it, we haven’t got the personnel to do it. Edinburgh couldn’t do it for most people, but Bryan, because he was very dedicated, could do it, and that made a big difference. [1:16:50] And then, as it went on in third year, then in fourth year, I began to do genetics. And the genetics department, although we didn’t realise it at the time, was really one of the leading genetics departments in the world. It wasn’t Cambridge, which was the leading department, but it was pretty damn good. It had people like CH Waddington, who was a developmental biologist, Charlotte Auerbach, who invented chemical mutagenesis. And a guy called Barnet Woolf who was the statistician. Henrik Kacser who founded what’s called systems biology. And they, often we were taught stuff that was way above our heads, but Henrik in particular, they had a cafeteria in the basement where they served this terrible muck called Coca-Cola, which was terrible coffee, which was free. And we used to go down there and I have vivid memories of Kacser, who was a Mittel- European Jew, and many of the people were Jewish who’d come to the International Congress of Genetics in Edinburgh in 1939, just as the war broke out, and never gone back, thank god for them. And he would simply plonk himself in the middle of a bunch of students and say, ‘What do you think about x?’ And we’d think, who is this madman? And then you’d start talking about it. And you were drawn in to feel that you were part of an academic community. And that again, I have to say, is not something which I think we succeed very much in doing now.

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[Track 2]

What then in the second and third year in your memory now stands out as the sort of most striking new material that you were encountering?

Well, it’s stuff really which I continued my whole life in studying, second and third year. Bryan had a course, Bryan Clarke had a course on evolution, which he talked about the stuff which is now hopelessly old-fashioned, but in those days was cutting edge, about butterflies, about fruit flies, about snails, all of which I was utterly fascinated by, I don’t know why. Largely because it has a lot to do with mapping genes, not in the sense of mapping on to chromosomes, but mapping out the frequencies of genes in different places, which I’ve spent many years – it’s an utterly futile pastime – but I’ve spent many years doing it. And that overlapped, actually, something I haven’t mentioned, which is always important to me, largely because of this Latin teacher, which is the genetics of human race. And I’d read Mein Kampf actually, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and a lot about, a book by Ashley Montagu, which had been put out by the United Nations just after the war, about race, biology of race. And I was very interested in this, and of course we knew nothing about it then. But the idea you could map out human genes is now banal, it’s now been done. So that really sucked me in and Bryan was an excellent lecturer. Then there was a guy called Aubrey Manning or Aubrey William George Manning, again rather grand. He came to UCL, and he was a brilliant lecturer, in animal behaviour. And that sucked me in. And then, a lot of the biochemical stuff was good, developed. It was the sense of excitement really, there was a real sense of excitement. I mean, you know, I really felt it and I felt most of my colleagues felt it too. [01:46] And it was a time, again, with the benefit of hindsight, when it was the time, you know, when genetics was really beginning and evolutionary biology, which had been stagnant for a long time, was beginning, the development was beginning. And you had this feel that it was all beginning to unfold and now it’s of course, it’s begun to implode [laughs], sixty years later, it’s got much, much worse. The stuff we thought we knew, we don’t know. So now it’s picking lint out of navels, you know, trying to find out the details. But then the grand picture, what we thought was the grand picture was beginning to emerge and to be part of that was very exciting. [02:27] Although you say that it’s old hat now, for listeners sort of outside the field of biology completely, this won’t make any difference, and therefore could you tell us what Bryan Clarke was lecturing about?

Well, he was lecturing about, I mean as I keep… people often say to me, why have you wasted your life working on the genetics of snails? And I say, well I don’t think I’ve wasted my life on it, but you’re probably quite right, that I have wasted my life on doing it scientifically. But why did people work on snails in those days, or on butterflies, let’s say. And the answer was, they were the only systems where you could see genetic diversity in nature. You could go out and look at my snail - I’ve got some in there, I’ll show them to you - and you could count the proportions of different variants which have got stripes on, no stripes or one stripe, or they’re yellow or they’re pink. These have been bred up and they were genetic, and you could count genes. Butterflies, to an extent you could do the same thing. Fruit flies you could do by looking at the chromosomes Steve Jones Page 24 C1672/12 Track 2

under the microscope. But you couldn’t do that with anything else, at all. All we knew about human genetics – and human genetics was always a great interest of mine, partly because of the political thing, and indeed, when I studied my PhD, I wrote to Curt Stern, who was then the doyen of human genetics in Berkeley, saying I was interested in doing a Masters in human genetics. And Curt Stern, who was a grand figure, who I never met, wrote me a very nice letter back, saying that actually he thought it wasn’t, human genetics wasn’t ready yet to do human evolutionary genetics, and he was dead right. I should continue doing evolution and then pick up on humans later, which I did. So that’s why we studied them. Now, of course, you can look at diversity in anything you like, humans most of all. So if you want to ask a fundamental evolutionary question, the species you look at is homo sapiens, because the money’s there, the genome has been sequenced, we have historical data, it’s politically and socially interesting. And so if I started again now, I would be looking at human populations. But when I started you could only look at snails, so I looked at snails. And that’s why I did it. And it was, in its day, a perfectly legitimate thing to do. [04:52] Now, many of the people who were doing PhDs with me or a bit later than me, got into fields which were actually much, much more repaying. I mean somewhat later than me, a couple of years later than me, Paul Nurse was a student in Edinburgh and he got the Nobel Prize. And he worked on the cell cycle, President of the Royal Society, now head of the Crick Institute, next to the British Library. And Paul is a very, very nice guy and brilliant guy, you know, he had the common sense and the good luck to be working on something which turned into a gigantic field. Well, I had the common sense… I had the bad sense, but the good luck to work on something which stayed as a small and narrow field – snail genetics – and as I often say, I’m now one of the world’s top six experts on the genetics of snails and the other five agree. And I really don’t mind having done it, I’ve done some – I’m blowing my own trumpet – but I’ve done some quite good science. There are other fields I wish I’d persisted with, which I didn’t, particularly my drosophila stuff, which I did quite a lot of. A lot of that went on in a way which was very interesting, which I’ve never followed. But I have no real regrets, I think.

[06:10] Could you say a bit more about your interest in the geography of races? I wondered whether you’d encountered any of this in school geography at all?

Not really. Again, a thing I haven’t mentioned, but it’s very true, as a schoolboy I had an obsession with maps and particularly OS sheet 127 – I even remember the number, I think it was 127, could have been 147. No, it was 127. Which was the Cardiganshire map. And the Ordnance Survey maps of those days were very pretty things, they still are in their own way. And I used to go for walks and fill in where I’d been on the map. And I learnt to read maps and vivid memories, I used to keep a little notebook of where I’d been. And the first word I ever looked up in a dictionary was the word ‘accrete’ - A-C-C-R-E-T-E – and I’d been reading something somewhere about Cors Fochno, which is a bog, now a nature reserve, how this bogland had grown. And it had grown by accreting soil. And I thought, what’s this, accreting, you know, adding on. And that was part of my map interest and once I was out with – we used to go to, from school, we used to Malham Tarn Field Centre – and vivid memories of seeing, they must have been geography students there, we’d been there for the day Steve Jones Page 25 C1672/12 Track 2

running around collecting insects, and snails actually, now I remember it, freshwater snails. And I saw these geography students surveying and so on, thinking god, I’d like to do that. And basically that’s what I did. So these things kind of overlap. It’s these odd experiences in your childhood that tell you. Yeah.

[08:00] Part of the reason for asking is that I noticed on that television programme that we referred to, you talk about HJ Fleure and he was a geographer who was doing sort of early studies of the geography of Britain, I wondered whether you were reading any of that material at this age?

Oh yeah, I used to read… oh, at university level, definitely. Even before I read some. I never read any Fleure, which is very hard to read, but I certainly read… I mean human genetics is a fascinating subject. Well, genetics was a fascinating subject. Here’s what was then the standard textbook, a standard textbook, which is a very good book. This is a slightly late version of it. So here we go… destroying my case here. No, I’m not destroying my case actually. It’s all about non-human genetics. It’s all about drosophila, animal breeding, little bit about twins there, but almost nothing about anything else. There were two reasons for that. First of all, not much was known and secondly, geneticists and biologists as a whole were deeply embarrassed about what had happened in the world of human genetics. And so – and it’s worth remembering, this was the Galton Laboratory until UCL in its stupidity changed its name, eugenics was a very real phenomenon. It wasn’t much practised in Britain, but of course it was practised in the most horrendous way in other places. And because I’m always interested in politics, there was an overlap, which is very interesting. And so I was interested in this and in retrospect, what was interesting about it, was the denial, the denialism that went on. [09:45] A little bit later when I moved to the States, I worked with Dick Lewontin, who was a grand figure, and he would be the first to assure you that he was indeed a grand figure, who’d begun to work on protein variation in drosophila. And at the same time here, at UCL, Harry Harris who was a professor, the Galton Professor of Genetics, had started working on protein polymorphism in humans. And the expectation, and we’re talking early seventies now, the expectation clearly was that if you took Africans and Europeans, there was an expectation, which was more or less universally shared, that you would find them to be quite different biologically. And that expectation made sense, because if you look at Africans and Europeans, they look different, end of story. I mean we don’t like to say that, but it’s true. But I remembered arguing with Dick, and Dick always called himself – Lewontin – always called himself a Marxist, which I always had my doubts about, but we were finding, people were finding this wasn’t true in these days of looking at protein polymorphisms, now long gone. I mean the technology’s years out of date. And I remember in Chicago, where I then was, they were all kind of leftie, it was during the Vietnam War and everybody was anti-war and that kind of stuff, and people were saying, this is great, this proves that racism is wrong. And I remember saying, hang on a minute, what happens if you do some more and you find that Africans are – or whoever you like – are indeed different from Europeans, does that prove that racism is right? And in fact, what then happened with the DNA systems, in fact, it turns out that Africans and the rest of the world are different, in that the rest of the world is a small sample of what’s in Africa. But that doesn’t say anything about racism. So I always had, perhaps slightly sophisticated, more political view of it than many biologists had. But certainly, an awful lot of biologists here in Steve Jones Page 26 C1672/12 Track 2

London in the 1950s and sixties were – and here at UCL – were racists in the sense that they believed in big – and I don’t mean that in the political sense – but big inborn differences between the races. Flinders Petrie, who was the archaeologist, was absolutely convinced that the finest race ever were the Ancient Greeks and they brought, because the Egyptians were Africans, the Egyptians had stolen their ideas from the Greeks, which is completely wrong, it was the other way round, okay? And so that feeling was around, that the races were different, and people didn’t like to talk about it. So that gave me a sort of an interest in that aspect of the subject.

[12:22] This was, you were detecting this while at university, this…

Well, there was a strange tension, actually. The University of Edinburgh was a very white university, except that, ironically enough, it was the year – I went in ’62 – and it was the year that UWI, the University of the West Indies, either that year or the year after was founded, and before that, many Afro-Caribbean students came to Edinburgh. There was a kind of formal arrangement, I’m not quite sure how it worked. But there were some of them and we were very friendly with a couple, became very friendly with a couple of them. What was his name? Really nice guy. And of course we’d never really known an Afro-Caribbean guy before and he was a delightful, very well educated middle class bloke. And the statement of the issue was, he was very popular, he stuck out like a sore thumb and he could drink a lot, which was good. He got into the Guinness Book of Records for drinking a yard of ale quicker than anybody else. And he stood to be President of the Union. And what happened? All the other candidates stood down, to allow him to become President of the Union. And that was a very kind of quintessential moment, you know? It was, because he was of African origin we had to be specially kind to him, and that was the obverse of what had been the view thirty years before. And is equally stupid. And I think now people have now developed beyond that, and thank goodness for that. So it was an interesting time to be interested in genetics. And the irony is, we used to talk a lot about eugenics and the eugenics movement and it was rather tortuous because people hated the eugenics movement, but still believed a lot of what the eugenics movement had believed, that IQ variation was all in the genes, so are big bollocks. And of course Eysenck was here, at UCL, and he had a hard time. He was right, it’s got a high heritability, what that means doesn’t mean very much. So it was an interesting… nobody got excited about snails, on the other hand.

[14:28] But the book that you picked up, Strickberger, Genetics, would that have been the textbook you used at Edinburgh, or the kind of textbook?

It was another one, Srb, Owen and Edgar, which has now disappeared, but that was much more elementary. But there were several texts. There was a huge one… somebody… This one’s the one I always used to teach from because it’s so clear. But the ones which had human genetics in them sometimes had a kind of an apologetic last chapter about basically sickle cell anaemia, which is basically all we knew anything about, and cystic fibrosis maybe. And then they used to skirt around the wider issues of race. And it was an interesting era from that point of view, really. Steve Jones Page 27 C1672/12 Track 2

Was it discussed in lectures, even though it wasn’t appearing in the book?

Not that I remember, particularly. I think, you know, academics are traditionally rather left wing and I think certainly the geneticists in Edinburgh were very left wing. No. But as I’ve often said, you know, if I was an expert in the chemistry of chlorine, I wouldn’t have what minimal fame I now have, because it’s very difficult to get the British public interested in the chemistry of chlorine, fascinating though no doubt it is. It’s much more, it’s much easier to get them interested in the biology of human race or sex, okay? Or global warming, all of which is stuff I’ve kind of done. So, doing those things is picking the low hanging fruit, which is what I’ve really been doing all my life.

[16:06] Was there any discussion at all at any level at Edinburgh of relations between science and religion? I ask because it’s often biology that raises questions about relations between science and religion in people’s minds.

I can’t remember very many, I mean in terms of creationism, that really hasn’t had a… didn’t have an impact in Britain in those days. In Scotland, to a degree, there were creationists because some of these Scottish sects, the Frees, the Wee Frees and the Wee Wee Frees, you know, these are the Free Church of Scotland which split and split and split again. They had these crazy beliefs, but they didn’t really impinge on us at all, they lived on the Western Isles and basically, as far as we were concerned they were Picts. And there’s plenty of religion in Edinburgh, and there was a new college which was the theology school of the University. But it didn’t really impinge because I don’t think I ever had an, is the earth 6,000 years old discussion, because it didn’t seem that anybody wanted to have that discussion, because people didn’t talk about it, it was of no interest in those days. And it got resuscitated much later and now it happens all the time, I’ve tried to avoid it, but it happens all the time.

Thank you. [17:39] What were you doing then, outside of lectures and of reading for the course in Edinburgh over those three years?

Getting drunk and sleeping around, I would say, basically. Yeah, more or less summarises it. [laughs] I didn’t do much, I mean I had a good time in Edinburgh, too much of a good time. I mean, I think like most of my friends, we worked hard and I tell myself – I’m sure I’m lying to myself – that we worked harder than today’s students. But I’m probably lying to myself, because Bryan Clarke used to say, oh we used to work hard, not like you bloody lot. And I have vivid memories; I’d always go to the library in the evening, the medical sciences library down in town. The science faculty was on this dismal campus on the edge of town. And, you know, the library used to close at ten, so if you shot out at ten to ten, you could just about get a pint before the pubs closed at ten. And there would be huge rows until ten about people putting their books down to reserve a place. And this was the ultimate sin, because the library was always jammed until ten o’clock, always. It was Steve Jones Page 28 C1672/12 Track 2

always full and, you know, you go to the UCL library at ten o’clock, it’s bloody well deserted. Now partly that’s because, you know, people don’t live in town, but we were very, we were all hard working, we were very competitive, I would say, so there wasn’t much spare time. And then, you know, in my third to fourth year vacation I went on the first of many snail expeditions to the extremely remote and bizarre part of Scotland known as, you know, Montrose, around Montrose and Peterhead and up there, which is, god, it’s a strange part of the world. It was even more so then. [19:09] And then from then on, I didn’t have a holiday for thirty years, because I didn’t need one, because I was always away in the Pyrenees or in Africa or in California, doing fieldwork. So, that’s basically what I used to do, I never really used to go on holiday, I never felt the need of it, I was always doing fieldwork. Apart from that, I used to go to a lot of parties. Occasionally used to go to musical events, not very many. But basically I enjoyed every minute of it, really.

[20:00] Any societies?

I was in the Exploration Society, and we used to accumulate tents, all of which leaked. I was in the Biology Society. Needless to say, I was President of the Biology Society, complete nerd. And we used to have, I mean we used to have visiting speakers. The first time I ever went to a restaurant was – literally too, I’d never been to a restaurant before – was in my first or second year with - god, my memory for names is definitely going - with Lewis Wolpert. Have you heard of Lewis? Lewis has become a friend of mine and unfortunately now really very old, and Lewis is an extraordinary character. He must have been young then. He’s about eighty-five now, maybe a bit more even, maybe he’s more. But when I was a second year student and President – or maybe third year student – and nerd, and President of the Biology Society, they had a thing called the Scottish Visiting Speakers. And Scotland was then a different country, and Scotland is no longer a different country, it likes to pretend it is, but it was much more than it is now. And the Scottish Biological Societies used to get together, student societies, and invite speakers from England to go round from one campus to another – I’ve done it myself since. And Lewis came round and we took him to a restaurant called – I have vivid memories of it – called The Brown Derby, in Edinburgh. And the title of the restaurant tells you what kind of restaurant it was, it was dreadful. You know, it was slices of over-cooked beef and Yorkshire pudding, it was bloody awful. But I’d never been to a restaurant before, in the evening. I’d been to cafeterias maybe, and had sandwiches. And old Lewis turned up and we were all very nervous and we didn’t know what to say, and Lewis, halfway through the second course, said, ‘Do you know, I’m really bored, I’m going’ and he walked out. And we were completely gobsmacked by this. And we thought, what did we do wrong? And now I know, as he’s written about extensively, is that he had very severe mood swings and he must have been going through a mood swing at the time. But it just shows how distant those days were, you know, the idea you’d be terrified as a student of a visiting speaker, that you’d go for, you know, as a student for the first time in your life to a restaurant. You know, life has changed and in many ways for the better.

[22:22] Steve Jones Page 29 C1672/12 Track 2

Thank you. Could you take us through then the steps that take you from just doing this degree at Edinburgh to thinking that you want to do a PhD, what are the sort of steps there?

Well, it seemed almost to feed on itself. I mean I did this snail stuff, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing, and – picking snails up in the northern limit of the species I work with, cepaea nemoralis – and it was a barrel of laughs and I really enjoyed doing it, and, such a strange memory, because I think eight or ten of us went up there, maybe more, and we were all enthused by doing this snail work. And nobody – fellow students of mine – and nobody felt we’re doing Jones’s honours thesis for him, which is in fact what they were doing. Didn’t cross my mind either, we really wanted to know what was happening with these snails. In fact, an incredibly miniscule addition to the mountain of knowledge of science, but the idea you could go out and do it was the joy of it. And we rented or were given a cottage by the Earl of Southesk [laughs] and it was still very feudal and it was a beautiful – I have vivid memories of it – beautiful little stone-built cottage and we all, very chastely, lived together. I’m not sure it was entirely chaste, certainly was as far as I was concerned, fourteen of us across this cottage, a couple of us in tents. And we had an old van which a couple of people were able to drive. And this elderly bloke came to the door one evening, who we were rather, in retrospect, rather rude to, and that was the Earl of Southesk. [laughs] Didn’t realise who he was. But I so much enjoyed that and enjoyed scoring the snails and drawing all the diagrams, that I did that for my honours thesis and I also did a biochemical thing that didn’t really work. And ironically, I wrote to Alex Comfort, you know, The Joy of Sex, here, who was here, Alex Comfort was in this building, he was actually over in the other building there. And Alex Comfort, who I never met face to face, was at that time writing The Joy of Sex, in the sixties, and he had, very bizarrely, worked on the biochemistry of snail shell pigments, and my project I started on was the biochemistry of the shell pigments of my snails, which I was really flying in the dark, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And it turns out that they are actually quite recalcitrant, I couldn’t get anywhere. But I wrote to him, and I got a very nice – I found the postcard the other week, the other month – a nice postcard back from this guy, signed Alex Comfort. Then he published The Joy of Sex and immediately had to go to the States because he outsold the Bible that year, and made millions. But anyway, I thought this is for me, and Bryan Clarke, who had been my tutor, was my supervisor. Although I blow my own trumpet, I got a first class honours degree and I got the class medal, not because I was smart, because I worked hard. And I just automatically fell into a PhD, which I did a lot of quite good stuff in, though I say it myself, working in Yugoslavia mainly, and in Romania, running these expeditions which I ran for many years. It all worked out rather nicely. And then I fell into doing a postdoc and then I fell into becoming an academic.

[25:49] Could you describe, in as much detail as possible then, the fieldwork – I hadn’t realised it was before your PhD – but the fieldwork for this, it would be a sort of degree third year thesis.

The Edinburgh system, which many places have now moved into, was a very good system. It was the old Scottish and European system, which every degree was four years, not three. And the way it worked was, Scottish schools – and still the case – did Highers rather than A levels, and you did more Highers than you would have done A levels, so they had a rather broader but shallower education, which I think is better, but Steve Jones Page 30 C1672/12 Track 2

that’s another issue. So the first year was a very general introduction to biology, chemistry and physics, then the second and third year really got up to speed, and then at the end of the third year, a considerable proportion of people would leave with what was called an ordinary degree. And that wasn’t seen by most of them as any kind of failure, they wanted to be teachers or something like that and they didn’t want to go on to the research operation. Now, in the fourth year, we would now call an MSc, and it was strongly research oriented and it was hugely, I now realise, expensive in terms of staff time. They took us away for a week’s reading week, we did essays every week for a year, we’d have to send them out, and it was a Masters degree really. But it was very, very good. I know it was excellent, in fact. So that’s what my fourth year project was all about. And then having enjoyed that, I did actually think about it, I mean the science in retrospect wasn’t very interesting – it is to me – but the question had arisen that if you look at the patterns of geographic distribution of these snails, the genes, on the Marlborough Downs in southern England, and elsewhere we now know, they’re very peculiar, we still don’t fully understand them. You’ve got a great block of light-coloured ones and then a great block of dark-coloured ones with a sharp transition between them, okay? And the question is, why the hell is this, and it’s the central question really which still persists in human genetics. Is it because it’s advantageous to be dark here and light here, or is it just a bleeding mistake, that one moment a founding one here was lighter and the founding one here was dark. And that remains unresolved and it’s very hard to resolve. But somebody called Arthur Cain had come up with the idea that somehow had to do with micro-climate, that in places where it was relatively cold, frost hollows, which are closed in areas where the cold air comes down and ponds, you would get – and snails are active in the morning – as the sun came up it would pay you to be dark, and you’d get going and you’d win. Places where it was more exposed to the sun it would pay you to be light. Now, on the Marlborough Downs I still don’t believe him, because we’ve resurveyed those Downs four times now and we know everything about them and there’s no real evidence that’s true. But my, it was my idea, my project, my honours thesis was okay, in that case, where the species reaches the northern limit of where it is in Scotland, they should be darker than in England, and they were. So my first year of my PhD was to go, ask the bleedin’ obvious question, what about the southern limit of their range, which was in Yugoslavia. Well, ex-Yugoslavia, Croatia, wasn’t it. So I went out there and we had a wild and woolly time, I can tell you, by Christ. And this was in 1966, Tito was still alive and the memory of the war was very much alive and was kept alive. My first two words of Croat were Nisam njemački, ‘I’m not German’. [laughs] Ja sam Britanski. And it was a wild and woolly part of the world, which later, in the break-up of Yugoslavia, several severe massacres were there. And it turned out, no, it didn’t turn out, I knew that it was also famous for being one of the world’s finest places for frost hollows. It’s what you call a karstic landscape. It’s a landscape with lots of wild mountains and then big flat areas which were caverns which had collapsed. And these were famous frost hollows, so I thought we’d look for frost hollows. So I wouldn’t do the kind of circular argument which Arthur Cain had done, which the dark ones are here, it must be a frost hollow. I thought, we’ll go to look in a frost hollow. And there’s another species there, vindobonensis, which was less variable than my species, but that worked like a dream. It just worked exactly right, they were dark in frost hollows and light out of frost hollows. So I worked on that. And then the following year I went to Romania, and this was, ’68 that was, and that was the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and innumerable bizarre stories about that. Quite by accident almost, both in the Yugoslav and the Romanian trips – and I went back to Yugoslavia four times altogether, spent almost a year there – we were funded by the Royal Society, which I’ve since, for reasons obscure to me, become a Fellow. And they’re Steve Jones Page 31 C1672/12 Track 2

always bloody good, they gave us money first time round, to go to Yugo, five hundred quid, which was quite a lot of money in those days, ’66, and we went. And they gave us this very fierce letter which said you must not call yourself the Royal Society Expedition. And we didn’t, but we had to write to the Academy of Sciences in Zagreb, who didn’t quite see that we weren’t a Royal Society Expedition, so they were tremendously welcoming, you know, took us out, found us somewhere to live, and wondered who all these hairy long-haired gits, you know, hadn’t washed for months. And anyway, we did all the stuff, had some trouble, quite a lot of trouble with the police and the army. Anyway, I can go on for hours about the bizarre events out in Yugo. But in ’68, it was crazy, because in ’68 we were working away, and we planned to go off into Romania to look at this vindobonensis in a warmer climate. And in May or June ’68, the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. I used to listen to the World Service, which we stopped being able to listen to, and my Croat was never any good, but I could certainly hold a simple conversation in it, and people were saying there are terrible things happening, the Russians, we’re getting very worried about the Russians – this is Tito’s time. And so with a lot of difficulty I rang back to Britain and they said you must not go into Romania unless you have been to the British Embassy in Belgrade and obtained their permission and their statement of whether you go. So we went, turned up at the British Embassy in Belgrade, and they said – and things had got tenser and tenser – the Russians were, you know, the shape of Romania is a bit like this and there’s a coast, Bulgaria there and Russia here, then that broke off and became – what did it become called? I can’t remember. But the Russian army was there, the Bulgarian army was there, and the Bulgarians hated the Romanians, because they were Romance people rather than Slavs. And we got to the embassy in Belgrade with all this, staggered in, and they said we think you oughtn’t to go into Romania because it’s too dangerous. And I said, well bugger that, I’ve come all this bloody way, I’m not going to not go, you can’t stop me. And they said no, we can’t stop you, we can give you a written – we’re going to give you and you’re going to sign – a written statement, we have advised you not to do it. And I signed it and they said well, we can only give you one piece of advice. I’ll give you this parcel and if you see any fighting or any signs of troops, open the parcel. So we got out of the embassy, of course we opened the parcel – it was a gigantic Union Jack. [laughs] But anyway, we got in finally, after endless buggering around, we got into, we got to Bucharest and there they genuinely thought we were a Royal Society Expedition, and they were beside themselves with worry, because they really expected to be invaded. And Ceausescu had just come into power and he was still, bizarrely, he’d only been in power for a few months, and he was seen as a liberal leader, rather than the horror show he became. And we were given, there was a woman called, the head of the Academy of Science – it may not have been the head – but somebody high in the Academy was a guy called Grosu, and he had a daughter called Doina Grosu, who was very sweet, very nice actually, indeed, and she was sent with us to be translator and to make sure we didn’t get into trouble. And she had this document, I don’t know what was on that document, but it opened all doors. I mean, you know, as soon as she came out with this document, ah! You know. And I remember going up to the – June, July ’68 – going up to the Danube Delta and with troops massed on the Romanian side, and with this document, we got closer and closer, and then when we finally stopped, and you could see Russian troops on the other side there, anyway, we collected lots of snails and it was incredibly boring and the results were not worth having. But that’s the kind of thing I was doing.

[35:32] Steve Jones Page 32 C1672/12 Track 2

Wow. Could you describe the fieldwork itself on that very first, because it’s the very first time that you’re doing the collecting and because you said that you enjoyed it, what was involved in collecting, when you were collecting in Scotland at the sort of northern limit?

I mean, the fieldwork could have been done by a baboon. I mean it just involves going out and collecting snails. There was all kinds of rather foolish things we were told, that you should only collect them within what’s called a panmictic unit, except the word panmitic unit doesn’t mean anything. On the average, two snails, a snail will find its partner - so they said, the evidence for this was lousy – twenty metres away, right, so you had to collect a sample within a twenty metre radius, god knows why. That made it much harder, we tended not to do that. You’re supposed to take detailed botanical notes. Of course we couldn’t take, we didn’t know any bloody botany so we didn’t take ‘em. We took some. You’re supposed to locate them on a map, and of course we had triangulating compasses, but we didn’t really know how to do that, so we’d take fixed points which were three miles away, so there’s no way you could locate them. But that’s what we did. I don’t think there was any great skill in doing it. It involved a lot of getting wet, that’s for bloody sure, because snails come out in the rain. In Yugoslavia it was much harder because we didn’t have any maps, and the first year, ’66, you couldn’t get any maps, and in fact if you bought maps from a map store in Zagreb, they would deliberately, I’m sure they were deliberately misleading, because they didn’t want maps to be out in the public domain because it was just too risky. I’m sure the Russians had ‘em. But the maps were useless, so basically I was completely lost most of the time. And then, bizarrely, when I got back to Britain I wrote – who did I write to? Was it the War Office? I can’t remember, I wrote to somebody, saying I’d been trying to get maps of Yugoslavia and I was doing my PhD and I couldn’t get any. Actually, I will show them to you, they’re in there. And they said, well okay, we have actually some American maps which are restricted, but we will lend you these copies of the American maps. And they had probably been made in the late thirties, I would say, but they were pretty accurate. But you must swear blind that you don’t take them to Yugoslavia, because if you do you’ll get into terrible trouble. Of course, the next year I took them to Yugoslavia. And then I could find my way around. By this time we were kind of well-known local characters and obviously they’d been told to keep an eye out for us. And most people were pretty friendly actually. And I remember we were stopped by the police once, and the police were a brutal looking lot, and no doubt had done a lot of brutal things in the war, and this policeman stopped me and said, ‘What’s that?’ And it was a map, I thought oh shit, I’m up bloody shit creek here. So he took it and he looked at it and he turned it upside-down, and he’d obviously never seen a map before, or a detailed map before. So he said, ‘Uh’ and gave it back. I thought, cor blimey. So that was the skill there. But we did more there, we did quite a lot. I mean we measured temperatures around the place. [38:53] I then did a huge experiment which was a complete failure, of moving thousands of snails from up on the top where it was sunny, to down to the bottom, and coming back after a year and seeing if we could recapture them. And that was a real sweat and a total failure, a very poor recapture rate. Just a mess, I don’t even like to think about it. So we did a lot of that kind of stuff.

How did you mark them for recapture?

Steve Jones Page 33 C1672/12 Track 2

We drilled little holes in the shell, that’s the beauty of them. You can put little code holes in the shell.

[39:22] Could you talk more about your sense of what other people thought you were doing out in these landscapes, so whether it’s in Scotland or whether it’s in Eastern Europe?

Oh, well in Yugoslavia, I then shifted my main area of expertise, enterprise to the Pyrenees. And in Yugoslavia they automatically assumed you’re going to eat them. Lov na puževe, I’m looking for snails. Mangare? [cete ih jesti] Are you going to eat them? And in the end I used to say yes. But we got, you know, not much exciting happened when it wasn’t a massacre in that part of the world. And it was not then touristic at all. They were just beginning to build the coast road down, when the coast was still closed. There was a place called Senj, which is incredibly beautiful, Venetian town. And the Germans were beginning to come down the coast and camping and that kind of stuff. There was a beauty spot called Plitvice, which is an extraordinarily beautiful, waterfalls and so on, which has now become a tourist honeypot. But basically, no tourist ever came to where we were, at all, the Lika. And people were well aware, I mean the police were aware, the secret police were aware, but we never really had much trouble. [40:38] I became very friendly with a couple of Yugoslav academics, a woman – what was her name? – Drechsler. With a name like that she was almost certainly Jewish, and she was an archaeologist and very… [laughs] very… And the archaeology there was superb, because they had huge caves, and we used to go into these caves and we’d just crunch through Roman and pre-Roman pottery, you know. And she gave me a brooch, an Iron Age brooch, which somebody stole many years later. And she in some sense may even have been sent to keep an eye on us, but she certainly knew what she was doing. And she had a son called Danko, who was a very nice guy, and he too spoke good English. So I mean we fitted in, I mean I liked it. I became very pro-Yugoslav actually. I didn’t quite think of becoming a Yugoslav, but it was my first introduction to Southern Europe, you know, I’d never really travelled in Europe before that and it was such a totally new environment and so wild, and it was genuinely wild, you know, in a way that Australia isn’t wild. It was wild, I mean nobody ever went there. And I really had a wonderful time actually, yeah.

[41:55] Who was, when you’re saying we did this and we did that, who…

Well, it was still this bunch of friends of mine from university really. And as the years went on, more and more they were replaced by more or less dissolute, often more dissolute acquaintances of mine, who just used to come out for the free booze and the food. I mean they’d come out with me to the Pyrenees in particular, and the deal would be, I would feed them and, you know, give them… we always used to work three days on, one day off, and they would, you know, where we were was superbly pretty and beautiful. In those days I could never afford to rent a house, so we used to camp and it often used to piss down for weeks on end. So that was a bit hard to deal with. But I’d pay for everybody, the research grant plus some of my own money would pay for everything, and they would work. And they really would work. I was always amazed, you know, particularly on hot days, Steve Jones Page 34 C1672/12 Track 2

you’d be up in the mountains and you might have driven on small mountain roads, sixty or seventy miles, you still had sixty or seventy miles to get back to camp, and it’d be six o’clock, I’d think, oh, Christ almighty, let’s get back. And they’d so no, no, let’s get another sample. And so we’d get another sample. And the irony was, none of them really knew what we were doing. You know, I’d say, well what we’re doing, we’re mapping out – by this time I’d started doing the biochemistry, looking at the protein variation and mapping out genes that way, not just the visible variation – and I’d say, look at this, look at this, they’ve completely shifted from here to here, the genes are quite different. And nobody really cared about that, but they wanted to see a new valley and, you know. So that’s what I used to do.

[43:33] You said that the biochemistry work actually ended up being more difficult than you thought it was going to be.

Well, it became more ambiguous. I mean, by the end of my PhD time in ’69, in Edinburgh, there were rumours beginning – no, the seminal papers, both of them were in ’68, Lewontin and Hubby, and Harris and… what was the other two? And they had published the first two papers on looking at protein variation. Lewontin and Hubby on drosophila and Harris, who was here, and – Harris and… can’t remember his name. Harris and Richardson was it? On humans. And to their great surprise they had found, and Harris found, Harris took… Harry Harris, what he did in retrospect was bleedin’ obvious to do, but nobody had done it before. He took something like, what was it, fifty or sixty medical students, got a blood sample from them, and Harry was a biochemist who knew about enzyme variants and knew about electrophoresis, which is moving, separating molecules or using electrical charge in a gel material. And he said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll go and look at the esterases, the dehydrogenases, fumarases, all these enzymes, in sixty medical students and see if they all look the same. Do they all move into the gel to the same extent? Now we already knew, people already knew, had known for some years that with sickle cell that wasn’t true, but sickles with A and S, they moved in different degrees. But nobody had had the nous to take that odd observation and say look, I’ll look at a bunch of random genes. And Harry did that and found that there was a huge amount of variation, which is quite unexpected. Dick then did it with drosophila and found exactly the same. And that then opened up a whole new area of looking for variation. So I then very daringly wrote to Lewontin, and Lewontin was a bit of a theatrical character in some ways. And I just wrote to him out of the blue saying, you know, I’m doing my PhD on snails and I’m interested in variation and if I finish my PhD is there any chance of doing a postdoc or research fellowship in your lab. Dick, being in a theatrical mood, wrote back a week later saying, yes, do come, start on the first of October. He’d never met me, didn’t know anything about me. So I thought, what the Christ…? So I went. And Lewontin had a huge, then a huge research grant from the Ford Foundation. And I got to Chicago, and Edinburgh was a good university, but Chicago was overwhelming. I mean I had never been surrounded by people with such talent before and many of my fellows, who were postdocs with me, I mean you won’t know them, people like Brian Charlesworth and so on, they became the major figures in population genetics, and I never did at all, I wouldn’t claim for a moment that I did. But, Monty Slatkin and all kinds of them. I mean these were the people who formed modern mathematical population in genetics. And it was completely clear that I was not able to do the maths, so I became the sort of native collector for these people. And they wanted to do various things and ask about migration stuff, and I became kind of Man Friday and did all the field stuff, Steve Jones Page 35 C1672/12 Track 2

going out to Death Valley, going to Mexico collecting Mexican species of cactus drosophila. And that’s what I did and I was out there and I did that for years, every year I would fly out to California and go and work in Death Valley or up in the mountains, or in [incomp – 47:10] Desert, and just do these various experiments. Most of which utterly failed, but I enjoyed doing them.

[47:19] Could you then describe how you do the protein variation studies of the snails?

Well, it’s basically, it seemed challenging at the time, but fundamentally it’s easy. What you need is a system of separating molecules on the basis of shape, size and charge, okay? And the way people used to do it then, and the way in which they initially began to do DNA, and this was long before it became even possible to contemplate doing it with DNA, was to take, grind up the fruit fly or take a human blood sample, put it on to a gel material of some kind, or the starch, which is what Harris used here, or acrylamide, which is what I used to use, and apply a powerful current and the whole thing would get sucked in and smeared out through the gel. You wouldn’t see anything, because all you had would be a smeared out bunch of proteins, but if you then put on a substrate, something which an enzyme could then chew, and a dye which picked up the products of the enzyme’s work and linked itself to them, you’d see a series of bands on the gel. You could put on a general protein stain, a blue, Coomassie blue, which would give you fifty or sixty bands, but you wouldn’t know what they were. But you could put on an alcohol dehydrogenase or a starch dehydrogenase, and you’d get nice patterns of two bands or three bands or one band, which would tell you where the variants were, and so you’d go out and count them. And actually, what I then began to do almost as soon as I got there, in part as a, in dissent from my work in the power station where I got used to fiddling with things, was to see that all these great minds had no common sense at all, you know, they’d be taking a fruit fly, putting it into a little tiny test-tube, grinding it up, taking it out, and putting one at a time into a tube of acrylamide. I mean it was just heart-breaking to watch them. And so within a few weeks I and a friend of mine had built a machine which could do twenty-four of these at one go, together with a multi-pull syringe thing, together with a thing with holes milled in a brass plate so you could add a little top plate with steel bars in it which you could grind ninety-six flies at once, and push the whole process up in speed by probably ten times. So Dick felt great about this because he got much more stuff through. And the irony is, the multi-syringe thing is now called a Gilson, and the guy, Gilson, absolutely independent to us at the same time, was developing this idea and bugger him, he patented it and we didn’t. And Gilson has made millions. But anyway, we did it. But I patented, I and a colleague of mine patented a vertical gel machine, which we built. Put it another way, the University of Chicago was a very, very rich university and it was private, it had been built, founded in some ways in the same way UCL was founded. UCL was founded in direct opposition to Oxford and Cambridge, because Oxford and Cambridge would only allow Church of England people in. University of Chicago was founded in direct opposition to the Ivy League, Harvard and Yale, because they kept Jews out. And Rockefeller, who founded it, said we’re not having this, this is going to be… and still, as UCL still to a degree has, has that sort of rather radical… by God it was rich. And they had these workshops where you’d go and make a little sketch, say I’d like to have this made and platinum wires here, and come down and show us what you want. And they would talk to the bloke there, and then they’d make it and then we’d fiddle with it and then they’d change it, and we built this beautiful machine. Steve Jones Page 36 C1672/12 Track 2

It’s amazing we never killed ourselves, it was a death trap in its early form. And then I patented it, and we’ll come back to what happened to the patent later, it was a disaster. But anyway, that’s what we used to do. And I used to run lots of these gels. And I started mapping out, as I had with the snails, the distribution of the variants, up in the Rockies, down in Death Valley. And we set up, as I had done and failed to do with the snails – and I didn’t learn – I tried to set up artificial populations in oases in Death Valley. And the belief was, utterly wrong, as it turned out, that if you had these little oases – Salt Creek was one of them, Death Valley itself, the little junction there – they had trees in them and a bit of water that came up. We could turn these into sort of population cages for fruit flies, we could release millions of fruit flies in them and see what happened in nature, stuff which people had done in the lab. And I did lots of those experiments which were a disastrous failure because these weren’t isolated at all, these fucking fruit flies, they’re supposed to travel fifteen metres, they travelled fifteen kilometres. So I did a lot of migration experiments, and then experiments out on the Channel Islands, off California, which turned on the same idea. An equivalent disastrous failure. I don’t think anybody has done a successful perturbation experiment in nature on anything apart from plants, they’ve done some on plants, and plants you can do it with. So I wasted a lot of money and time doing that, but again, I enjoyed doing it. I got a tan, yeah.

[52:40] And recalcitrant was the word you used for the protein variation studies in snails, are you able to explain how it became sort of overly complicated or why it didn’t play along?

What happened was, that we started looking at the variations in, protein variation in snails. Now, there were in fact practical problems which we didn’t understand initially, because snails have got very, very powerful gut enzymes, so if you grind the whole sodding thing up, you release these enzymes and they destroy all the proteins and the DNA. But we got round that and I started running gels on snails. But then I got involved with a bloke called Silander, Bob Silander. I think he’s still alive, so I won’t call him a psychopath, but he was a bloody psychopath. [laughs] And Silander was an impressive, you know, in a sense American scientists are very, very competitive people and they’re competitive often not in a good way, they’re not competitive because they want to be great scientists. I mean there are a number of great scientists in America. British scientists aren’t competitive in that way, most of them. At least they weren’t, it’s changed a bit now. But they wanted to be great scientists, in part that involved getting the biggest machine. And that was Dick’s, Dick was competitive, definitely, and he had a big machine, he had ten or fifteen people working for him. And Silander had a big machine. And he was very good at running gels. And I fell in with him at some meeting and he said, oh, these snails are great, let’s run gels on them. So I basically outsourced all the nasty time-consuming and very expensive biochemistry to him in Rochester, New York, and I became his native collector in the Pyrenees and collected all the stuff and took them over. And I ran a few of the gels, but he ran nearly all of them, or his people did. So we did a huge amount of work. I think it’s still the case that in terms of numbers of animals looked at and protein gels run on, my survey of cepaea in the Pyrenees, snails in the Pyrenees, is still the second biggest of any creature ever, the biggest being of humans. And what we found – and I did a lot more across Europe too – and what we found is completely uninterpretable, we don’t know what’s going on. There are big, big patches of all this kind, now all that kind, now all this kind, and it doesn’t make any sense and we don’t Steve Jones Page 37 C1672/12 Track 2

know what’s happening. So that’s why I said it was recalcitrant, it hasn’t given us an answer. My guess is that it’s like the African/European story, that what happened was there were a few founder snails that got in, as the glaciers retreated, expanded and once you’re there, it’s very hard to replace you. But I don’t know the answer. And now people of course are doing it with DNA and they’re getting exactly the same results. And I’ve never been tempted to pursue that, I think the DNA stuff, it’s the same again really.

[55:46] How did you decide whereabouts to, I mean you’ve explained that you were going for an upper limit in Scotland and a kind of southern limit, how did you make decisions about where to go in Europe after that point?

Well, because in the Pyrenees there had been some classic work in one particular valley by a guy called Richard Arnold, where he’d found, after our Yugoslav stuff, he then found in the main species, cepaea nemoralis, the very pretty one, he found a similar thing in this valley. And I was obsessed really, looking back on it, with the idea of doing perturbation, moving around snails experiments. And we went back to the valley and we initially, we ran the gels on, did the DNA on that. And that was actually rather boring, the whole valley was the same, for DNA level. And then I kind of took one sample somewhere else, and that was different, so we just spread up and down over the whole Pyrenean chain. And because the Pyrenees, it’s such a nice place, I like going back there, so I used to go back and I spent years there really. I bought a house, now fifteen years ago, or twenty years ago now, not very far away, so I’d spend my time down there.

You continued to do the same sort of fieldwork?

Well, I’m ashamed to say that 2015 was the first year since 1965 – that’s fifty years – in which I haven’t collected a snail sample. And I think the collecting is now over.

[57:11] And were you, throughout all of this time of collecting, were you adding, say, with the Pyrenees, to a kind of master map of these…?

I was. And all that kind of ended slightly in tears, really. See those books there? They’re my master collection books. Now, all those books are collection books, nearly all of them, are collection books of European snails, and there are thousands and thousands of samples in there, huge amounts of work. There are also some databases of European, German snails in particular, by a group called Schilder and Schilder, and Schilder and Schilder worked in the thirties, in a very peculiar mindset, in just looking for races of snails. I don’t think they had any overlap with the political world, but they realised that you could look at stripes and count stripes in different populations, and they produced this very strange code where they presented thousands and thousands of, hundreds of pages of their results in a code which was baffling. But they had one sample which referred to an English paper and I could translate what their code meant from the paper which had been published in Britain, which had the traditional, the British code in it. So I spent months finding these samples on a map and Steve Jones Page 38 C1672/12 Track 2

re…. And we got all this huge dataset. I did a very crude analysis of it, which I published in Science and somewhere else, and then I kind of forgot about it. [58:40] And then about five years ago – and we may need to edit this section of the damn thing, because it still rankles actually, I can tell you – the Open University got hold of me. And they were trying to do one of these Citizen Science things – I don’t know if you’ve come across them – which was going to be a Europe-wide survey of cepaea, cepaea nemoralis, my snail, variation, and would I collaborate with them. And they wanted to know whether there’d been any change in time since my day and since Schilder and Schilder’s day. And I said well, I’m happy to collaborate, in fact myself and my colleagues have done a lot of this time stuff, we’ve done three separate surveys over – when did we do the first one – we’ve covered the Marlborough Downs now over fifty- five years from the first one, and there’s been no change in time at all. And there’s a place we can hammer every sample down to a few metres. But you can take my data and you can analyse it. And then we began immediately to have some big falling outs, because they wanted to get the schools involved and all this kind of stuff. And I said, well, you know, well alright, but how are you going to know how well they’ve mapped these places? How are you going to know… you know, I’m just uncertain about all this. And then it got, I thought, then it got ridiculous. They began to ask the school kids, the amateurs, to score, to count the gene frequencies. And I said, well you can’t do that because you need to know how to do it, and particularly you need to know how to separate out various snail species, because there are some that look a bit like this, but are not my species. Now, anybody who knows what they’re doing can immediately tell you that they’re not, but some of them look a bit like mine, but they’ve got patterns of stripes that don’t vary from place to place, they’ve got just one stripe. But if people start mixing these up, then you’re really going to be in a mess. So anyway, they then did this enormous analysis, got all this data in, and I was thinking, getting more and more uncertain about it, thinking I just don’t think this is any good at all. And also, you know, they’d collect a sample here and they’d get weather data from seven miles away, and I knew there were differences in weather over 200 metres. So they sent me the manuscript and I thought, I can’t put my name on this bloody manuscript, and so I took my name off the manuscript, which I’ve never done before. And at my advanced stage, that doesn’t matter, but somebody at the beginning of his or her career, that’s a major thing to do. And there is still a certain dynamic tension there. I will one day write a paper, when we publish this damned Marlborough Downs stuff and say look, this is the way you should do it. You go back again and again to exactly the same places, you have the same people scoring them, there’s no messing around making up meteorological data. We have Met points which we measure our data, and there’s nothing happening. Now, across Europe they find no increase apart from this particular one that looks like the other species, and I’m pretty sure what’s happening is that they’re mixing those up. So anyway, that’s what ended with that huge survey. And that’s what happens with a lot of my stuff, you know. To my shame, I’ve done lots of stuff, some of which is actually scientifically interesting which I haven’t published, and that’s part of it. And I probably never will now.

[1:02:00] Those notebooks that you’re referring to, are these field notebooks from…

Yeah, they’re field notebooks, yeah. Steve Jones Page 39 C1672/12 Track 2

Do you have a sort of particular way of recording so that if we open…

Oh, it’s pretty rough and ready. 1986’87, these were the [incomp – 1:02:15]. There you are, okay, there you go. This is… what is this? Rod and Steve. These are the resampling, this is where we’re resampling. There’s the grid reference, there’s the data, there’s the road, these are the various scores: live adults, live young, predated, TP – thrush predated adults – dead, whole, young. So you score them. Yellow five-banded, yellow spread- banded – that’s a thing – yellow one-banded, pinks, pink mid-banded, pink mid-banded spreads. So it’s just a….

So the score refers to the pattern?

The proportion of different types.

Okay.

And that’s basically what these all look like. I have many thousands of them. See, that’s not published either.

[1:03:11] Could you comment on then, reasons why certain things were published and other things weren’t? What does…

Well, it’s a funny thing. I mean we’ll no doubt come to this in a later… It’s a strange thing really, because… in the old days, you know, in the days of tenure and that kind of stuff, people did science, and they still do, because they’re interested in doing, okay? But once you’ve got a job, I oversimplify it, but once you’ve got a job, you’ve got a job for life and that made less difference. I mean many people, Thatcher put an end to that, and many people say, oh academics, you know, once you’ve got a job you can just stop. But it wasn’t like that. I mean when I was Head of Biology here, which thank god I no longer am, there were one or two people who’d been, you know, and they were old too, they were all past sixty. And rather against my better nature I did sort of heavily breathe down their necks and say, well, why not think about a bit of early retirement, which they did. But there was one guy in particular, who I won’t name, who hadn’t done anything for forty years. But they were absolutely the exception and everybody just worked away. I worked away like mad. [1:04:26] But the problem was, there was then no… in my case, you see, I’d finish a project and I’d think, oh fuck, that didn’t work, so I didn’t feel I had to make it work and then publish it, I thought, oh bugger it. Like those perturbation experiments, I’d think oh, it’s not going to go anywhere, I’ll give it away, forget about it, so didn’t publish it. You didn’t publish a negative, which is always a bad idea, you should publish your negatives. It’s very hard to publish a negative, harder, but you should do it. And then I’d do something which worked, I’d say, oh that worked, that worked very nicely, what’s next? You know, the summer season would be on us, I’d say, oh let’s go and do this. And that was a mistake and so I have a lot of stuff which I should publish, and I tell myself that instead of writing these boring books, what I should do is get my act together and publish some of Steve Jones Page 40 C1672/12 Track 2

this stuff, some of which, as we may learn on the next meeting, is actually, though I say it myself, is pretty good stuff and I give it in talks. I was in Amsterdam last week and I gave a talk on some of this stuff to some fairly heavyweight evolution biologists, and they were amazed by it, they said we’ve never seen this. And I said, because I did it in 1985 and never published it. So I think you should publish and I’ve been, I have genuinely been selfish in not publishing. But I haven’t, that is the sad thing.

Are there particular case studies, particular experiments that did work that you haven’t published that you really think are the sort of priority?

Well, that’s kind of a bigger story, so maybe we should come back to that. Yeah, some of the best stuff I’ve done, and I know full well my role in the panoply of science, which is not at the summit, but some of the best stuff I’ve done remains unpublished, which is bloody stupid really. And, I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is, yeah.

[1:06:19] Do you, speaking to other colleagues, do other colleagues have certain sets of data that they haven’t written up…

No, I think it’s a peculiar weakness of my own, really. Things have now changed, I mean the academic system is now much less pleasant than it was, in many different ways. I mean the individuals in it, in fact we’ve just had a staff meeting this lunchtime, which was very boring, but the entire staff meeting was about how do you apply for grants, what’s this safety damn thing you have to do? You know, it’s no longer… it’s become a much less comfortable way of life. Now, you might say that’s a good thing, and if you were spending taxpayers’ money you might be right. But I have to say with a clear conscience, I would find it very hard to find anybody to go into academic life now. I really would. I think we’re getting a bit better about telling them. I mean I think ten years ago, fifteen years ago we were lying to ourselves as academics, saying, oh, do a PhD, get on with it. We thought to ourselves, life will get better. It didn’t. Ten years ago we were lying to them, saying, oh, do a PhD, it’ll be great, get a great career, except that secretly we knew we wouldn’t. Now we’re being honest. For the last five years we’ve been saying, do a PhD, do this research. You’ll never get a job but you’ll enjoy it while you’re doing it. And, you know, the figure that’s bandied about, and I’m not sure how true it is – it sounds a bit extreme to me – but the figure that’s bandied about is that only one in a hundred people who start a postgraduate degree of some kind in a science, only one in a hundred gets a university professorship in the end. Now that isn’t viable, you know. And what that’s done, rather interestingly, is change postgraduates’ population from being a British population to being a foreign population. Because there’s no academic life, there’s no academic jobs in Britain any more. So we have huge numbers of very good French, German, Swiss, Indian, Chinese postgraduate students who will go back to France, Germany, India, China and, not in Britain. And that’s really changed the whole atmosphere of the place really.

[1:08:39] Why has that happened here? Steve Jones Page 41 C1672/12 Track 2

Well, because there’s no jobs. I mean, yeah, that’s the way it is, there just isn’t. I mean I was, made the very fortunate decision to be born in 1944, you know, as they say, choose your parents well, and when I came into the business, through no talent of my own, I was lucky, extraordinarily lucky, to be in at the very beginning of the explosion of British university teaching. And I was lucky. Now we’re at the implosion of British university teaching and I’m not lucky, these kids, my equivalents, are not lucky. And it’s a mess. But it’s also a very unfair mess because it means that somebody like me, who’s doing something that doesn’t earn much money and has no, you know, if I fill in a form that says what is – what do they call it – the transferable value of this… what’s the economic value of this? The answer is, as far as I can see, bugger all. Except that in some senses, you know, the instrument stuff, the looking at polymorphism stuff, that’s turned into human genetics. I mean my part in that has been tiny, but if we hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have happened. You know, so I wouldn’t be able to defend myself on those grounds. I wouldn’t be able to defend myself for getting huge research grants, because you can’t get research grants for this kind of stuff any more. I could defend myself on teaching, because I’m a very good teacher, but that wouldn’t give you a university post any more. You’d get some kind of teaching fellowship, which you’d be hired from year to year. So it’s a mess and I don’t know how it’s going to resolve itself, I really don’t.

[1:10:19] Apart from the Royal Society, who was funding you in the early part of your…

Oh, in the early days, in the early days NERC, Natural Environment Research Council, funded us rather generously, and I didn’t repay them. I mean they funded us rather generously, I found some interesting results, I built this big snail ranch up in Oxford, which we might come back to, and NERC, you know, they expected this stuff would be published, and some of it was, without question, some of it was pretty good. But most of it wasn’t and I should feel more guilty about that than I do feel. But then they all stopped... [1:10:54] I mean I finally gave up – it’s crazy really – and I put in in the early eighties, yeah, early eighties, I put in grant after grant after grant, all of which were turned down. Not just to the research councils, but to people like oil companies and so on. And the irony of it is, is my research was based on thermal ecology – animals in different microclimates. You know, which is now the world of trendy, but of course then wasn’t. And my technique, which maybe we’ll talk about tomorrow, which I developed in measuring individual thermal environments, was actually a pretty clever technique. But I remember sitting at my old desk in the other building, grisly old building, in about 19… when would it have been? About 1985. And I put in, I’d applied for something like thirteen research grants, one after another, to NERC. And the trouble is, as you get to number thirteen, I mean they get worse, you don’t have thirteen good ideas, you just don’t, okay? And some of these were to the Royal, some to – which by then had got no money – some to NERC, some to BBSRC which demanded an economic thing, and some of them were just, two or three of them were to different oil companies, just beginning to become aware of global warming. And they were all turned down. The oil company ones were the worst, because they demanded huge amounts of discussion and so on. Anyway, they were all turned down. I was cleaning out my office and I’d got this huge pile of papers which were my failed research grants, and I picked Steve Jones Page 42 C1672/12 Track 2

them up and I threw them in the bin, I said, ‘Screw this, I’m not going to waste my time. The time I’ve spent doing this, I could have written a book’. And then I sat down and wrote The Language of the Genes and that was really the end of my scientific career. [end of track 2] Steve Jones Page 43 C1672/12 Track 3

[Track 3]

Could you say more then about the postdoc in America, in particular more about the colleagues around you that you were working with, and about the particular sort of collecting missions that you seemed to be doing for other people in the laboratories, is it a laboratory, is that right?

Well, we talked a bit about that. I mean you wouldn’t know the names particularly, but Dick Lewontin, or Le- WON-tin as some people call him, and Dick Levins and Steve Gould who joined them later at Harvard, all of whom I kept in – Levins not so much – but Lewontin and Gould I certainly did, I kept in contact with for years. They were high profile public figures, not just in the world of science, but in the public world as well. Dick in particular, Lewontin, who I had a very high opinion of, not quite as high as his opinion of himself was, but it was still pretty high. [telephone ringing] [break in recording?] So Dick Lewontin always described himself as a Marxist and I’m never quite sure what he means. Steve Gould did as well, and there I’m definitely not sure what he means, because Steve Gould was a very, very rich man. But… and Dick got a lot of public coverage in the States. I have sympathy with what he did, it was during the Vietnam War, there was a lot of political activity and the National Academy of Sciences - Benjamin Franklin, founder - unlike the Royal Society, is an arm of government. The Académie des Sciences in Paris is an arm of the French government, it was founded by Colbert in order to give scientific advice to the French government. The Academy of Sciences, thanks to Benjamin Franklin, was founded with exactly the same reason, okay? And it does, it’s a very noble academy with lots of academicians and it does what the Royal Society does, it publishes journals, and fine. It was asked to generate the most efficient system for bombing Haiphong Harbour, knowing that you’ve got, there are random patterns in bombs, how many bombs would you need to drop in order to map out and be sure of destroying Haiphong Harbour. And Dick, and I think he was right to do it, kicked up an almighty stink about this, and so did Dick Levins, both of whom were in the Academy, and they both resigned from the Academy at just the time I was there. And this caused a huge uproar, because they were the only members of the Academy who’d ever resigned from it. And I have to say, had I been a member of the Academy, I too would have resigned and I’m surprised that more people didn’t, because this was a naked attempt by the Nixon administration to intimidate the National Academy, obviously, daring them to say they wouldn’t do it. And of course they did it. So he was prominent in that sense, [02:51] and he was a bit of a firebrand and he published a lot of polemic. Steve Gould was beginning to publish his essays, and his early stuff – I say it through gritted teeth – was brilliant, I mean he had a real gift. He lost it, I don’t know where it went, but he certainly had a gift. So they were very prominent in that sense. And the people around, it’s also the case, you know, because this was the time when genetics was just beginning to emerge, that Dick knew all the heavies, people like Crick and all these people, who themselves were becoming public figures. And Lewontin was not afraid to talk about it in public and talk about racism and race. So they were well known. [03:42] And we were convinced, probably wrongly, that one of the researchers in the lab was a CIA plant. Now, we liked to persuade ourselves we were more important than we were, but there was one guy there who’d been in Vietnam and was, you know, unlike the rest of us who were crazy pinkos, was very much on the right, and so of Steve Jones Page 44 C1672/12 Track 3

course that made us think he was in the CIA. But in fact, the irony was, that there was a – what was it called – Students for a Democratic… what were they called? Students for a Democratic Movement? SD… But there was a student movement, which one of my chums was very active in, I can’t remember… which played a big part in the riots and the demonstrations in Chicago and several of which I was on. And that turned out that was completely infiltrated by the CIA, so maybe we weren’t wrong. So there was a lot of tension in the system. But the odd thing is, since I’m now married – haven’t been for thirty years – I’m married to an American, but it was odd that I accepted and we accepted that we would live in America while the Vietnam War was going on. I think it wasn’t quite clear what a disaster it was until it was becoming clear what a disaster it was. But, you know, I would never live in America now for those kinds of reasons. Yes, it’s very strange. [05:03] But it was a very, very… it was a very intellectually thrilling time. And also an exciting time because I’d never been to America before. I mean the amount of money in the system was bizarre. When I was collecting cactus flies in Mexico and Baja California… when I was collecting flies in Baja California – Baja California, as I’m sure you know, is that long extension of what used to be California which, California itself used to be part of Mexico of course, which in those days was completely unpopulated. It didn’t have a road going down it, it had Mazatlan at the bottom, which Frank Sinatra and all his Mafia friends used to go to. But I was collecting these cactus drosophila. In fact a guy called Zouros, Eleftherios Zouros. And this was, again, politics again. That’s the time of the Colonels in Greece. And El Zouros is a very nice guy who’s now back in Greece. Couldn’t get a visa, so I said, oh, I’ll be your native collector. So I went into Mexico. And we found we couldn’t drive around because there were no roads. So I rang up Dick and I said, you know, they’ve got these flies up in the mountains but I can’t get there, there aren’t any roads. I hired a jeep but it’ll take me a week to get up there. He said, ‘Hire a plane!’ [laughs] So we hired for three weeks this plane and pilot and we used to fly out, we used to fly in from Arizona, fly into the beach, land on the beach somewhere, and I remember screaming down with this seventy-two year old pilot, scream down, roll on the beach and then take off again, see how deep the indentations of the wheels were. And if they weren’t too deep, then you’d come in and you’d land. And this became to seem perfectly normal, that’s what you did. So we flew all round Mexico collecting these damn flies. So there was that kind of stuff, and that was pretty exciting, I have to say, yeah.

[06:59] What did the collecting involve? For a non-biologist and for the non-biologists listening, you approach a cactus, I can see someone doing that…

Well, it depends what you’re doing. I mean the cactus drosophila stuff was interesting. I wasn’t particularly involved, I don’t think my name ever got into any of the papers. But the cactus drosophila is a classic, what we call coevolution problem, because cacti do not want to be eaten by drosophila, okay? What happens is, the cactus is scratched or pecked at by an insect, it’ll put a scratch in it and the fruit flies will come and lay eggs in there. And there are various species of cactus, ten or a dozen different species, and each one makes lots and lots of poisons to try and keep these bloody flies out, and what’s happened was, there’s been coevolution of the flies and the cacti so that they’ve specialised, it’s a kind of evolutionary race, it’s like a host parasite race. So that’s what El Zouros was doing, and it was quite interesting and it tied on to my interest, because if you go to a cactus Steve Jones Page 45 C1672/12 Track 3

rot, as we call it, on a sunny day in the Mexican desert it gets hot, really hot, it gets up to about forty-five Celsius, and yet the larvae manage to survive. And I later did experiments on that with drosophila, which we’ll perhaps come to in our second meeting. And to get a rot, what you do, you find a rot and just cut that off and you put it in a bag and take it back with you, okay? And then you’d raise them on drosophila medium and send them back to Chicago. The species, the other species I worked on, drosophila pseudoobscura, which a guy called Dobzhansky had founded the work in the 1930s, this was different; we collected those with rotten fruit; tomatoes and bananas. And again, it was a common sense thing. Dobzhansky who was the grand figure in population genetics in those days. In the 1930s and forties, and fifties, had done a series of genetic studies on drosophila chromosome structures, and he was, it was technical stuff, you had to be able to read the chromosomes and it wasn’t easy, but he published all these papers on changes in frequency from place to place and over time, pretty elementary stuff with the benefit of hindsight. But he used to collect them in little pots about that big, with a little net. And me and my colleagues thought bugger this for a lark, so we invented a thing called a Dobie Bag, and the Dobie Bag consisted of a big bin which would be filled with rotting bananas and yeast and stank to high heaven. And you’d stick it out in one of these oases, or in a jungle, and get a big plastic bag and tie two clear bags to the corner of the bag – big plastic bag – and you’d creep up and go whiiit, and the flies would go, wham! And sometimes you’d get a complete, probably get a thousand flies in every corner. And I remember the only time I ever met Dobzhansky, the famous Dobzhansky, it was his last field trip and he was in his mid seventies and was very ill, and I was sitting, me and my chum were sitting in the back seat and Dobzhansky and Lewontin, the two great figures in [incomp 10:06] genetics history were, Dick was driving, Dobzhansky was moaning – he was Russian – ‘[incomp] dying, [incomp]’. And he was moaning and groaning and we got out there and he was very depressed. And then he said, ‘We’re collecting some flies’. So we showed him this, and it was like the warhorse, you know, hearing the trumpet. He could smell the banana, he cheered up no end. And he saw this Dobie Bag and his face lit up and he went up to Dick, he said, ‘That Jones, he will be a great biologist some day’. [laughs] And the sad thing was, he then drove back home and he died about three weeks later, and he really was dying. So that’s how we collected them, yeah. So we collected thousands of them that way.

[10:48] And the oasis work, what did…

That’s how we collected them in the oasis too. But then the great bugger was, we took ‘em back to the lab, what we tried to do was to find rare variants of a particular gene, a figure of, say, one per cent, or less, and then take those back to the lab and by doing crosses, make lines of millions of identical copies of that gene, okay, and then take them back into the field and release them. And ironically enough, I’m now involved in a company called Oxitec which is trying to do this with pest species of mosquitoes, which is now done with, you know screw-worm flies and so on. But we were among the first to try to do it on a big scale. And of course we were hopelessly naïve. First of all, you have to grow up millions and millions of drosophila, which you grow up on fermented yeast, which stinks to high heaven and is a bugger, because drosophila gets, they stick, then you have to transfer them from the lab to the field, which is about a five hour drive. Then they stick again, so you have to do it overnight, or try and get an air-conditioned truck, which we did have. Then you have to keep them alive Steve Jones Page 46 C1672/12 Track 3

and let them go. Anyway, that’s what we did and we released millions of them and the answer was, they flew away. [laughs] And our expectation was they would stay there and we would come back the following year or over the following months we’d get them up to ninety per cent and we’d see them drifting down, or staying the same, proving whether it was disadvantageous to be this variant, or whether it made no difference. And in retrospect that was really thick, because it could drift down for two reasons, either it was no good being that variant, or other flies were blowing in. But then, I had a good idea, -ish idea, which was to do it simultaneously with two different genes. And the argument was, if they both drifted down at the same rate, that was probably flies blowing in, but if they drifted down at different rates, that was a difference in fitness between them. But that experiment was a complete and utter write-off and didn’t work at all.

Because?

Because I couldn’t get any of the flies back. That was the ones we did on the California Channel Islands, and that was a… I don’t even want to think about it. That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they were American taxpayers’ dollars so it doesn’t matter.

And how would you know that you’d got the right…

Because you’d take your sample, take them back to the lab and grind them up and look at what genes they had.

[13:17] And the initial postdoc in Chicago was a certain length, presumably, so…

It was two years, yeah.

Although it sounds as though you’re going back to America past that.

Well, I basically, I mean my first job, very bizarrely – I think I’m still on the same contract – was a three-month contract at the Royal Free Medical School, they were over in Hunter Street, and I was hired by a guy called Sam Berry, who I owe a lot to, he’s a nice fellow, still around, and it’s a different story and I was teaching first year medics. And I was one page ahead of them in the book. And because there weren’t many research facilities there, I spent every year, three months or so, from, I’d spend a month or so, about six weeks or so, maybe, in the spring and then more in the autumn, and then in the summer I’d be off in Yugo or in the Pyrenees doing collecting. So I commuted back and forth really for about ten, fifteen years. Till I finally got rather tired of it and gave it up.

[end of track 3]

Steve Jones Page 47 C1672/12 Track 4

[Track 4]

Before we go on today, would you tell me the story of HJ Fleure offering to buy your grandfather’s…

Well, it wasn’t my grandfather’s.

Or great-grandfather’s…

Yes. I mean I’ve obviously been interested in anthropology and human evolution, kind of, and there’s a strange overlap with my own Welsh ancestry, because there was at the University of Aberystwyth in the 1930s, I think, 1920s and thirties, a well-known anthropologist called HJ Fleure – F-L-E-U-R-E – and he was one of the legion of skull measurers in those days, which in retrospect, a pastime which in retrospect was largely futile, although it led to dreadful side effects in Germany and elsewhere, needless to say. And HJ Fleure was convinced that the Celts were a distinct race. Nowadays we find it hard even to define who the Celts might have been, I mean it’s not even clear there was anybody called the Celts, but in those days it was a classic case of ignorance and confidence going together. And HJ Fleure described a typical Celt as small, among the chapel-going population, dark, and all these stereotypes of Welsh people. And he decided he’d found the perfect Celtic skull in somebody called James James. And James James was my grandfather, my mother’s father’s cousin. My grandfather was John James Morgan and this chap’s name was, first name James, second name was James. And so HJ Fleure arrived with his skull measuring device, which in fact had been invented here at UCL by Galton himself, decided this was the perfect skull. So he asked James James whether he would donate his skull after his death to science, and James James being a Cardiganshire man, and Cardies, as they’re called, are well known to be extremely mean and careful with money, said yes, but he wouldn’t donate it, he, Fleure, would have to buy the skull. And so Fleure, rather against his better judgement, bought the skull for quite a substantial sum from James James and the irony of course is that James James lasted for an immense age and Fleure died long before. But I’m told that James James’s skull, as an example of the perfect Celt, is still hidden away somewhere in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. So that’s my tie with the pure blood Celts, through my grandfather’s cousin. But I don’t think it actually holds up very well in modern scientific terms. Indeed, ironically just now in 2015 there’s rather a row going on about a very odd chap who’s selling DNA tests to tell you whether you’re Welsh or not, a true Welshman or not. And that has about the same scientific merit as HJ Fleure.

[02:55] How did the story come to you? Who told you the story?

Well, it came to me in a sort of roundabout way, because strangely enough my mother used to tell me about this aged couple she’d known when she was a girl, who’d lived way up in the hills, a place that then seemed to me impossibly remote and is now underwater, underneath the Nantymoel Reservoir, and they were somewhat of local celebrities because they lived in an isolated little cottage up in the hills, couldn’t speak English of course, and were very religious and never went out, had never been to Aberystwyth, you know, they really were quintessential examples in some sense of the ancient Celtic peoples who lived there, and they just lived off their Steve Jones Page 48 C1672/12 Track 4

own patch of land and their own sheep. And they were much talked about because they were so different from everybody else, and that was James James and his wife. So that was how I first learned about them. And I’d read about Fleure long before in the days of skull measuring, and I can’t quite remember how I put the two stories together, but it’s certainly a tested story.

Thank you. [04:01] Now, you told us yesterday that by the, I think you said by the early eighties, and in other places you’ve said it was at some point in the eighties, the grants that you were putting in for the work that you were doing on snails and other things weren’t being funded. But at the very beginning of your career, what was the status of ecological genetics as a kind of sub-discipline within biology?

Oh, I think it was relatively healthy. I think a lot of it, in retrospect, was very simplistic, and didn’t add much to the corpus of knowledge. But of course that’s true of all science, in retrospect. You know, you tend to pick out the highlights, like quantum mechanics. But, you know, that’s a perception by us, that’s an assessment by us. An awful lot of science, although it has some value, it’s fairly low. I think in retrospect that a lot of the early ecological genetics, I would like to think, not necessarily mine, but of course I would say that wouldn’t I, but a lot of the stuff on butterflies and so on was in fact slightly futile, because we didn’t have the tools to ask sophisticated questions. But against that is the situation today, where actually people with extremely sophisticated tools, both biochemical and mathematical, are actually asking and failing to answer exactly the same kinds of questions that we asked way back in the sixties and early seventies, you know, is natural selection generally important, does evolution take place at random, what are the patterns of kinship, what’s a race, what’s a species. We don’t have answers to any of these things, but now we can ask them in a more sophisticated way.

[05:41] And within ecology, I wonder to what extent fieldwork became unfashionable over that period, because I suspect you’re going to tell me that molecular biology affected the kind of status of ecological genetics. But what about the status within just ecology of fieldwork?

Well, I am an ecologist in some senses in that I’m interested in thermal ecology, and I’ve done a lot of fieldwork. Ecology’s a very strange science because it means very different things to different people. There are some very, very deeply sophisticated mathematical models in ecology. What use they are is another question. But an awful lot of statistics and mathematical modelling actually began in ecology. There’s an awful lot of what you might rather dismissively call nature study in ecology, which goes out and discovering new species and describing how many species are living in a particular place. Now it’s easy to mock that, but that’s an essential part of understanding biology. What there isn’t, as far as I’m aware, is a unifying hypothesis which unites all these things. And that’s not like, let’s say, unlike most of the rest of biology, which is united by the theory of evolution, by the facts of genetics and that kind of stuff. Ecology is odd in that it’s, I once rather dismissed it as a science without a theory. It’s still very much in the data gathering world. For example, there is out there – I’m not going to put a date on this – but there are models which appeared five, ten years ago, which Steve Jones Page 49 C1672/12 Track 4

slightly mocked the numerous attempts to get rules of community structure. In other words, under what circumstances do you have lots of different species in a particular place and under what circumstances do you have long food chains versus short food chains, and what circumstances do you have high energy throughput versus low energy throughput. And somebody had the rather bright idea of saying, look, the trouble with all these models is you haven’t got any… no hypothesis, as we say. In other words, you haven’t got a model free system to compare it with. So what he did was take huge amounts of data, crank it through a computer, and compare it with the kind of patterns you would get if all this information was simply random, there were no rules of community assembly. And in fact, it looked pretty much as if most of it was random, so they hadn’t really even begun to attack the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t attack the problem. I think what it does mean to say is that once you get to that level of sophistication and complexity, it’s very hard to assess. And I think, you know, people like brain scientists should be reading the ecological literature, because the ecological literature is really, in my slightly uninformed view, failing to explain patterns of animal and plant abundance. And that’s a problem which is, I think, simple compared with explaining consciousness, explaining brain function. You know, there you’re really getting into some major complications and I think there are lessons to be learned from the hubris which is now around brain science, which is just the same as the hubris which used to be around anthropology when we knew nothing, the hubris that was around genetics when we knew nothing, and I think that’s a problem. If you’re using sophisticated tools on a very complicated system, it’s easy to fool yourself you’re finding answers, you’re probably not, you’re just finding new questions.

[09:11] To what extent is the sort of exaggerated claims made for particular kinds of science at particular times part of this attempt to engage the public in that particular science and to sort of, if not raise, at least maintain the status of it?

I think, to an extent, I think more now than it used to be, I mean in the old days nobody cared about the public, as long as they kept paying the bills. [laughs] And I was actually, I suppose, one of the earlier proponents of, being a bit of a scientific tart and engaging with the public a lot. Now it’s become rather an industry, rather unfortunately, of engaging with the public, and one of the spin-offs, regrettable spin-offs is that every university across the world has got their own PR men, or women, who put out press releases, press releases which are often unrecognisable by the scientists who’ve done the work, and these tend to be leapt on by the newspapers across the world and, you know, grotesque hype takes place. Now, it’s not all due to that. I mean it’s clearly the case that when people began to sequence DNA, with the Sanger Method, as it was called, it seemed a tool of almost unbelievable power and it seemed reasonable for everybody to leap up and down and say, as Clinton, President Clinton said about the Human Genome Project, this is going to change everything. Well, I think we, geneticists, had a rather sardonic grin at that. But I think it was an exciting moment, but you know, science is a bit like Wagner, there are exciting moments and terrible half hours, and now we’re in a definite terrible half hour when it comes to molecular genetics. So, I think the public is actually, I think, is much more sophisticated about science than many people give it credit for. You know, I think they can see through some of this stuff. And there isn’t a profound anti-science movement in Britain, and in most of Europe, as there is, let’s say, in the United States with creationism and so on, or across the Arab world where science, to be frank, doesn’t really Steve Jones Page 50 C1672/12 Track 4

exist. Engineering does, medicine does, but scientific research doesn’t. So I think the communication of science to the public obviously isn’t perfect, but I think it’s not bad.

Thanks. [11:38] Did you then at any point in your career have relations with the ecologists at Silwood Park?

I did, and they weren’t entirely happy, at least from our point of view, in that in a moment of rather, rather hubristic moment in ecology, John Lawton, who is a highly capable ecologist, there’s no question of that, came to UCL from Imperial – and we are of course traditionally rivals, and that’s putting it politely – and suggested we put it in a joint grant to the National Environment Research Council to found a centre for population biology which would combine their expertise in ecology, which is very real, with our expertise in population genetics. Now, when I say our expertise, what he wanted was the expertise of my colleague and then very good friend, still friend, Nick Barton, who was and is one of the world’s great figures in mathematical population genetics. Now, that simply didn’t work, it simply didn’t happen, and I don’t think there’s much point in apportioning blame. Part of it was the banal but true fact, to get to Silwood Park from here is more difficult and takes more time than getting to Manchester from here. Public transport was dreadful, it would take you two and a half hours to get here, if you drive it’s a nightmare. And so we could never really have this to and fro. They have and they still have most of it, a large area of extraordinarily valuable land, which belonged to the University of London - the University of London, that failed state if anywhere is - and we had schemes to set up what later became the snail ranch up at Oxford on that land. But it didn’t work, largely because it was so difficult to get to, it was much easier to get to Oxford. So in the end I think the Centre for Population Biology really became the Imperial College Centre for Population Biology. And they set up this thing called the Ecotron, which I’m no expert on, I’ve read some of the stuff, I’ve always distrusted any science that ends in the word ‘tron’ or ‘omix’, you know, it tends to be a word that… cyclotron means something, genomix means something, beyond that I’m not sure that ‘tron/omix’ add much to the cult of human happiness. So it didn’t work out and I don’t think there’s much point in apportioning blame, I’m sure we were to blame. I think that they were to some extent to blame, and I think that failure actually did a certain amount to stop my own scientific advance in its tracks and I think it’s no coincidence that Nick Barton then left, to my dismay, and went to Edinburgh, and now runs a big mathematical biology centre in Austria. But I think this is all water or blood under the bridge.

[14:41] The efforts in modelling in ecology that you talked about at the beginning today that were compared by this person who generated their own, are they in part the models of Bob May developed in this?

Yes, I mean there are many of them, but May, who was a mathematician rather than a biologist, he simply began to use chaos theory, pointing out that you can start off from identical end points and go through identical experiences in any system and you cannot predict where the system’s going to end. And I mean a famous example of that is the pendulum, the pendulum you think that Galileo found looks like a perfectly sane and rational thing, but in fact it isn’t. All pendulums in the end will end up in chaos, even if you send them ticking Steve Jones Page 51 C1672/12 Track 4

like a grandfather clock, as long as they’re on a flexible rope. And the weather of course is a chaotic system, you can predict it to a certain extent. And Bob’s real contribution really was to say okay, you can make all these rules in ecology and even if they’re true they’re not going to predict what happens, so you’re not going to, with hindsight, be able to say that this system here is like this because we went through this pathway and that system is like that because it went through the other pathway. You can’t do that. And I think that was a valuable addition to the argument and it actually has an ugly sister in evolutionary genetics, which is this argument, is it is a directed system by natural selection, or is it a chaotic system by random change. And the problem is, as I found, and as I think the molecular people have even found, you can look at any system and you can – almost any system – and you could explain it in both terms. And of course you can’t get away with that. You know, you can explain patterns of human variation in more or less absolute terms of random change in small populations as they migrate, or, some people might say, it’s all due to differential reproduction because of this gene or that gene. Now, there’s elements of truth in both of them, but we certainly haven’t disentangled them. I think that’s more true in ecology.

Thank you. [16:56] To what extent did you work with Sam Berry, having been appointed by him in your first…

Well, Sam Berry I think is one of the great underrated scientists of the last few decades. And Sam, I owe a lot to Sam and I have a lot of affection for Sam. I was in Chicago and as I was then, a reputation which I didn’t manage to keep [laughs], I was then fairly well known among that very small community of evolutionary biologists, then very small community of evolutionary biologists. I was pursued by several American universities and actually I was offered a job by McGill University. But I always had a lingering desire to come back to Britain, I didn’t really feel at one in the US, to be frank. And McGill actually hired somebody much better than me, Peter Grant, who’s famous for his work on Darwin’s finches, so they made a good decision there, I mean I didn’t accept their offer. But then out of the blue came this offer from Sam, who I slightly knew from meetings over here, got a temporary one-year job teaching elementary biology in the Royal Free Medical School, which I took, and Dick Lewontin thought I was mad. He said, you know, why are you doing this? You’re squandering your career, you’re not going to go anywhere. But he wasn’t right, I mean I was lucky, I came to the Royal Free which was just beginning to mutate from an all-female medical school to a mixed medical school, and was in extremely, the hospital was in a desperate state in Gray’s Inn Road, I mean shouldn’t have been used for treating horses, let alone humans. The Medical School was very small, still largely female, and I turned up there knowing nothing about the damn place. In fact, the day I turned up, and vivid memories of it, 19, when was it? ’71 was it?

Yeah.

Yeah, would have been. I’d just driven overnight back from Yugoslavia, three nights constant drive, and I was completely shattered, and I had nowhere to stay and I just slept on somebody’s floor, in London. And I got up and staggered in, not expecting anything to happen, I just wanted to say hello to Sam. And I walked into the Steve Jones Page 52 C1672/12 Track 4

Medical School and this extraordinarily fierce lady of about sixty said, ‘Young man, come over here’. So I went over, and she said, ‘You’re not wearing a tie’. And I said, ‘Well I don’t really very often wear a tie’. She said, ‘Well, you didn’t listen to what I said in my lecture’. And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t know you were giving a lecture’. She said, ‘Well, I told all the first year medical students that there was going to be a lecture they had to come to’. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not a first year medical student, I’m your new lecturer in genetics’. And I don’t know who was more embarrassed, her or me. I think me. But she was actually a very nice woman. What was her name? Mary… no, it’s gone. And she had been one of Britain’s first female surgeons, and you’ve got to bear in mind how incredibly chauvinistic medicine then was, particularly surgery, and still is, but she had suffered from familial tremor, which is not damaging for most people, but meant she couldn’t carry on doing surgery, so she became professor of anatomy. So she looked at me and said – I had a torn sweater on – she said, ‘Give me that sweater’. And so I gave it to her. And the following day she gave it me back perfectly sewn. And I thought, this place isn’t so bad, and I actually rather liked it. I was there, tout seul, I mean as a member there, and then Sam and me and a guy called Ian Lush, who were the three illuminati, if that’s the word, of the biology department there, began to play footsie under the table with UCL and that went round and round for years and in ’74 we all formally moved over to UCL. And the irony is that in something like ’84 or ’89, finally the Royal Free Medical School joined UCL, with all kinds of Sturm and Drang and threats of murder and suicide, but it was bound to happen in the end, but we were first to go, and I’ve never regretted it. [21:13] But I enjoyed teaching, I mean quite a lot of the people I taught have become quite well known. I mean Henry Marsh, who just produced a very good and very grisly book called Do No Harm, and became a well-known brain surgeon, and a couple of others who have become really quite prominent. There were some very odd people there. There was a guy, a lecturer in physics, who was, to be frank, a complete jerk who became a Tory MP and then went to the House of Lords. What was his name? I can’t remember. There were some very eccentric people there. It was kind of pickled in 1950s aspic, a lot of it. But in its own way it was fun, I certainly don’t regret having done it.

[21:56] When you said that you think that Sam Berry is an underrated scientist, what do you mean?

Well, because, I mean first of all he was technically very able. I mean he worked on mouse chromosomes and, you know, nowadays, everybody works on, I mean mice are the new humans, except now we know they’re not, I mean there are big differences in mouse responses. But he worked on wild mice population and found chromosome variants across the place, published extensively on them, did quite a lot of mouse behaviour, did experiments on islands, did a lot of other stuff. He was one of the first people, he remains completely unrecognised, he and his colleague, Ian Lush, were among the first people to find the particular genes behind insecticide resistance in various pests. And simply by being at the Royal Free and not being a man who blew his own trumpet all the time, I think he was somewhat overlooked. And ditto Ian Lush, who in his own way was a rather tragic figure. He was overlooked too, I mean he did a lot of very good early stuff. He began to work on something which seemed eccentric, which was taste variation and smell variation in mice, and he used to cross these damn mice together and it cost us a fortune keeping the mice. God, it was when I was first head Steve Jones Page 53 C1672/12 Track 4

of biology, when we were over here. And he was the first to map these genes, and that turned into a huge industry which ended up with a Nobel Prize for the person who’d done much more on it. So I think, I mean I wouldn’t say I was underrated, but those two certainly were. But it shouldn’t matter, I mean it’s the science that matters and we did a lot of science, even in that slight outpost of scientific research.

Is it just that, that the place where this work was done and the characters of the scientists involved being non- showy that results in this?

I don’t think it’s entirely that. And again, we’ve got the benefit of hindsight. It wasn’t clear in the 1970s when Ian was doing this stuff, that mouse taste and smell was going to be the entry to a new world of what became, that’s part of brain science essentially, physiology, so you know, looking back it’s easy to say. It wasn’t clear that looking at mouse chromosomes was going to tell us an awful lot about human genetics and human disease. But I think it’s notable that nobody picked it up at the time, it seemed to be a bit way out.

[24:30] One of the things that Sam is well known for is for talking and writing about his science and his Christianity together. Was that something that was discussed at work?

Not really, not really. I mean I knew of course that Sam was a believer. I was on a field trip once and he tried to make me say grace, and I said, ‘Sam, I can’t do that’. And he was perfectly reasonable about it. He has tried to, he’s asked me recently to try and write a joint book with him about science and religion, because I wrote a book not long ago called The Serpent’s Promise, which really was not about religion, it was about the Bible, the science in the Bible, and created a great fuss, which I didn’t expect, among the religious community. But I just don’t see how Sam, I mean I respect Sam’s view, I’m a great believer in the freedom of religion, but they just wouldn’t overlap, they wouldn’t have anything to say to each other. So he, I think he’s a profoundly religious man and good luck to him, and several of the other people at the Royal Free came from that background. But the answer is, so what? I mean, you know. The irony of course is that UCL was specifically founded to exclude any religious test to come into university, it was founded in the 1820s in direct opposition to Oxford and Cambridge who only allowed paid up members of the Church of England in. So there’s an irony there, but we’re liberal, we’ll let anybody in, you know, atheists and all.

There wasn’t then any… did you perceive any extent to which he might have been looked at negatively by other scientists because of his faith?

I didn’t perceive that really, no. I mean I think the great majority of scientists we know nowadays are not religious, I mean the evidence is overwhelming, that’s true. Now Sam, although he’s religious, is certainly not a biblical creationist and in fact if you were to ask about our own views of human evolution and many other people’s views of human evolution, they would actually converge. As I often say, science will tell you everything you need to know about yourself, apart from the interesting stuff. And because humans are unique in so many ways, in terms of IQ, sense of history, a sense of the future, altruism to people who aren’t related to Steve Jones Page 54 C1672/12 Track 4

you, all these are unique attributes and because evolutionary biology’s overwhelmingly a comparative science, it’s not very good at all in dealing with one-offs, the unique. And I can’t believe that a chimpanzee has got any religious sense at all, so I think there comes a level, at least for the time being, we cannot explain this stuff. There’s quite a lot of sociology which tells you when religion emerges and what kinds of religion there are in different societies, and that’s quite convincing, but beyond that, I don’t think that traditional biology will tell you very much about it. You certainly couldn’t use science to disprove the existence of God or prove the existence of God, and as you can’t, I find the question uninteresting. And I think Sam would actually agree with me there. You’d have to ask him, but I think our views are quite… he has faith and I don’t, it’s simple as that.

Thank you. [27:58] Could you tell me about some of the key developments in your work on snail genetics, in particular sort of experimental work? I know there’s a denim dye fade test, something called Jones’s Balls. And you’ve also mentioned twice the snail ranch, but haven’t told us about it. So take us through the…

The interesting thing is, I mean I spent a long time looking at the patterns of gene frequency in snails in relation to thermal relations in sunshine, as we called it. And snails are what we call ectotherms, they get most of their energy from outside, from sunlight, the energy in sunlight, which is very considerable. If you sit on an iron park bench on a sunny day, you’ll immediately discover that. And of course if you sit on a black iron park bench on a sunny day, you’ll discover it a lot quicker than if you sit on a white iron park bench. So it was clear to me that an awful lot of snail population genetics, not necessarily all of it, which involves genes that alter the reflectivity of the shell had to do with the way they responded to patterns of sunlight. And in fact it was in the Royal Free I started doing it, bizarrely, I have vivid memories of standing on the roof messing with this stuff. And I thought to myself, how can we measure the thermal relations of individual animals in the wild. And I had done some messing around, sort of brain dead messing around, with putting thermometers inside gel filled snail shells and it was obvious that dark ones heated up more than light ones, I mean, but that’s not biology, that’s physics, I mean it’s a statement that was obviously true. And I went round and round in circles, I messed around with a thing called a pyranometer, which measures the wavelength of radiation given out by a snail. So a warm snail has kind of produced more and shorter wavelength in the infrared than a cold snail. And we can buy these pyranometers, they weren’t much used then, and you can sort of measure the temperature of this snail and that snail, this snail. But it didn’t work in the wild because you couldn’t see most of the snails most of the time. So after all the buggering around I came up with an idea of, I have vivid memories of how I did it actually, I was walking around, I was collecting snails around the coast of Cornwall in 1968 and I know it was 1968 because that was the year of miracles. Just the year after Sergeant Pepper. And it was also the year of the Torrey Canyon disaster. And I remember going down to Cornwall with a chap called Paul Harvey, Paul who’s now, who was until recently head of zoology in Oxford, and Paul was a louche character, that’s for sure, I think he’d agree with that, and we had a wonderful time. In fact in the end it was kind of a brain dead piece of research, it was just more of those data points… we were out there camping for a month, six weeks. Walked all the way round the Cornish coast path to St Ives, which was then completely packed with hippies. And we did all this, it was a barrel of laughs, and it didn’t produce anything of much value, but I had one of these strange memories, I Steve Jones Page 55 C1672/12 Track 4

remember walking past, on the cliffs one day, walking past a big board, probably about ten feet by ten, and on to it were nailed all kinds of bits of electric wire in circles. And it didn’t say what it was and I thought, what the hell – we looked at this – what the hell is this thing? And it was just stuck up there. And I was in the pub, as I frequently was, and fell into conversation with some bloke and I said that board out there, what’s it for? And he said, oh, what they’re doing is they’re testing the ability of different kinds of cable to withstand sunlight, and that for some reason stuck in my mind. And two or three years later I began to think, well there was that board, these things could break down in different lights and different rates in sunlight, so maybe there are bits of plastic that break down at different rates in sunlight. And I went into it and there were bits of plastic that broke down at different rates in sunlight. And I got some of them and I messed around with them, but they were a bit recalcitrant. So then I thought, hang on a minute, I’m wearing jeans here, as I always did in those days, and these fade in sunlight, so we can cut out bits of denim, a bit of ‘jean’ manipulation, and we can stick them on to snail shells. And we did that, I did that, and it was kind of stupid, but then of course the penny dropped, what you needed to do was to find out what the name of the dye in the jeans was, buy some of it, which I did, stuff called Coomassie Blue, I got some, and it was cheap, got a big pot of it. And I thought, how are we going to work out the breakdown of this? And I had a bit of a brainwave and I said, what we can do is dissolve this very labile, unstable blue dye in a stable yellow paint, to give you a green paint, and then put that green paint out in the sun and as the blue dye breaks down it’ll fade back to yellow. And I did a lot of messing around, I did a lot of pouring it on to flat glass plates to make it into a kind of plastic sheet which you would then glue on to the snail. But that, you didn’t need to do that, all you’d need to do was to blob it on. So I did some experiments in a little series of cages at Nettlecombe Court, which is in Somerset, and to my extreme delight it worked like a dream. The snails of different genotype, dark or white, spent different parts of the day – over a month or so – spent different periods in daylight. So they were choosing the part of the habitat in which they were relatively, in inverted commas, ‘comfortable’. They weren’t thinking, oh this is comfortable, what they were doing was saying, oh shit, I’m too hot here, I’ll move somewhere cooler, or I’m too cold here and I’ll move somewhere warmer. And although I say it myself, that was a nifty piece of work, and I published it in Nature, just a single author. As far as I know it had no conceivable effect [laughs] at all. But it was a clever piece of work, I mean I’m boasting here, but it was one of those rare clever bits of work I’ve done. [34:32] And that kind of grew and grew and grew, in fact it outgrew itself, because it was a damn good idea. And so we started doing it out in the Pyrenees, by which time my main locus operandi had by then moved to the Pyrenees, I used to go there every summer. And we buggered around, god, we buggered around. We marked hundreds of snails and put them back, came back a month later, two months later, a year later, and it was all a nightmare. You got a tiny recapture rate, lots of the snails lost their marks out in the wild because they scratch themselves against rocks and that stuff, and we wasted about three seasons doing that. And I thought, you know, this is going nowhere, so, with my last substantial research grant really, we built this, what I called the snail ranch, out at Wytham Woods in Oxford, which was a lot of work. And I had a number of PhD students and postdocs there and my postdoc research fellow, Rob Cowie, who’s now head of conservation in the Hawaiian Islands, he and I built – and it really was, it was real hand work – a hundred steel cages, a metre across, round cages. And we drove back and forth to Oxford again and again, dug ‘em in, must have been mad, it took us months, over the winter and digging in the snow. And we dug ‘em in and we started doing experiments there and we repeated the Steve Jones Page 56 C1672/12 Track 4

stuff I’d done in Nettlecombe on a much bigger scale and it worked. We did the obvious experiment which was to take light ones and paint them black, and black ones and paint them light, and that worked. Then I fell into my great failures, which is we started doing experiments which I’ve never published, for example, we collected a whole pile of snails from Europe, cepaea nemoralis, my snail, from Scotland all the way down to the Pyrenees and further south, and we randomised them over cages and we found in fact that the Scottish and the southern ones behaved quite differently. The southern ones were much more anxious to get into the sun than the northern ones. Never published it, to my shame. I did some other stuff which was pretty nifty, which goes back to my power station days. Now, in the power station days, if you’re working on high pressure steam it’s hot, in fact it’s very hot, it’ll kill you if it gets out, and so you’ve got all these valves and so on. Now it’s all done electronically, but in those days the rule for a valve is if it ever goes beyond, above a particular temperature, then it’s condemned. If it only goes over the temperature for a minute, that’s it, you have to abandon it or replace them, whether you replace the gaskets, what have you. And the way they did it, commercially, was to buy these things called Celsi dots, which was a clever idea, which were based on waxes which melted at particular temperatures, and it’s well known that the longer a paraffin molecule is, you know, C6Hn, an olefin molecule is, the higher the melting temperature is, okay? And so they had these waxes and at the bottom of the little patch, the waxes which were clear, they were actually white, were put on top of the carbon dust and so if the wax ever melted, the thing went black. And that too sat in the back of my mind. And I thought, I started reading the literature and it’s the nature of the beast in thermal ecology is that what happens for nearly all creatures, humans included, is that we might keep our temperatures at very narrow limits, but if you go above that limit, even a little bit above that limit, you’re done, you’re done for, you’re finished, you die of fever. Now, we are very good at keeping at that limit. Snails and fruit flies and so on are also very good at keeping at limit by behaving, but if they ever stray outside it, that’s it, they’re finished. So what you need to know is what happens at sudden moments of extreme temperature. So we did some experiments, I began to do some waxes which worked at much lower temperatures and it worked, and we found indeed that the dark ones were on a sunny day, if they went out, suddenly bam, they were done for, okay? Did it in the cages, actually did that out in Spain too. Never published it, to my shame. [39:14] Something else we did, which was also bloody clever, which came again from actually teaching medical students, was talking about blood glucose. Now, what medics had become very good at, were then very good at and now much better at, is measuring the amount of glucose in a solution. Because if you’ve got diabetes, let’s say, you’ll have sweet urine and doctors used to – I always used to tell the students – they used to drink their patients’ urine to see whether it tasted sweet. But it’s gone way beyond that now, and even in the eighties when we – it was late seventies when we did this – I suddenly thought to myself, oh bloody hell, I’d read years before an ecological technique which is called an integrating thermometer, and what this does, it measures the number of degree days in a particular place. And this is very important in farming, because what you will need to know, for a farmer, he wants to know how much oomph – to use the technical word – has gone through his field to allow his crop to grow, and that might have gone through six cold days and a blasting hot day and six cold days, or it might have been thirteen moderately warm days. But it didn’t really matter. It mattered to some extent, but what they needed to know was the number of degrees and days. And there were various machines that did it and I knew and I’d read somewhere, I can’t remember where, that sucrose – sugar, glucose plus fructose – broke Steve Jones Page 57 C1672/12 Track 4

down into glucose plus fructose at a rate that depended on how warm it had been, as solution. So I thought, here’s a bloody good idea, we’ll make what we call snail rucksacks, which we did, little tiny plastic bags, into which we put sucrose solution and we stuck them on the back of these bloody snails, and we put them out in the cages and measured – and this was Rob did the actual work – by talking to medics who could now measure minute amounts of glucose, we measured the amount of glucose, the number of degree days which every individual snail had lived through, and it turned out that the energetics of each individual snail depended on whether it was dark or whether it was light. And though I say it myself, there’s a huge literature on what’s called ecological energetics, how energy passes through communities. Nobody’s ever done anything like that, and we didn’t publish it. So that was stupid. [41:42[ And then the other thing which we did publish, because I had two very fierce colleagues, which is a bit off on left field, but it’s the same kind of thing. From there I’ve moved back on to working on fruit flies. And snails have many, many advantages because they’re tough in the field, but you can’t breed them, it would take too long. Drosophila are exactly the opposite; you can breed them but they’re real buggers in the field. But I had an idea, I tried to measure the ecological niche of drosophila melanongaster, standard animal in the field, and once again, here am I blowing my own trumpet, but it was a good idea. Now there are numbers of mutations in drosophila and drosophila mutations, there are thousands of them and we know a lot about them. And many of them are called conditional mutations and they depend on the conditions in which the fly develops and some of those are called TS, temperature sensitive mutations, and I thought here’s a good idea. What we’ll do is we’ll release a gazillion drosophila melanogaster carrying temperature sensitive mutations and we’ll look at the next generation and ask, by looking, how powerful the manifestation of these mutations were, what temperature they developed in the wild. And in fact we went a step further than that, the mutation we used was called white blood, and it’s an eye colour mutation and there’s a whole series of eye colour mutations. And to put it crudely, it’s a mutation in one of the steps in eye colour which leads to the brown pigment in the eye – there’s two sets of pigments in the eye, brown and purple, which gives you kind of red eye – and if you keep the flies cold, the eyes are brown, if you keep them hot, the eyes are white. And this is what we call a sex-linked mutation, so in other words, you can make females who are XX, it’s on the X chromosome, you can make them have one copy of the mutation and one copy of the normal, heterozygotes, and they will look normal and act normal and you can let them go in the wild in huge quantities, and their sons, half their sons, will have a copy of the mutation. And we did this, myself and Linda Partridge, my colleague, who’s a very, as I think I mentioned last time we spoke, is an extremely distinguished biologist, and a friend of mine, Jerry Coyne, who became professor of biology at Chicago and has just retired, and become the world’s great expert on drosophila speciation. We did this in the States in the early eighties. And again, it worked like a dream, we released a gazillion drosophila, some of them on the USDA, United States Department of Agriculture, experimental site at Beltsville in Maryland, which is on the outskirts of Washington, middle of the summer when it was blastingly hot, and simultaneously up in the Shenandoah Mountains at about 6,000 feet. And we released gazillions of these flies, not asking anybody’s permission, which turned out to be a big mistake, but that was another story, and sampled them over the next several months, and we got lots of them back. And lo and behold, what we found was, there was a big range of temperatures experienced by the flies, which had developed in the wild, when we got the F1s, the males of the next generation. The individual flies, some of them had developed at thirty-three degrees Celsius, some of them Steve Jones Page 58 C1672/12 Track 4

had developed twenty-eight degrees Celsius, within a patch of rotting fruit as big as this room, and this is a tiny room. So that there was an enormous potential for habitat choice within that particular tiny region, just like the snail stuff. So the flies were choosing to live in quite a complicated habitat, quite a complicated way. And we said oh whoopee about that, and then we completely blew it, because we didn’t ask the obvious question, and penny dropped just after we’d thrown the flies away, the ones we’d collected, the obvious question is, that we knew that if you keep flies as they grow cold, they grow bigger than flies which are kept as they grow up in the lab warm. And the question was, was there a difference in body size, as manifested in wing length, between the cold developing flies in the wild and the warm developing flies in the wild. And we didn’t ask the question, and that was just stupid because one of the big questions is – it’s still talked about – is if you take body size in flies or anything else, in general, not always, but in general it pays to be good – it pays to be good – pays to be big, particularly in sexually selected species where males fight over females, it pays to be big. But you always end up with variation in size, and that’s a bit of a paradox, because if it pays to be big, why isn’t everybody big. And nobody ever really had thought that maybe it’s a purely environmental response, or largely environmental response, given where the flies live. And it might well be you’ve got a trade-off, as we would say, it might be better for some flies to develop fast as hell and get out first, even though they’re small, whereas other flies think, well I’m going to develop slowly and get out later, but by that time the females may have been taken. So there was a whole universe of interesting stuff we’d missed and I kick myself about that, but we’ve never really done anything more about it. Linda and I then did some experiments releasing cold and warm lab flies into the wild in Davis, California, and seeing that in lab flies, indeed, they did do that when released, but that wasn’t nearly as good as doing it in flies who’d done it in the wild. But we published that and it’s funny, that paper, which really was not a bad paper, I seem to have a talent for doing this, publishing interesting papers and never get referred to. And there have been some references to it and one of them, by somebody I don’t know, said ‘this unduly neglected paper’. I don’t really mind, but it’s odd that that should happen.

[47:53] How do you, when you were talking there about the trade-off, obviously thinking here is a metaphor, but you say some flies think it’s best to go…

Well, yeah, it’s a metaphor.

How do you get around that problem of when you’re communicating this sort of thing, it’s almost impossible to avoid…

Well, it’s a metaphor. I mean I think if I say… I mean, in some senses, if you put a snail, a dark snail on a hot sunny day, okay, in the sun, it’ll think to itself, shit, I’m too hot, so I’ve got to get moving, okay? And I think you can use the word ‘think’ there, I don’t think you’re using, having any particular… and again, if you put your finger on a red hot poker, you’re in some senses thinking, shit, I’d better move my finger. So I think that’s allowable.

[48:47] Steve Jones Page 59 C1672/12 Track 4

And in the snail ranch, could you tell me what you put in the cages in order to give the snails the opportunity to have different environments?

Well, we basically planted them with local plants from the pasture, or had been a pasture, and just let them grow up. In fact the problem really was, and we hadn’t thought it through, when we started them we put a whole pile of manure, of horse manure on the bottom, and this was a mistake because what happened then is we got this tremendously over-generous vegetation, so we had to cut that back. But because we were randomly, doing it properly, we had a hundred cages and we were randomising them over cages, in principle that didn’t matter. So yeah, it was a huge amount of effort and we were deeply foolish not to do more with it. It kind of ended in tears, because it turned out that the buggers we’d bought the mesh – they had galvanised steel mesh round them – they’d kind of cheated us, they told us that this mesh was guaranteed to last for eight years or so on, it started rusting after about two years. And we went back to them and screamed and shouted and yelled and bawled, but they were having nothing of it, they said where’s your guarantee, we didn’t give you any written guarantees. So that was a problem and we constantly had to be repairing the cages and painting them, which was a pain in the neck. But it was an opportunity – some of it was good – but it was an opportunity missed.

[50:20] Why do you think that you didn’t publish some of those things?

It’s a mystery to me, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It was partly in that when the money ran out, all my colleagues, I lost all my PhD students. I had a whole, I mean I’m not particularly embittered by it, but there was a whole period early in the Thatcher disaster where everywhere you turned you were being told no. I mean I had just become head of biology, head of the Galton Laboratory, head of the genetics department, and the genetics department was in poor shape, largely because the previous head, Betty Robson, who was, she had been a very good biologist, a human geneticist, but she had this very strange, I remember her boasting that our department was the only department in UCL that was not running a deficit, financial deficit, and we should be proud of this. And that of course was completely mad, because all these people were, what was then the zoology department, were throwing money around like there was no tomorrow, and hiring people, and whenever anybody, one of ours left, they weren’t replaced. So the place was definitely on the way down, there’s no question. And then I became head and I thought, oh God, this is a mess. And just after that they had the first research assessment exercise, which was an utterly stupid and futile waste of time, and we failed and I was furious about it, because they were comparing us with Cambridge genetics which was twenty times bigger, there were only four, five of us. In the end, I have to say, that failure, although I didn’t live to see it, was a success, because the then provost of the university, Derek Roberts, who was a brutal guy, but very, very effective, he said we can’t have somebody as weak as this, we’ve got to pour money on them, so he did and the place began to expand and I hired lots of people and it came back in good shape. But I was very annoyed and disappointed by that. [52:27] And then I had a PhD student, a postdoc, research fellow, Les Noble, and Les I liked and was very good. He was supposed to be working on thermal relations in drosophila, which - as a development from this stuff we’d Steve Jones Page 60 C1672/12 Track 4

done in the wild – and that was an era when a whole new machine had started, which again, I should have done more with, which was called heat-shock proteins, and heat-shock proteins were discovered by Lindquist about that time, and they were a bit of a curiosity, it turned out that if you – well, they’d been known, the effect had been known for a long time – that if you shocked a drosophila pupa or larva, then first of all particular parts of the chromosomes began to puff up and then adults were then more resistant to heat shocks. And it turned out this was due to particular genes being turned on by a heat shock and this was one of the very first cases where you could turn genes on and off at will. And the HSPs, which are very, very interesting, turned out that heat was only one thing, I mean all kinds of things: poisons, even sex turned them on, all kinds of stuff, they were stress proteins. And they’re big now, they’re big in cancer biology, everything. And Les was supposed to be doing stuff on making temperature gradients in the lab which he put flies, did they choose to go where the heat shock proteins were on, and it was my fault no doubt, particularly, but he didn’t really push that through the way he should have done. Instead, he spent his time working on what he really cared about, which is what he’d done his PhD with me on, which was the systematics of slugs. And I kept shouting and swearing at him and I hadn’t realised how little he was actually achieving. And in the end our final report was judged unsatisfactory, although the slug work was published and was actually very successful. And I thought look, I’m being told I can’t – and then Nick Barton left and when Nick left, Nick was famous and notorious because he was a mathematician, I mean not in the sense that somebody who’s a real mathematician is like way up in the stratosphere, but he was a proper, he did maths, and he hired students who simply couldn’t cope with the mathematics. So his rate of success of PhD students was abysmal, they failed all the time, or they gave up. And the damned assessment people put in another assessment, which if you didn’t have a certain proportion of PhD students who passed, you wouldn’t get any more studentships. And lo and behold, we fell below that, and that was entirely due to the fact that Nick’s students didn’t finish. My students finished, everybody else’s students finished, but Nick was such a spectacular failure that we failed. But Nick had gone, so our individual ones, but that was no, no, that was the rule was it was this period. So I thought right, I’m being told again and again and again that I’m a failure, and I’m failing research grants, screw it. And that was a kind of infantile thing to do, but it led to a great break in my career, which stopped me being a real scientist and started me being a hack.

Was your reaction, as you’ve suggested, was there one of sort of irritation, or was this actually something that was sort of depressing or upsetting, this period?

Oh, it was both… but yes, it was very depressing and very upsetting. Particularly when one saw that other people were still getting funded for projects like, shall we say, things I didn’t think were particularly good science, things like a lot of the stuff that happened at Silwood. Now I myself didn’t think that was particularly good science. Now, that’s just my own, no doubt rather ignorant perception, but I certainly saw people being funded for much more banal stuff than what we were doing. Now, a lot of it was my fault for not publishing stuff. But I do remember a period of real depression at that time. As I often say [laughs], you know, the most important year of my life was 1979 when I found a wife and lost a country, and I found, I’m glad to say, I found I was set up with the woman I’m now married to, and Mrs Thatcher came and everything in the university business changed. From my point of view for the worse, from many other people’s point of view, for the better. Steve Jones Page 61 C1672/12 Track 4

But, you know, all this constant judgement and picking of scabs, it just wasn’t for me, it wasn’t why I went into the business. [57:04] And almost by coincidence, out of the blue, shortly after that, I began to get heavily involved, particularly in radio science. I have vivid memories, I think it was in 1979 when out of the blue came a message from the BBC to UCL, was there anybody who could come down and talk about snails on Woman’s Hour. So they picked on me and I went down and there was this fairly grand woman who said, ‘Oh, oh, Dr Jones, I gather you know about snails’ she said. ‘I have a scientific question I want to ask you’. I said, ‘Yes?’ She said, ‘These animals are absolutely noshing my hostas, what should I do?’ And I thought, ‘What?’ And this was live, you know. [laughs] I um-ed and aw-ed and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that stuff. This is gardening, not my game.’ And I thought, well they’ll never ask me back again. But they asked me back again and again and I did have hundreds and hundreds of little pieces for them. And I, through the good auspices of Deborah Cohen, who then became Head of Radio Science, who’s an extremely capable broadcaster, still there, we set up a thing called Blue Skies, which I thought would last for six programmes. It lasted for forty or fifty, and it was on Radio 3 and it was an arts/science type thing and was utterly obscure. Usually went out on a Saturday night on Radio 3 during the concert interval in the evening. As far as I was aware, there was nobody listening to it. But it was really good fun to do, because every one was a mix of a scientific theme and an artistic theme and I really enjoyed doing it. For example, we did one particularly good one early on, which was a bit of a gem of a programme. It was about time and it was about time in the novel, time in music, time expansion and dilation in physics, measuring time. And it just all fitted together, and the irony is that particular one introduced me to AS Byatt who I then became really quite friendly with. And a lot of her books had quite a lot of scientists in them as characters, and she has a book with a lot of snail genetics in it which came from my discussions with her. And I met Ian McEwan and I met all kinds of interesting people and I really enjoyed doing it. [59:24] And I think the BBC in its own odd way rather liked it, and out of the blue, in about 1990, really out of the blue I was invited to give the Reith Lectures. And I gave them on a topic called The Language of the Genes. And I was quite startled by the invitation, because the Reith Lectures then, much more than now, still had the aura of, you know, Bertrand Russell and all that kind of stuff. I think they’ve regained it to an extent now, but they went through a period when they didn’t. And they were a triumph, not because they were particularly good lectures, and I put a lot of effort into them, but because 1991 was the year when the public was just becoming aware what was happening in genetics. It really was the year when DNA was beginning to come out of the closet and people were beginning to look at differences between races, genetic diseases, human migration, mutation, mutation in age. All this stuff which was just beginning to emerge in genetics was completely unknown to the general public. So I put that into the Reith Lectures, six of them. And it’s ironic, they were very well reviewed and the BBC had lots and lots and lots of queries about them from the word go. And they then produced a Roneo’d version of the scripts - and they literally were Roneo’d, showing the period when this was done - which they sold at some large sum, twelve pounds or so for each, probably forty or fifty pages of script. And they sold 15,000 of them to people out there who really wanted to learn this, to hear about this stuff. So they made £180,000, having paid me £10,000. But they did pay me a bit more. But then I thought, bloody hell, and then I was immediately approached by publishers who said do you want to make a book out of this. And I said yeah, Steve Jones Page 62 C1672/12 Track 4

and that was The Language of the Genes, which really sold like hot cakes. And again, I think it’s not a bad book, but overwhelmingly, the reason it sold like hot cakes was it was published at absolutely the right moment, because genetics looks as if it was going through one of those things, one of those moments in science, where everything suddenly became clear. And The Language of the Genes came out in ’93, I think, the hardback, and you could produce these clear explanations of, you know, mutation, human history, all this stuff. Now, I actually produced a revised version in 2000, when it was still fairly clear, and I couldn’t produce the revised version now, because it’s such a complete mess. So it was just the right, it was a book of the moment, you know, and that’s the reason it succeeded. [1:02:28] And having had such a success with that, I went on to make a television series called In the Blood. And that was Alan Yentob. And my wife, as it happens, is in television, as in quite well-known in television. And Alan called me into his office when he was head of BBC2 and said make a series about anything you like. So I said I’ll do one about human genetics and evolution, and that was In the Blood. And that was a bit, they threw money at it – god almighty, they threw money at it – but that was a bit of a mixed success, and I’m not throwing blame around, but the woman who was the producer, I don’t think her heart was in it. I mean her interest in life was and is feminism and women being oppressed and that kind of stuff, which is a topic which I’m not close to, but it’s an important topic, I agree. And to my amazement, and even more so to my wife’s amazement, enormous amazement, she simultaneously took up another six-part series on oppressed women. Now, my missus makes five or six part, sometimes longer, political documentaries about death in Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, she’s now doing one about Obama. Each one takes three years of absolutely fulltime work by a fulltime team of people. And we didn’t have that and that kind of showed, I thought. We had some very good stories in this, I travelled all over the world, in Japan, to Finland, to Australia, you name it, I went there. I went to Death Row in Georgia, which was a horrible experience. And it was all there but it didn’t stitch together. It was unfortunate, I think. It could have been brilliant. I wasn’t a great television presenter; I have a very good face for radio. I’m not like somebody like… who’s the guy who presents Grand Designs, what’s his name? Can’t remember his name. But I’m obsessed, like many men of my age, with buildings and houses, that’s my hobby, that’s what I like doing. And I watch him and I think this guy can present, he can just walk, he can just walk up to the camera and talk to it like a friend, which is much harder to do, you know. And the guy, what’s his name? The astronomy guy from Manchester? You must know who that is.

Brian Cox?

Brian Cox, who I’ve done a lot with. He can do the same, he could marry the camera. And I couldn’t do that. I could marry the microphone, I can talk perfectly happily into a microphone, but I wasn’t good at doing that, and I think it showed. So that wasn’t a huge success. But the irony is that my publishers, Harper Collins, were convinced that it was going to be a triumph, because while I was doing the book, in the abundant periods when nothing was happening, I took a sabbatical from here, so I didn’t make any money at all out of the programme because I gave up my salary here, more or less the same from the BBC, I wrote the book while it was happening. When we should have been filming I was saying, where are we going filming, you know, oh, I’m busy doing this, I’m busy doing that. And the book is not bad, actually, I think it’s my best one. But the Steve Jones Page 63 C1672/12 Track 4

publishers had the draft in manuscript and they said, this book is great, it’s going to be a real bestseller, particularly with this television programme with it – I haven’t got a copy in here, surprisingly – but they said, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to make it on glossy paper with colour illustrations throughout. I thought, Christ almighty, you know, and in the end, bizarrely, when they did it, it was a beautifully produced book, with colour illustrations on almost every page turn, to such an extent I couldn’t find enough illustrations. And anybody who’s been in publishing would know, that’s just crazy, because these illustrations cost a fortune, you have to buy the rights to them and to produce them costs a fortune. So in the end the book fell slap-bang between two stools, because, though I say it myself, it was quite a good, it was a good science book, and it was also a good picture book, but the people who want to read science books are not interested in pictures, and the people who want picture books don’t want science. So the cover price was, I’ve forgotten what it was, it was pretty elevated, and so it didn’t sell. However, I got an enormous advance for it, so that was good. [laughs] So anyway, then having got the book habit, carried on with the book habit and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

[1:06:58] Could you tell me, as this is the sort of beginning of it, could you tell me more about the 1979 offer of the radio work and how that developed? In other words, who at the BBC were you working with on those initial, for example, the snail programme on Woman’s Hour, was it always Woman’s Hour that you were doing…

No, no, no, it was all over the place. I mean the BBC, I mean much, much later, three years ago, I did a report on science broadcasting for the BBC, and the BBC then, less now but certainly then, was a totally fractured organisation, you know, it was like the warring states of the Soviet Union. So people would come to me from all over. And also, if your name was known, they would come to you, you know, who should we, talk about this. And of course I had the unique distinction of being the closest geneticist to Broadcasting House, so I could be over there in ten minutes. [1:07:57] But how they decided to do the Reiths, I don’t know. Deborah, who I think was a first-rate broadcaster and did a really good, in the Radio Science Unit, did a really good job. I think she put in a bid to do a science one and obviously there’s some elevated body that decides it’s going to do them, but when we did them, I took it very seriously and it’s actually very ironic because I put a lot of work into the scripts, and I’ve been to several since by people who’ve put no work into the scripts. I went to a great one with Daniel Barenboim, which was absolutely hilarious, because he didn’t know what the Reiths were, he just wandered in and started rambling, but it was extraordinarily good and funny. But I put too much work into the scripts, so every line was carefully crafted. Deborah was beside herself, because in those days the Reiths, you know, was the peak of Radio 4 broadcasting, in some senses at least. And she came up with this rule which was to me was and is completely barmy, which was that every single one had to be done in a single take. So you’d start – every one was twenty- eight minutes – so you’d be in Studio B5, which is in the basement, and that too is a bugger because you have to stop because of the tube trains sometimes. And you start reading, you know, how do they begin? Every day as I go to work I pass a glass case containing some scientific relics, and these are the… this is the Galton stuff, and that’s how it all started. And I’d get to minute twenty-six and I’d cough, or fluff. Right, go back to the Steve Jones Page 64 C1672/12 Track 4

beginning, start again. And I did some of them about six times, and I never really knew why she wanted to do this, because, you know, normally, you edit, you cough and edit. But she wanted to do it and we did it. And the reviews were generally very good, apart from one by a guy who I then got to know – forgotten his name now - became a well-known television critic. And he said the contents of these programmes is absolutely fascinating, but they appear to be given by a badly programmed, read out by a badly programmed robot. And I was forced to agree with him, you know, because there was this leaden urspreche, you know, discourse. And I then learned that, you know, when you’re on the radio, and I’ve done really a lot, I have a radio voice, which is a bit like this, you know, it tends to get a bit too sing-song and a little bit too explanatory, but it works, and it probably wouldn’t work on television. But I’ve done, I seem to have slipped off the radar on the radio to a degree, but I’ve now done a few television things. Yeah, I just do ‘em, it’s fun to do.

[1:10:47] So after the, after Woman’s Hour asked you to do the snail one, it would be someone from another department…?

Well, it was very often from the Radio Science department, and I’d do all kinds of little short reports and this, that and the other. And they had a magazine programme called Material World where I’d do things from… I did a number of odd little ones. I did really quite a nice one, I remember, about Alfred Russel Wallace, a radio series, tracing the River Wye and the Usk. And Wallace thought – Wallace, who travelled across the world and had incredible adventures – he thought the most beautiful place in the world was the valley of the River Wye, and so we traced the Wye going up and coming down the Usk and went to a lot of Wallace places, and that was just one of many such things. I did another one about Darwin in Snowdonia. I can’t remember most of them, I’ve done dozens of them, yeah.

[1:11:41] Tell me more about your friendship with AS Byatt and especially the way in which knowing you led to the inclusion in her books of the snail work.

Antonia has written a number of books which have scientific themes in them. What was her first one called? Possessed [Possession]. And I have to say, I’m not a fan of modern fiction, generally. I like early McEwan, the later McEwan I’m not particularly fond of. But I interviewed her on Blue Skies and she said, ‘I’m terribly busy, I’m going to France tomorrow’. I said, ‘Well, that’s fine, I can go to France, where do you live?’ And it turns out – I have a house in France, where I spend a lot of time – and it turned out she too had a house in France about forty minutes’ drive from me. So in her somewhat grand way she said, ‘Well, come over and visit’. So I went over and visited and in fact we hit it off, we got on very well. And we started talking, we talked a lot about, she’s obviously interested in science, so we talked about science, and her husband was very nice, Peter, Duffy. And we often saw each other, and then from this, this emerged, she wanted to write a gigantic – her later books became gigantic – she wrote a tetralogy, what was it called? But one of them was called Babel Tower and it actually turned on language, as in my Language of the Genes, that’s why ‘Babel’. And one of its characters, who certainly wasn’t me, but he was a snail geneticist at the University of York, Steve Jones Page 65 C1672/12 Track 4

where ironically, the dreadful Paul Hardy had then gone. But, so she wanted to know all about the kinds of questions he’d be doing and she took copious notes, and I realised after a while, what she was doing, she was writing stuff for PhD students of the future to deconstruct. I mean she’d ask me questions like, ‘What was the name of the keeper of molluscs in Dublin in the 1930s?’ His name in fact was Stelfox, because I’d been to his collections and been through them. So Stelfox goes in, you know. And, ‘Where would people have been collecting snails?’ The Marlborough Downs. So that goes in. And she in fact dedicated the first volume to me. So that’s the kind of thing I got into. I also talked a lot to Ian McEwan, although McEwan got much more into people I knew, some of whom had been at the Royal Free, who became psychiatrists and brain scientists and so on, Enduring Love, bizarre book, it turns on – what’s the guy’s name? An old friend of mine, his name’s gone. Who’s a brain scientist. So yeah, I got involved in that kind of… which I much enjoyed. I got involved, heavily involved with Melvyn Bragg too, I did a lot of stuff with Melvyn, who my wife and I had known for many years anyway. So I became a tart.

Did you, in all of this work, did you find that certain producers, directors, had certain sort of visions about what they wanted, or certain aspects of science that they wanted to draw out?

Oh yes. I mean it was interesting to me. I think in the science unit, I have to say, the radio science unit, which I got to know well, they were extraordinarily eclectic and able in what they put across and that’s because they didn’t need pictures, okay? Television science was much less imaginative, and that’s because they needed pictures and in many ways a word is worth a thousand pictures, when it comes to broadcasting. And so you get an endless number of beautiful and, you know, Attenborough type documentaries which I used to watch avidly from when I was a teenager and before, and I thought they were great and Life on Earth and stuff like that, I thought it was absolutely wonderful. But there was some science in that and David was very proud of the science which he’d helped to foment, because they had all this, you know, incredible equipment for filming and so on, but they weren’t really science programmes. And so you got a much narrower insight in television. So they were interested in genetics, in sex, in astronomy, in geology, in natural history, but they weren’t interested in chemistry, in physics, in molecular biology and cell biology, there was none of that. So there was a difference, but I have to say, my experience in dealing with most television producers, possibly excluding the one who produced my programme, and radio producers, has been very positive, no question of it.

[1:16:33] When, are you able to sort of date the time when you started to be asked, if you did, to talk about relations between science and evolution and religion?

Well, I try and avoid that. It was kind of a response to the new creationism, which really didn’t get going in Britain until the late seventies probably, and it’s still a very peculiar thing in Britain, it’s a very odd business in Britain. And it was partly because Islam became much more prominent in Britain. But I make a point now, I will never ever debate with creationists, that’s impossible, you cannot debate with creationists, you can only debate with somebody who’s willing to change their minds and if somebody is absolutely insistent that the world is 6,000 years old, I’m not going to waste my breath talking to them. So I haven’t really done a lot on Steve Jones Page 66 C1672/12 Track 4

religion. I’ve kind of defended, as many of us did, religion against the stupidities. I used to have a talk I haven’t given much recently, called Evolution is Right and Creationism is Wrong, and I gave it that title to épater la bourgeoisie, to annoy the outsiders. And I used to give it at schools. And I had some very aggressive responses from teachers at schools, not from students at schools. Now, partly because – that’s another thing I’ve done throughout my career, is go to schools, I’ve been to hundreds of schools. I’ve talked face to face to something like 200,000 school students, partly in schools conferences, but often at schools. And the response has been interesting, it’s been teachers of other sciences or history who stand up. I had, at a school in north London – what the hell’s it called? Can’t remember, it’s quite a well-known state, good comprehensive, where my godson went, in Enfield. But anyway, it’s a well-known school and very good school too. And I gave this talk and this middle-aged and very angry man kept interrupting me and shouting at me and saying ‘You don’t understand science at all!’ And all the other teachers are completely mortified by this, and he turned out to be head of physics, who was a Christian fundamentalist. And I kind of snapped back at him and it was all rather tense. And I’ve had some parents at evening events attack me. But you rather rarely get kids who attack you. I’ve certainly had a few recently from Islamic students, who can be very aggressive. They tend to gather around you at the end and shout at you, this is against the Qur’an. And I say, okay, tell me where in the Qur’an it talks about evolution. And the answer is, it doesn’t talk about evolution at all. So I say, where’s it against the Qur’an? And they say because God knows, Allah knows everything that happens and will happen. And I say, well that’s fine, I know plenty of Christians who think that too and they believe in evolution, so why can’t you believe in evolution? And, no, no, it’s against the Qur’an, so you go round and round in circles, and it’s just pointless. So I don’t really get involved in that. I mean what I do, I just give people the evidence and let them make up their minds. And a thing I’ve often said to – and I believe it – to believers, I’ve often said look, let’s imagine that you’re a believer in the Qur’an or you’re a fundamentalist Christian and you’re in a school and you’re teaching kids and the school is teaching kids that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, that the earth is 6,000 years old, that fossils are due to a series of floods which are recorded in the Bible. And the kid, you know, he’s six or eight, he’s very receptive, and he will believe this, of course he’ll believe it. But then, he gets to be sixteen and becomes interested, he wants to do biology, or geology. And very soon it should become absolutely clear that everything he was told by his imam, or his priest, or his pastor was completely wrong. Now, if the imam or the pastor was telling him stuff that was completely wrong about that, why shouldn’t they be wrong about everything else? So what I say, and it annoys the hell out of the fundamentalists, you’re doing no harm to science, but you’re doing a great deal of harm to religion, and I believe that to be true.

Thank you. [1:21:12] Were there television programmes, requests to do radio programmes where it was clear that a kind of an assumed opposition between faith and science was something that the programme wanted to draw out, whether you wanted to or not?

No, there have been many like that, and I generally avoid them. I’ve had a couple, but it’s pointless really. I can’t remember the details, I’ve done so many. One area, which is in an oppositional view, which is interesting, and it came out very much in my BBC Trust report about science broadcasting, is that actually in the general Steve Jones Page 67 C1672/12 Track 4

reporting of science outside the news arena, I think in general it’s good. And that’s not just, it’s not just in the BBC, I mean if you look at, I hate to say it, if you look at the damn Daily Mail, which otherwise is a poisonous rag, its science reporting is good. It’s got some crazy stuff about, you know, I have seen ghosts or I’m going to live forever, but that’s not done by the science people. And I wrote for many years for The Daily Telegraph, I wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles for The Daily Telegraph, literally hundreds, did about 500 of them. And then I was fired by the new crazies who are in charge. But… and it was not oppositional; you put out your case, other people might disagree with you on scientific grounds, and I sometimes had debates like that, and that’s fine. But the one exception to that was news reporting, and news reporters, on the BBC more than anywhere else, have got to be oppositional, you know. And I got furious with them, particularly in fact about climate change, because Lawson, he was the guy who spoke about climate change. He knows nothing about climate change except that it isn’t true. And this was in part one of the reasons why they did a, the BBC Trust asked for a report about science broadcasting, about balance. And the Trust is obsessed, the BBC is obsessed by balance, and I am perfectly happy with that when it comes to politics, that you should have balance insofar as you can. I mean you can’t, but you can at least try, and they do a pretty good job. When it comes to science it’s hopeless. I mean a thing they do all the time, they’d have a climate change scientist who’s kind of tongue-tied and talks too fast and talks about, you know, chaotic weather system and the El Nino, which nobody knows what the hell it is. And they’d have a glib little lawyer like Lawson who’d simply come out with fundamental half-truths and talk over the poor sod who’s trying to give… And in the end, doubt was cast on the science, for non-scientific reasons. And the thing I said again and again when I was interviewing people in news, in BBC Radio – radio was worse than television – was look, let’s imagine – probably said this already, I’ve said it again and again – let’s imagine that it’s suddenly discovered by a top mathematician that two and two is four, okay? So you call, what you will do on the Today programme, you will call on this top mathematician to explain his or her theory that two and two is four. So they’ll come on and they’ll say, well it’s number theory, it’s factorial x, q, z and y, and at the same time you will give equal time to somebody from the Duodecimal Liberation Front who believes that two and two is five, and you’ll allow them equal time and the Duodecimal Liberation Front person will say, I know God has told me that two and two is five. And at the end your summary will be, two and two is probably closer to four than five, but the debate goes on. And that is false balance, that’s just stupid and you shouldn’t do it. And I put that in big – and that’s been happening to me and everybody else, in news, for the last thirty years – and I put that in big letters in my Trust report, this false balance has to stop, climate change is happening, there’s no point in arguing about whether it’s happening, it is happening. What you do about it is a different issue, but that’s not a scientific issue. You can certainly talk about that, but don’t… And I spoke after that to the guy, what’s his name, who then became the editor of the Today programme and to my dismay, I said, well look, you’re still doing it. You know, I mean all I could do was take recommendations, the Trust made recommendations and you’ve basically stuck two fingers up at the Trust and, you know, I have no power in this, but why are you still doing it? And he said, look, my criterion is this, if I go into the pub and there’s fifty people there, I know two of them won’t believe in climate change, they deserve a voice. So I said, okay, if I go into the pub and there’s a hundred people there, there’s one of them that believes that mental illness is caused by possession by devils, does he deserve a voice? He says, of course not, that’s stupid. And I said, well it’s equally stupid what you’re saying. But you listen to the news, they’re still doing it. And that’s a thing which irritates the hell out of me, about science reporting by news, because science isn’t like that, science moves Steve Jones Page 68 C1672/12 Track 4

on. Occasionally, and a thing I’ve said again and again, occasionally the scientific edifice collapses, famously in 1905 with quantum theory and general relativity. The whole of physics basically had to go back to the beginning and start again. So it happens, but it doesn’t happen very often. And these people think it happens every day. Everybody’s got a crazy idea, because it’s crazy that idea must be right, but it’s not like that.

[1:27:01] Thank you. Could you tell me how you met your wife, your future…?

I can tell you indeed how I met my wife. I’d just made a schools programme for Granada Television, for whom she then worked, about snail genetics. Occasionally I get embarrassed by being shown copies of it and I’d got long black hair and a big moustache, I look like a real hippy – this is about 1978. And I was in this programme, which was actually a rather good programme, it was good fun to do, and Granada was then a proper, good television, BBC level television station, and they put a lot of money into it and went all round the place, did the snails and a good time was had by all. And I’ve forgotten how much they paid me, but they basically said at the end of it, well, what we can do, we can either give you a reasonable sum of money now or we can give you a much smaller sum of money now and then you’ll get a royalty every time it’s shown. So I went – I think the sum of money now, the big sum of money was £150 or something, which was quite a lot of money in those days. So I said, oh come on. I went to see Norma, who was a friend of mine, living in Primrose Hill. In fact I walked past the house today, having been to the dentist this morning, that was fun. And Norma said, oh come on, they’ll never repeat it, take the money. So I took the money. And it was repeated about, literally a hundred times, because it was a schools programme, it was done again and again. But that’s how we met and the rest is history really, yeah.

What was she working on at the time that you met?

Well, she was then working on, she worked for a guy called Brian Lapping, with a guy called Brian Lapping, and she was doing journalist reconstructions, which were big in those days, where they took a series of experts, well-known, prominent journalists and politicians, who tried to relive various experiences such as criminal trials and that kind of stuff, they were good. But she then branched out and really became, at least in the world of television, very well known, about a very high profile series about political events. Like, the famous one was the end of Yugoslavia, the collapse of Yugoslavia with Milošević, and she interviewed all the major players: Milošević, Šešelj, all these war criminals. And they were crazy, I mean she has… she’s completely fearless. I mean some of these people were just killers and they were mad, because they didn’t realise they were damning themselves out of their own mouths, and a lot of them ended up in The Hague. And she then did the coup in the Soviet Union. She did a lot of work in Iran, then the Iraq War, she was in Iraq for a long time, she and I were in Syria for a while. And now she’s doing Obama and she’s like a, I mean really it’s… It’s difficult, it can be difficult, I mean she works all hours of the day and night. But we manage.

And you met her in 1979? Or rather you started to…

Steve Jones Page 69 C1672/12 Track 4

Well, we got together in 1979, I think we met in ’78, yeah.

[1:30:14] Did she have a role in your decision to go down a sort of science media course?

No, not really. I mean because she was very well known in the BBC who showed her, they ended up in an independent company called Brook Lapping, who’d made, they had certain programmes they’d made for BBC2 when Granada was sold to the crooks and sold off. So she knew a lot of people, which is kind of somewhat of a help, not that much of a help. No, I don’t think that made that much difference, it was a parallel track really.

[1:31:49] Thank you, and could you tell me whether she has, whether you got together in time so that she was able to help you with your scientific work? Was she involved in fieldwork?

No, no, god forbid, you’ve never met Norma. No, no, she would never dream of doing that. She came out collecting snails once and fortunately the sun was shining, which is lousy for collecting the snails, but we did a lot of work on the Marlborough Downs resampling stuff, and she came out on one day, but that’s the only time she’s ever done it. She’s certainly never been through the rigours of a field trip. Except the irony, when she’s out filming, I mean she’s out, spends three nights on a train, she would happily do that. Same as me, when I’m in the field, at least when I was more energetic, I’d be out there twelve hours a day in a rainstorm if I had to be. But I put it rather flippantly, we have an agreement, I don’t watch her programmes and she doesn’t read my books. The second part is true, the first one isn’t.

[1:31:49] Did you consider, at the time when the grants weren’t coming in for your kind of work, did you consider moving into another area of ecological genetics or another area of science rather than this move…

I should have done really. That would have been the more mature thing to do. And actually I had a great opportunity. Because I worked with drosophila in the States, with a guy called Michael Turelli, he had found, or it had been found and I’d known about it, that there were some very odd things going on in particular species of drosophila in the States in the late – when would that have been – the late sixties, I guess, that suddenly the rate of mutation shot up and that males who generally speaking don’t – do you know what recombination is? Reshuffling the genes?

I know a little, but the person listening may not.

Yeah. Well, recombination is when different gene combinations are reshuffled and it’s what sex – recombination is a snotty word for sex, that’s what sex is all about, reshuffling combinations of genes - but in drosophila males don’t recombine, their genomes do not recombine with the female genome, okay, only females recombine. Now, why that is we don’t really know. But in the late sixties there was a series of what were then Steve Jones Page 70 C1672/12 Track 4

called MR [Mister] genes, male recombination genes, where the male suddenly started recombining. And Turelli and I started kind of looking at this vaguely, and it turned out to be due to the invasion of a, what’s called a P element, which is one of the very first bit, known examples known of a parasitic DNA, the discovery that a piece of DNA could get into a species and spread through it and cause all kind of mayhem. Which was then just a peculiarity, and that then grew into the fact that mitochondria, which had passed down the female line, can also do this. And Turelli started looking, and I did some work with him on this, and you started getting sterile males in these things, because the mitochondria was killing off the males, because mitochondria had only passed through females, they don’t want males to succeed, so once you got the eggs fertilised the mitochondria would kill off the male eggs, so the only eggs that succeeded were the female. Which is bad for the fly, but good for the mitochondria. And he started working on this and he said, come on, join me on this, it’s great. And I said, load of bollocks, it’s VD in fruit flies, I’m not interested. And that was a really stupid mistake, because that grew into a big, big industry about sterile, evolution of sterility, and is now, in fact I’m involved in a company called Oxitec which has taken that a step further in controlling pest insects. But I should have got into that. But this is the benefit of hindsight, it’s very easy to have hindsight. And I would have enjoyed that, because I like doing fieldwork and I’m kind of reasonably ingenious about doing it, but that was a piece of hindsight when I made a, that was a mistake, that’s for sure. I’m glad I didn’t get into a thing I thought about, which was human genetics, the technology of it, because the people who did, what happened in Britain, and in the Galton Lab, which was a human genetics department, largely, their aces were trumped very quickly by people with bigger machines. And that was bound to happen. Here it happened in Cambridge and it’s good that it happened in Cambridge. It’s pointless people buying bigger tanks to beat the other one in a battle, you’ve got to have the best machine you’ve got and you can only have that in one place, and that’s what happened with the Sanger Institute. And we were… they trumped our aces, and if I’d gone into it, I would have had all my aces trumped and I’m glad I didn’t.

[1K35:39] To what extent were you a reader of popular science before you made this change in your work?

Scarcely at all really. You know, because I read these – see those cards there, there are thousands of them, I haven’t counted them – but there are many, many thousands of file cards, probably 10,000 file cards there. And they are the scientific papers I read and books I read over most of my scientific career before the electronic world came out. So I’ve always been - blowing my own trumpet - good at keeping up with the literature, and particularly as I wrote every two weeks in the Telegraph on a completely different topic, I’d read the scientific literature. Then we got the electronic science, the Web of Science, as it’s known, which again, I now have many more thousands of papers on this. But that’s work, I read for pleasure, so I very rarely read popular science.

Had you read The Selfish Gene when it came out?

I’m ashamed to say this, but I’ve never read The Selfish Gene. I’ve skipped through The Selfish Gene and I know the scientific arguments that are in it and I’d read some of the fundamental literature, and I think in its own way it’s a very good book. If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to irritate me is in the days when I used to Steve Jones Page 71 C1672/12 Track 4

interview students for entry into UCL, I’d say what made you decide to do genetics. And I’d think to myself, [whispers] because I read The Selfish Gene, and they’d always say, ‘It’s because I read The Selfish Gene.’ I thought, oh, not again. But come on, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. None of them ever said, ‘Because I read The Language of the Genes.’ Some of them have since said that, yeah. I mean I think that’s a book which did its job and did it well. I think scientifically, because the science has moved on, it hasn’t lasted that well, but that’s because the science has moved on. And you could say the same about The Language of the Genes, you know, all those simplistic statements, the science has moved on. But that’s bound to happen.

And have you read his subsequent…?

I’ve read, I prefer his subsequent ones, actually. I’ve reviewed several of them. Yes, I prefer the later ones. I rather liked a very eccentric one called the something’s tail, about taxonomy. What was it called? I can’t remember. Great thick thing, about different kinds of animals and plants. It’s a very weird structure, it’s like The Canterbury Tales, you all start off and try to get back to the origin of life, but it was quite successful. No, I’ve read, yeah, I think I’ve read most of them actually. The one I find a bit hard to deal with is his very recent stuff, his autobiography. But I think it’s because he has such a different history from me, you know, that I find that slightly… it’s less good. The reviews have been rather less than favourable. It’s interesting, I mean I know Dawkins, not particularly well, but I think he’s a very good science communicator, I think he’s a nice guy. But why he should want to write his autobiography is a mystery to me. Very few scientists do, yeah. Jim Watson has and it’s weird as hell.

So you’ve read Richard’s autobiography?

I have, yeah, yeah.

And you say it’s very different…

Well, I mean his life was so different from mine. I mean actually I’m an avid reader of autobiographies, I read many autobiographies, but they tend to be of politicians or of writers or of explorers, you know. I just finished Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which is a brilliant book, brilliant, about his life in Russia and then he went to Cambridge, and then in the States, and it’s just a brilliant book. But because I know about academic life, even in bloody Oxford, I don’t find it very engaging. And that’s kind of what I felt about Richard’s, but that’s just my own opinion, it doesn’t mean very much.

[end of track 4]

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[Track 5]

You mentioned that you’re a reader of autobiographies. Do you have a view on the influence on your adult life of your childhood? I ask because you have written and said a few sort of autobiographical things in various places, one of which is that you think that your career really is dictated very heavily by chance, that you were put into Bryan Clarke’s tutor group based on your surname, and so your scientific topic was picked up like that. But then in The House I Grew Up In programme, when you were at the hillfort you say something about your childhood interest in difference in landscape and language and race to some extent, and you say that the fact that you’ve ended up writing and speaking quite a lot about especially human genetics, as you say, it’s a coincidence, but it’s a sort of pretty remarkable one, almost a sense that you think that there might be a connection in some way between childhood interests and later…

Oh, I think there is, you know. I mean, I would never dream of comparing myself with Darwin, that would be absurd, but Darwin, published after his death, wrote a short autobiographical sketch which is very – he’s a beautiful writer – and he talks about his childhood experiences at Shrewsbury School, which he hated, because he did Latin and Greek and thought it was a great waste of time. And there’s a couple of telling statements in there. He says that he fooled his friends by saying that he could pour coloured water on to flowers and the flowers would then grow into different colours. And then he says that he went on his holidays to – where was it – Barmouth, on the Welsh coast, and he noticed certain moths which are the, what the hell do they call them? Those black and red things. Can’t remember. Which were there in Barmouth and not in Shrewsbury. What are they called? Christ, I’m getting senile. And he, essentially he wondered why that was, and that’s a very telling sentence, because in his day, many middle class children and adults would have collected moths and insects and snails, simply to have collections, and British natural history was at the forefront of the world really, because that’s what people did. But they wouldn’t have wondered why they were in one place and not in another. And he described himself later in that autobiography as a man of enlarged curiosity. In other words, he always wanted to know why. And I think that’s the essential thing for any scientist. And he showed it to an extraordinary degree. In a much lesser degree, I think it’s behind all of us really, and it often manifests itself in childhood.

And so of the various things that you did as a child, the various experiences, what are those that you think are sort of most closely connected to the fact that you then had a career in…

I think the Darwinian ones, I used to grow up caterpillars, I used to look at birds, and that kind of stuff. I can’t imagine that I really wondered why they turned from caterpillars into pupae into adults. I think I must have done, but I didn’t have any real insight into it, that’s for sure.

Thank you. [03:29] Now, you told me yesterday that during your research career here you tended to go to America for just over a month almost every year? Steve Jones Page 73 C1672/12 Track 6

Every year, yeah.

And you’ve also said that compared to America, the British experience of creationism is very feeble.

Yeah, it is.

So, that raises the question of the extent to which your American colleagues working in this field were discussing relations between evolution and religion because of the very different context?

I mean we ourselves, people in the trade, would never talk about it because it’s so boring. But it’s become much more of a live issue. I mean you tend to forget it went away, I mean there was the Scopes Trial in the 1920s and it then faded away and didn’t really come back until the 1970s with the sort of new conservatism that came in. And a friend of mine, I’ve mentioned him, Jerry Coyne, who’s an extremely capable evolution biologist, I mean he to me has done something completely bizarre. I mean he’s Jewish, and very Jewish, he’d be proud to say he’s very Jewish – and so’s Norma, my wife’s Jewish too – in the sense that he comes from a very Jewish cultural background, he’s obviously a New York Jew, from Indianapolis, but he’s mentally a New York Jew, as is Norma. But, although he’s not a believer in that sense, but he really, almost ten years ago, almost gave up his scientific career to fight the creationists. And he wrote a book, which has done extraordinarily well in the States, much better than mine, called Why Evolution is True. And it’s a good book, it just gives you, straight down the line, the evidence for evolution and it’s not polemical, it’s simple, it’s accurate, and it just says this is why I believe in evolution. And that was aimed slap-bang at the creationists, it sold huge numbers of copies – not to creationists, needless to say. And he’s written a new one – what’s it called? I can’t remember. He called it the albatross, because it was round his neck. It’s called Fact Versus Faith or something. And I saw him a few months ago, well, a year ago now, and I said, well why are you doing this, what is the point? And he’s read all this theology, must be absolutely deadly stuff to read, and he basically says that science doesn’t need religion. And I said, well I could tell you that, I mean anybody can tell you that. But he’s written this long detailed book about one heresy versus another heresy, and a guy called Plantinga, I’ve never heard of, who apparently is a great anti-science guy. I don’t know why he wastes his breath, but he’s become obsessed with it.

[06:16] Were you though, clearly not obsessed with it yourself, but were you concerned about the possible, perhaps rise of creationism in Britain in giving, for example, the talk at the Royal Society, which is the one you’ve mentioned, with the title Why Evolution Is Right and… I mean is it in any way set against a kind of potential?

Well, I give it that title just to annoy them, really. But as I often say, I don’t mind if those creationists burn my books as long as they buy them first. But they don’t buy them first, unfortunately. I mean that particular talk, that was the first time I gave it, was at the Royal, and it got, I’m told, the biggest audience that a public talk had ever got with huge numbers of people outside who couldn’t get in, even into the overflow one. So there obviously was an interest in it. But it’s just not the same here in Britain. And if you’re a scientist in the States, Steve Jones Page 74 C1672/12 Track 6

these people are irrelevant. They’re just an annoyance, you know. There’s plenty of money in evolutionary biology in the States and what’s happened now is that basically, as I’ve said before, the whole of biology has become evolutionary biology and genetics. You know, if you’re looking at animal behaviour or brain science, you name it, you’re getting data which you can only explain in evolutionary terms. So it hasn’t really damaged the science at all. It’s damaged school education and a lot of people, like Jerry, get very agitated about this. But here it hasn’t. So, you know, I’m not going to stand up arguing with idiots, it’s just pointless. And that’s my line. [07:56] I’ve had some trouble from Islamic students here who had petitions saying that I insult the Qur’an by talking about evolution. Well, as far as I’m concerned, and the College is concerned, they can go jump in the lake, if they don’t like it, they don’t have to take courses in it, you know. I mean I often say why are you doing medics? There are lots of creationists, Islamic creationist medics here, and [laughs] a couple of years ago I came into the office here and, oh god, one email after another one, one phone message after another. The Islamic Medical Students Association had put up notices all over College saying ‘Final disproof of the Darwinian theory to be announced in the Darwin Lecture Theatre’. Now, the Darwin Lecture Theatre is in the basement here and this is, as you probably know, this is the site of Darwin’s London house. And all these fellows were furious about this, what are you going to do about this? So I thought, oh my god. So I rang up the Provost and I said, well, what are we going to do about this, and we went to see him. And we agreed we couldn’t say they couldn’t have a lecture, because they would love that. But we thought, I’m buggered if we’re having this in the Darwin Lecture Theatre. So we put them – they were so naïve, these kids – we put them in what’s called the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, which is a nice theatre, but it’s the Hebrew studies lecture theatre and it’s got all these Hebrew letters around the top with quotes from the Torah. These kids were too ignorant to see what that was. But it was crazy, you’ve heard of this guy – I think we’ve mentioned him – Harun Yahya, have you heard of Harun Yahya? Harun Yahya, what a madman. Harun Yahya is a Turk who has sent copies of an enormous tome against evolution all over the world, beautifully illustrated, hundreds and hundreds of colour pictures, completely stupid. And he runs this thing called the Harun Yahya Foundation, which has got millions and millions of dollars, I mean many millions of dollars. And he sends speakers across the world. And they wanted me to debate with this guy, he has the rather unfortunate name of Dr Babuna. [laughs] And I said, I’m sorry, I’m not going to debate with this guy because I know exactly what will happen, he will come out with a load of nonsense, I will say you’re wrong, and your report of the event will be, Steve Jones admits that he can’t disprove… So the event passed. But I’ve had, you know, and I say to them, look, you’re medical students, why, for example, have I had a hernia – for many years I’ve had an inguinal hernia as many men do – it’s because the tube from the testes goes up, loops around close to the body surface and goes down again from your own testes to the penis, why is that? Because in fish it’s deep in the body cavity, but in mammals you have to drop the temperature, because the body is warm, and so the testes is kept cool. Now, that’s evolution isn’t it? And that’s why people have hernias. Now, isn’t that interesting to you as a surgeon and that’s why you need to do this operation? And they say, well, I suppose it is, I hadn’t thought of that. And then you push them a bit further and they always say, they always say, oh, it’s against the Qur’an. And I have a thing which annoys the hell out of them, you know, the difference between you guys who just follows the instruction book on how to do a hernia operation and somebody who knows why they have to do a hernia operation is the difference between a Steve Jones Page 75 C1672/12 Track 6

pharmacist and a pharmacologist. And a pharmacist sits behind the chemist’s desk, he’s told to make up a prescription, he makes that prescription and he gives it to the patient, okay? A pharmacologist knows why this chemical has this effect on this receptor and not on that receptor, what would you rather be? And they say a pharmacologist. So I say, why don’t you deal with evolution? But you can’t get through to them, so I’ve kind of given up.

[11:54] Have the responses to your lectures by students changed over the period of time that you’ve been lecturing? Have you noticed a difference?

Yes, in some ways. Not necessarily in the creationist way. I mean, I have to say my lectures have got much better over the years. When I look back to the way I used to behave when I was a young carefree academic, I mean it’s quite shocking, I mean really. I’ve always been very glib, because I’m Welsh, so I’ve always been able to fake it, but you know, I would be giving lectures on the small intestine over in the Royal Free and I would come home from the pub the previous night and I would scribble out half a dozen pages and show, you know, those black and white slides. And I’ve taken to putting much, much more work into lectures now, so they’re good. And I would say, and I say with a clear conscience, my first year genetics course is an outstandingly good course and it gets ninety, ninety-five per cent approval rates. And I think that teaching in general has got much better here at UCL and everywhere it’s got better. But student responses have changed for reasons which are independent of that because schools have changed so much. What students now want to know overwhelmingly is, what do we need to know to pass the exam. We don’t want to know, wow, that’s amazing about that, tell us more about that, they want to know what, you know, you tell us all these ridiculous stories and jokes, they all say too many jokes, okay, but are these going to be in the exam, what do we need to know, what are the learning outcomes. So it’s this tick box culture, which of course is in schools, and that’s guaranteed to kill any scientific ability at all. What’s interesting about medical students in general is that they have this in spades, and I don’t blame them, because they have to soak up this fantastic body of knowledge, much of which doesn’t make much sense at first sight, you know, when you’re learning the doses of drugs and that kind of stuff it’s just… soaking it up. And the irony is, so many doctors want to be scientists, but in general they become – some of them do become scientists – but in general they become lousy scientists, because being doctors they’re trained to be optimists, you know. Oh, this drug is going to cure you of cancer, they hope. Being a scientist, the point about a scientific training is to be a pessimist, there’s something wrong with this theory, my theory included. Now, you don’t do that as much, as deeply as you should, but that’s basically what lies behind it. If something doesn’t work you think, oh shit, I was wrong. When was the last time a doctor said he was wrong. So that’s the difference, there’s a fundamental difference between them and I really regret this tick box stuff going down into the, right the way from primary school onwards, and you can certainly blame the present government for that, but you can also blame the previous government for it. And it’s the same as the research assessment exercise, or research excellence fund, or whatever stupid name it’s got, it’s percolating into the research business too. And it hasn’t killed it, but it hasn’t done it any good at all.

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What do you remember of the response of the audience to the public lecture that you said was very well attended, very popular, at the Royal Society the first that you’d given a lecture?

I can’t remember, I think it was good. I mean there were… I think there wasn’t time for questions, as far as I remember. It was good, I mean, you know, I’m a hack. I’ve given some of these lectures thirty or forty times now, so I can guarantee you I will give you a good lecture. I mean I am now, for reasons unclear to me, an Associate Professor at Gresham College. Do you know what Gresham College is?

No.

It’s a really weird place really. Gresham College was London’s first university. It was set up in fifteen something in the City of London, in Haberdashers’ Hall, is it called? I can’t remember. And they’ve got one of the livery company halls. And it was set up as a university which in the Middle Ages taught Latin and so on, and failed, really, it faded away. But it had an endowment and it still had its City building, medieval building, and I don’t know when it came back to life, but it was reinvented by the Mercers’ Foundation, and these are one of the City Guilds, all of which have got far too much money and spend most of it on just stuffing their faces. But it reinvented itself as London’s first university, which it is, and it gives free public lectures, and it gives a lot, it gives about two or three a week throughout the year. And I’ve given about fifteen there. I’ve got to give three more this year. And, you know, I can guarantee you I’ll get a full house every time, so that’s fifteen different lectures I can give. So I just do it, I mean I’m… And in some ways, giving public lectures is a very salutary experience, because what always happens is, they ask you six months or even a year ahead, and I think to myself – I’ve got one, a fairly recent one called ‘Snails in Art and the Art of Snails’, which I thought, oh that’s a snappy title, I’ll give a lecture about that. And I’ve forgotten where I first gave it, it was about a year ago. And about three weeks before I gave it, I thought, shit, what am I going to talk about. And I knew a couple of examples of snails in art, then I started going into it and it turns out to be an incredibly repaying field, I mean there’s amazing illustrations of snails in art, which are very relevant to an awful lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about. So I’ve got this really cracker of a lecture, it’s a good lecture, which came from accepting a public lecture. And I’ve got a couple of other titles, I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to be talking about at Gresham College, but they’re ones I haven’t given before so I’m going to have to start doing them.

[18:01] When you told me the story earlier about the medical students putting up the poster and then you had phone calls and emails from people saying what are you going to do about it, who are those coming from?

Oh, other academics, mainly. I mean I was head of biology then.

Oh, other academics in UCL?

In UCL, yeah.

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Okay. When you said fellows, I thought it was other fellows of the Royal Society.

No, I think they were all local, yeah.

Okay. Thank you. [18:26] Now, when you were deciding, doing the writing for the Reith Lecture, how did you decide, can you sort of put yourself back into that time and tell me how you decided on the content for that, which was, as people who have listened to the lecture and listened to this interview know, nothing to do with snail genetics at all, but almost entirely on human.

Well, that’s when the ship of state had begun to shift really. You know, people had stopped working on snails and butterflies and started working on humans. So that all the questions which I’d been asking were now being asked about humans. So I could use an awful lot of the logic which I knew in evolutionary biology, which I’d been using on fruit flies and the like, to explore the human story, but I don’t think I even mentioned snails in the Reiths at all. I do, in most of the other ones now, just to get a sort of cheap laugh. But no, I didn’t mention them. But my knowledge, I mean the beauty of evolutionary biology is that the logic applies to worms, to plants, it’s all the same. So that’s more or less what I did, I reinvented my snail knowledge using human examples.

Do you remember what sources you were using, what preparation?

I did a lot, perhaps too much preparation. This was in the days before electronic science, I think. Yes, it was. So I read an enormous amount of the technical literature, the American Journal of Human Genetics is the big one, but there are lots of others. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, I just did, I did comb the literature. And I read a number of textbooks, Curt Stern’s Human Genetics, which, like all textbooks by then were already out of date. No, I just read around the subject enormously. And I’ve always liked the stupid story side of it, so I picked up some of those too. Some of which I knew, like the Fleure story.

And then, I wondered about titling. You’ve got, I think the third one’s called ‘In God’s Image’ and the fourth one’s ‘Economics of Eden’. What sorts of decisions were you making about how to – it’s an inherently interesting subject anyway – about how to further enhance the potential interest of the public in this?

Well, I think, you know, ‘The Escape from Eden’ is a very obvious title and has an uncanny – I’m sure in the Serpent’s Promise there I kind of took it a lot further – where the escape from Eden, I didn’t know this in the Reiths, was clearly a historical event, which was the shift from hunter-gathering, which is a very relaxed way of life, to farming, which is an extremely unrelaxed way of life. And in fact God says to Adam and Eve, to Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy brow for thy bread thou shalt labour’. And in fact early farmers had a miserable, miserable life and organised religion began with farming. So there is quite a close tie between the two, which I didn’t know, nobody knew when I gave the Reiths. But the idea of being expelled from Eden and the farmers starting Steve Jones Page 78 C1672/12 Track 6

in the Middle East was then known and the model of European genetics, although it’s now been modified, was that a great wave of farmers, because of an enormous population explosion, moved into Europe and mixed in with the hunter-gatherers and got these gradients across Europe. That was, I mean that is the escape from Eden, it’s the escape from the Middle East into the world. I can’t remember what ‘In God’s Image’ was about. That’s about human evolution, isn’t it?

Yes.

Yeah. Well, that’s it, see that’s what creationists don’t like. They don’t mind evolution, it’s just human evolution they can’t stand, and the whole point of that lecture insofar as I remember it, is that human evolution is like every other kind of evolution until we became human, at which moment it ceased to be like every other kind of evolution, it became evolution in the brain rather than in the body. And I’m by no means the first person to say that. But it’s quite a snappy title, I think you’ll agree.

[22:44] Could you tell the story from your point of view of the, I don’t know whether you’d say that it was a controversy, but the interest in your lectures on the extent to which human evolution could be considered sort of stalled in particular places, and this is in the early nineties, I think this is happening.

Well, it’s a funny thing, that. I mean I was rather careful about what I meant. What I meant was, you know, evolution is many things, it’s natural selection, you know, sickle cell, that stuff, it’s mutation and it’s gene flow, geographic, it’s movement, so it’s all those things. Now, I specifically said I’m really only going to talk about natural selection and I think I started off by saying a thing I use all the time, look to the person to your left and the person to your right and two out of every three of you will die for reasons connected to the genes you carry. And that’s, in a loose sense that’s true, because people die of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, all of which have got a genetic component. Now, the environment’s involved too, that’s for sure, but it’s got a genetic component. But then I say, cheer up, because if I’d been speaking in Shakespeare’s time, two out of every three of you would be dead already. And that’s also true if you look at the patterns of mortality, only one English child in three got to be twenty-one in 1580, whenever it was, when Shakespeare was alive, okay? Even in Darwin’s time, when he was born in 1809, it was only about one in two. Now it’s ninety-nine per cent. Now, an awful lot of the deaths in those days would have been raw material from natural selection. People died because they were not resistant to cholera, or they couldn’t stand the cold, or they died of rickets, okay? Because their bodies couldn’t make enough Vitamin D. And now what is natural selection, inherited differences, underlined, in the chances of reproduction, that’s what natural selection is. Some people are, because of their heritage, their biological heritage, more likely to survive and to have offspring than others. But if ninety-nine per cent of people survive to be sexually mature, the raw material for those differences has gone away, okay? And that’s a simple arithmetic fact. It’s just simply true. It goes further than that, because if you look back in Shakespeare’s time, or even in Darwin’s time, you will find in many parts of the world and even much further back, plenty of cases where particular individuals, particular men, have literally thousands of offspring either through rape or Steve Jones Page 79 C1672/12 Track 6

through having a harem, which meant that huge numbers of men had no offspring at all, okay? The famous case is Genghis Khan, who is said to have forty million direct descendants through his Y chromosome, which is probably true, there’s a huge preponderance of this Y chromosome, Genghis and his descendants, Khan’s. But that’s gone away too, nowhere in the developed world do you have anybody with anybody now with fifteen or twenty or thirty children. Everybody has nought, one, two or three. And if you put those two simple statistics together, you get a measure called the opportunity for selection and if you do it over the years, and if you do it in India, say, compared to Britain, the opportunity of selection has gone down by ninety-two per cent. So natural selection has stopped. And I get again and again – look at my Wikipedia page, which I’ve never written any of – but people stick, again and again they say Jones is an idiot, Jones is a fool, Jones is a cretin, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And there’s been some recent stuff looking at the human genome, looking for signs of natural selection, and they find it. I say, well that’s perfectly fine by me, but this is stuff that happened in the past, I’m talking about the future. I mean take something like sickle cell, which everybody knows about, nobody denies for a second that malaria resistance has led to an increase in sickle cell. The incidence of malaria is on the way down, we are in the end going to beat malaria. We’re not there yet, but it’s a lot, lot better than we were ten years ago, even. So, that natural selection on sickle cell is going to disappear, okay, the malaria side of it’s going to disappear. That doesn’t alter the fact in the past that it was incredibly important, but I’m talking about the future. And they say, oh. So I’m right in that narrow regard. The other thing which I’m more shaky about is the mutation rates, and in fact I’ve changed my view since then. When I gave the Reiths, the data which was around was about mutation, okay? And people always said, oh, it was all to do with chemicals and radiation and that kind of crap. Well, it kind of isn’t. We knew that even then. And if you talked about the chemicals, the dangerous chemicals was stuff like moulds that grew on badly preserved food, and of course in the Middle Ages, or in Africa and in China, until recently people were eating mouldy peanuts and god knows what, and this was causing mutation in a major sense in that it caused cancer. Nowadays we don’t eat mouldy food and we don’t eat food, like lots of hunter-gatherers would have done, which was only marginally palatable, because they had to eat it or starve. And the stuff which is only marginally palatable has often got lots of poisons with mutagens in it, so the chemical thing has kind of gone away, the radiation thing is certainly there, but the amount of radiation from bombs and so on is utterly trivial. What happens with radiation is it’s all from granite, granite, radon gas. It depends where you live. If you live in Cornwall you have three times as much radiation as you do if you live in London, okay? And that has nothing to do with society, that’s just there. But the one which we know to be the major mutagen causing mutations is old men, elderly men, okay? And that’s a big effect, a big, big effect. The rate of mutation through males – and males do most of the mutations – can go up by thirty or forty times in a seventy year old man compared to a sixteen year old man. And when I did the Reiths and looked at the literature, which is a very different literature, nobody ever put them together before, as far as I could see, about the demography of sex, what’s interesting is that in many Third World countries what you got was a demography of sex where powerful and affluent men had more than one wife and they continued - women first of all are limited in the number of children they can have for simple biological reasons and then they come to the menopause and stop anyway, and often quite young in the Third World because they’re undernourished. But men just carry on. So if you asked the proportion of old men with children in the old days, compared to today, rather surprisingly, it was more in the old days, even though lots of them died, enough of them stayed alive to father children. Now, more recent data, which is much better, suggests that the effect of old Steve Jones Page 80 C1672/12 Track 6

age is so strong that actually, I was wrong there, that actually the mutation rate… so my argument was, the mutation hasn’t gone down. But I think in the modern world, the mutation rate has probably gone down, because people have shrunk their reproductive gears. They start late, I think the mean age for reproduction for women now, it’s remarkably late in Britain, it’s twenty-six, twenty-seven, and the mean reproductive rate for men is, I think, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, but they stop early, they stop about thirty-two, thirty-three. Whereas in the old days they would have gone on like nobody’s business. But now all over the world, and all these changes, you know, in India and so on, China they’ve happened, there’s a, demographic transition as it’s called, has happened at extraordinary speed. So the truth of the matter is the mutation rate has probably come down. But the thing which I skidded over in my talk was migration and there I was, I’m clearly wrong, I mean if you look at the genetics of London now, it’s a very different city genetically from what it was even when I first moved here forty years ago. Because first of all there are lots more immigrants, migrants, many more Afro- Caribbeans, and secondly, the barriers, the genetic barriers between them have really pretty much broken down in some cases, and I think we probably talked about it, half the kids in London, teenagers in London and younger, who have one Afro-Caribbean or African parent, the other parent is white. And that means that the barriers between the races, if you want to use that word, have gone, which means that the genetics of London is now different from what it was, and that’s evolution. So in that sense I was wrong, but I kind of admit that in the Reiths, slightly, but I didn’t know how wrong I was going to be proved to be.

[31:48] Could you tell me how it is that you came to be writing the column for The Telegraph…

Oh, they offered me large sums of money, it’s simple. [laughs]

But I mean, for those completely outside this world, how does it work and is there someone in The Telegraph who chooses you and then you meet and then…

Yeah.

So how did it work?

I mean The Telegraph as a paper has always been a conservative, often with a big ‘C’ paper, and however, and I’m an avid reader of the newspapers, I read every day of my life. Nowadays I read – my wife is just the same – needless to say, I’m a Guardian reader more than anything else. But The Telegraph, in my day and even when I was a student, separated its news coverage from its opinion coverage in a way much better than The Guardian now has ever done. And The Guardian is a liberal, left wing paper, so it’ll always say this is good and liberal. The Telegraph would tell you what was going on, then it would comment on it. And The Telegraph had an outstandingly good science editor, Roger Highfield, who you may or may not know. And Roger I’d known under various circumstances, I think I’d interviewed him a few times, and he ran the science page, and I’d done a couple of book reviews for him and written a couple of pieces on his science page. And out of the blue he came to me and he said, we’re going to start the first science column, do you want to write a science column, Steve Jones Page 81 C1672/12 Track 6

every two weeks? And I said… he said, I’ll pay you, however much it was, it was quite a lot, it was five hundred quid a column, which in, you know, ’92 or three when I started, that was a lot of money. So I said, well Roger, I’ll do it, but I’m going to run out of steam after five or six columns. And he rolled his eyes, he said, ‘They always say that’. And he was right. I mean I did ‘em every two weeks until a year and a half ago, two years ago really now. It slipped to being every two or three weeks. And it was always the same system, I’d have the idea on a Thursday, it would come out of the blue, I’d think about it on the Friday, back of my head, and I’d spend the Saturday doing the literature and writing it up and I’d send it off on the Sunday. And it just became a machine and some of them were good, I collected them as a book. The book was a slight mistake because it showed the trick, the trick was always the same. They were all the same column with different facts in them. They’d start off with a joke, tell you a story and then refer back to the joke at the beginning. But not many people noticed that. So that’s how I got into it. And then The Telegraph started to go mad, it was taken over by the Barclay brothers, and they’ve now completely ruined it, it’s a joke of a newspaper now. But they got rid of Roger, and Roger, who was a serious journalist, I mean he was a journalist first and foremost, also a scientist. He just said, I’m not going to go along with this, so he then went off – where did he go then? But now he’s head of publicity at the Science Museum. He did something else in the interim, can’t remember what it was. And then the science page kind of sank and disappeared, and then my column started appearing less and less, and then it disappeared. They were still paying me, so I thought screw you, I’m not going to complain about this. But then I got the thingy about a year ago saying we don’t want it any more, so I thought to hell with you. Which I kind of regret. It was very good discipline, because you knew you had to do it and I’m not giving any secrets away when I say that quite often I would recycle those columns in a later book.

Okay. And you say you collected them all together as a…

I collected some in a book called The Single Helix. There’s a copy up there? I don’t see it. The Single Helix, the publishers didn’t like The Single Helix because they thought it wouldn’t sell. It did actually sell, but it was just it was a hundred columns of mine gathered together into a book. No, it’s not up there. I would have given you one if I had one. It didn’t sell… it sold a fair number.

Do you have the full collection?

Oh yeah, I’ve still got ‘em, yeah. I think I may have lost a few, but I’ve got them.

[36:02] Could you then tell the story of how you came to get the contract for Almost Like a Whale?

Well, my first two books were with Harper Collins and – owned by Rupert Murdoch, which was always a bit of a problem – but then Stuart Proffitt has now, since then, become a very successful editor and I think he’s now the editor of Penguin Books. Harper Collins, publishing in about ’94 or so, maybe a bit later, six. Went through a bit of a difficult patch with the collapse of the economy in the early Thatcher years. It really went through a difficult patch. And science publishing was beginning to go out of control, and it went completely mad, you Steve Jones Page 82 C1672/12 Track 6

know. And so Stuart Proffitt basically, with regret, and false regret in his voice, said, we’re not going to commission another book. I had an idea for writing Almost Like a Whale, which I sent to him, and he said we’re not going to commission it. So I said, screw you then, I thought. And my agent, Peter Robinson, he said, that’s crazy, this is a really good idea. So he then went to Little, Brown, who are my present publishers, who went completely overboard about it, and I’ve been with them ever since.

When you say that science publishing went out of control, what do you…

It begun to completely… I mean when I started, when I wrote Almost Like a Whale, I used to go, as one of course does, into bookshops and see what’s around, and you’d look at the popular science and there’d be two shelves, probably, that much Dawkins, that much Steve Gould, a little bit of Steven Pinker. Now you go in, or you used to go in three or four years ago, and there’d be two blocks of shelves, most of which are books that are totally impenetrable, alright? So there was a gross over-publication. And the one which really, they really, which Harper Collins went completely over the top on, which isn’t a bad book in its own way, it’s the least original book ever written. It was followed by an obvious idea, which was The Descent of Men, Y: The Descent of Men, which was Darwin’s next book, which was sexual selection, Descent of Man. And Ursula – what was her name? The publisher. She went completely barmy over that book and she offered me an advance when I quite genuinely rang up Peter and said there’s a misprint in this contract, they’ve put an extra zero on the advance. And he said, no they haven’t. So I said, Jesus Christ, I’m going to accept this advance, which I did, and the book is okay, but it will never ever earn its advance back. So I’ve stuck with them really. But what’s happened is, my French Revolution book, which I’ve enjoyed writing and I actually think it’s not bad. The one before, The Serpent’s Promise, I think probably didn’t work very well. But, you know, the financial aspects of it now have become not worthwhile. I think, I’m told, there’s only 150 authors in Britain who make a living out of writing, okay, and some of them are people like Rowling who make millions, JK Rowling. Some of them are people like Ian McEwan, has made a lot of money, probably makes a little bit less now, his stuff sells less well. But an awful lot of them are jobbing writers like me, and if I was only trying to live from book writing, I wouldn’t make a living. I would, but I wouldn’t be rich by any means. So in the present world it just wouldn’t be… And you can see that, the number of popular science titles is dropping rapidly, and I think that’s a good idea.

[40:00] Could you describe the process of writing it, from sort of beginning to end?

Which? Almost Like a Whale? Well that was, well, I mean it was a lot of sweat, but that was easy, relatively easy because I didn’t have to have a single original idea. All I did was to write out the format and the argument of The Origin of Species, which strangely, nobody had ever done, really. There were various edited Origins where they missed out some of the longueurs, but there was no attempt to work out what Darwin called his ‘long argument’. That was the alternative title, which in many ways was a better title. Darwin called his book, ‘this book is one long argument’. One long argument would have been a good title. The publishers didn’t like it – long, they don’t like it long. But once you’d done that, the book had basically written itself, okay? I mean the Steve Jones Page 83 C1672/12 Track 6

first chapter’s ‘Variation Under Domestication’ and what Darwin does very cleverly is point out that, something utterly familiar, which is domestic plants and animals are proof of change. And that’s what he had to do, he had to persuade people that life could change, and it hadn’t really crossed their minds that life could change, because it was bloody obvious. But, you know, you look at beef cattle and milk cattle, they’re different, but if you look at them in detail they’re the same animal, okay? And then it was ‘Variation Under Nature’ where he rather less successfully began to argue that that could happen in the wild, because he didn’t know any real examples. And then it goes on about the fossil record and evolution of islands and evolution on the continents, instinct as he calls it, animal behaviour. Difficulties on theory, which is a brilliant chapter, where he puts up all these straw men, like the evolution of the eye, this is impossible, shows that it is possible. So it was easy, I didn’t have to do any originality at all, apart from absolutely grinding through the literature and finding brand new examples.

What does ‘grinding through the literature’ mean? What…

Well, now it’s much easier because with the Web – do you know what the Web of Science is?

Not very clearly, no.

I’ll show it to you. The Web of Science is like Google to the tenth power. Let me find the Web of Science. The Web of Science takes the entire scientific literature and puts it online. For stupid reasons I’ve destroyed all my bookmarks, by mistake. Web of Science, access the Web of Science. So… find it there. So I’m now into the Web of Science. So what I can do, in a second you’ll get a basic search, so tell me something scientific. What are we talking about, we’re talking about…

Well, what sort of search might you have done in writing that book?

Well, I would have, for example, I stole the title from something that Darwin says much… people laughed at him for saying that he imagined a bear swimming with its mouth open and that by so doing he scooped in insects on the water and he could imagine that this, almost like a whale, that bears with relatively big mouths would get bigger and bigger. And so I began to think about whale fossils, okay, genetics. And as it happened, this had just started then. It’s now thinking, because there are so many, and these are papers that contain whales, fossils and genetics. It’s being slow because the bloody students are using it now. Fuck ‘em. Get on with it! What’s the matter with you?

And Web of Science had started at the time that you were writing that in the mid nineties, yeah?

[both speaking together]

By this time it had started, yeah. There we go. Oh, only in ’99, I guess it’s close to it. phylogenetic position of Steller’s sea cow, a new family, perspectives on baleen whale evolution, the future of the fossil records – that’ll be about David Jablonski who’s one of the big players in the whale story. So you can, you know, you can just Steve Jones Page 84 C1672/12 Track 6

immediately get all these things together, and what was I… I was thinking one about… And what it’s good at is taking two random words, a bit like Google, and seeing how they link. In fact I was doing it this morning on snails in, on eating snails, and I knew that ancient humans had eaten snails, and within seconds I’ve picked up papers about snails in digs and how efficient it was, and so you can bring these things together very, very quickly. And, you know, it’s instant culture at the touch of a button, which is what Google is, but this is much, much more powerful.

You presumably showed, well you must have showed the draft to colleagues, because you acknowledge some of them. Can you give me a sense of the comments of others while it was in draft, what people tended…

Oh well, I mean, the comments I generally get, I mean that one less so. I can’t remember, who did I acknowledge? I can’t remember. That one less, this one less so, because…

Sam was one of them.

Well, Sam read some, yeah. But a lot of my more recent stuff has got a lot of physics and chemistry and that stuff, which I don’t really know and I know, I mean I know biological sciences reasonably well. But yeah, Douda’s [Bensasson] my student, Sam, John Brookfield. Yeah, these are all evolutionary people. Yeah, generally they made marginal comments, which were helpful, I’m not denying that. Some of which were very helpful, I remember. But what’s more important, in my French Revolution book there’s an awful lot about Laplace and the universe and black holes and that kind of stuff, which are simply (a) I don’t know in depth and (b) when I go to the primary literature, in biology I can usually separate out bullshit out from non-bullshit. I can’t always, certainly in some biology I can’t. But in the primary physics literature it’s impenetrable to me, the maths is too hard. So I sent that to various physicists I either know or half know and they picked up a couple of grotesque errors of fact on my part and that’s important, which isn’t to say there probably aren’t any more, there are plenty more grotesque errors of fact. But I’ve always been very happy to accept comments. And the thing I find most surprising is my publishers don’t do that. In fact my very first book was the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Human Evolution, which as an experience was a complete disaster, because Cambridge University Press was the most ineffective, inefficient and useless organisation since the Holy Roman Empire, I mean I’ve never seen anything like it. It took ‘em six years to publish the bloody book, they were absolutely absurd. I basically in the end roped in – and it’s a big substantial book, a huge book – and I invited chapters by various experts across the world. I was then completely unknown, I’m still pretty completely unknown. And I got these chapters in and I have one editing technique which really pisses people off, particularly in the days before Word, and this was just in the days really when you were still doing it in manuscript. I’d get out one of those black felt pens which you can’t erase, and I simply blacked stuff out. Now if I don’t like it, it’s gone. And several people were furious, and I would take out eighty per cent of their writing, because the writing was crap. Particularly the people who did the current social anthropology stuff. You know, it is the opinion of Durkheim and I have spoken further elsewhere on this issue. Forget it! And, you know, that’s what an editor’s for and if they don’t like it, generally speaking you have to lump it. Sometimes I’d gone too far. But the editors I’ve dealt with haven’t been like that at all, in fact I just got a thing yesterday, a couple of proof points, I repeat a Steve Jones Page 85 C1672/12 Track 6

sentence in the French Revolution book, which I do, on two different pages. I use a word which he can’t find and I can’t find, the word minw – M-I-N-W – which sounds to me like a Breton word, because it’s a bit like Welsh, and it was a measure of the amount of cheese. Now where I got that from, I don’t know, but I can’t find it so I’ll change it. But it’s that kind of level, it’s not, no, I don’t like this, take this out. So the art of editing has kind of gone, I think.

[48:35] So in writing this book and other books, to what extent have publishers been involved in the content, in…

Scarcely at all.

What about in titling, subtitling…?

Well, titling, titling, yes. They have the rights in the title. I mean the title of the new one is called No Need for Geniuses, as I may have said, and that’s, it’s a poor translation of the French, I speak, as I probably also said, reasonable French. The judge, Fouquier [?], who judged Lavoisier in front of the tribunal and sentenced him to death, somebody shouted out, you can’t kill that man, he’s a genius. And the judge said, ‘La Révolution n’a pas besoin de savants’; the Revolution has no need for ‘savants’ which actually means ‘wise men’ rather than geniuses. But I make an excuse in the preface and I say it seemed to me appropriate to use the word genius. And my title of the book is No Need for Geniuses, and they hated that. And we had a number of exasperated arguments about this, and I thought that they were going to win, and they had some crappy title, a terrible title. Something like, you know, Science in the French Revolution or something, you know, something terminally boring. So I shouted and screamed and hopped up and down and they’ve kept the title, at least for time being, but they’re still not completely happy with it. But I like it, so screw them. But they have the rights in it, I know that. And for example, the title of Almost Like a Whale in the States, it’s a lousy title, it’s Darwin’s Ghost, and there are three books called Darwin’s Ghost, but I have no say over them.

To what extent is it, was it thought of by you as a kind of, or to what extent was it a celebration of Charles Darwin’s Origin?

Well, it was a celebration. Had I been more thoughtful I would have waited until 2009, of course, which was Darwin Year. It was a celebration of Darwin’s… I mean, it seemed to me I’d written, in The Language of the Genes, a popular textbook of genetics, that’s what it really is. And so the obvious step for me was to write a popular textbook of evolution. And there really wasn’t one. I mean Steve Gould’s early stuff, a lot of which, I say through gritted teeth, was very, very good. But they were essays on particular aspects of evolution: palaeontology more than anything else, and many of which, I hate to admit, were brilliant. But they were about this rather narrow aspect of it. Whereas the Origin’s about everything, you know, and I felt that there is room for a book about everything, and that’s what it is.

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How do you, how have you viewed the various sort of celebrations of Darwin that, you know, the anniversary type celebrations, the media celebrations?

Well, it was all rather predictable. I mean various things happened, I was kind of involved in it. I made a series of In Our Times with Melvyn [Bragg] which was good fun. They had the Beadle Project, which I steered away from, where somebody rented an enormous three-masted sailing ship and sailed it round the world following The Beagle, with schoolkids, or sixteen year olds on each different leg, and they wanted me to go on that. And I thought, do I want to be stuck on a fucking sixty foot boat with thirty schoolkids? Forget it. So I didn’t. And I mean I wrote a book myself, Darwin’s Garden, which again I much enjoyed, which is based on Darwin’s – sorry, Darwin’s Island it’s called here, Darwin’s Garden in the States – based on Darwin’s other work, on barnacles and so on. And that was good and that gave me, that gave me a deeper insight into what a genius he’d been, which he really had.

[52:30] What has been the view of your scientific colleagues to all of the sort of work that we’ve been discussing this time, the writing of the Telegraph column, you know, radio and TV work, popular science writing?

I would say, quite reasonable. I mean UCL, with all its flaws, is a reasonable organisation. It can’t be as reasonable as it was because there’s so much top-down control now, but it lets people get on with what they want to do. And I don’t think it took ‘em long to realise that having me doing what I do and various other people, Lewis say, Lewis Wolpert, it actually does the College’s profile quite a lot of… it doesn’t do it any harm. So they’ve never bothered me at all and I think certainly when Richard wrote The Selfish Gene, I mean he was of course at Oxford which is a famous, was and is, a famous nest of vipers, and in those days was just dreadful. They spent their time just stabbing each other in the back in the zoology department at Oxford, and Richard was mercilessly mocked for writing The Selfish Gene and still, until he made a million out of it, and then they changed their tune to an extent. But I’ve never really had, I mean it’s clearly damaged my grant generating ability, and it has damaged my grant generating ability, because if I’m writing it takes up a lot of time and I couldn’t run a big scientific operation and write these books at the same time, but the College hasn’t complained.

What about, not the sort of administration, but other scientists in your field or other scientists in the fields that you’re popularising, what have they tended to…?

Well, behind my, they’re probably horrible about me behind my back, but to my face they seem to be quite reasonable.

[54:26] And you said Stephen Gould’s books, through gritted teeth you say that his early ones are okay. Can you expand on that a bit?

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Well, Steve was famous, I mean Steve was a very odd character, in that he had a grotesque self-confidence, over-confidence. And he thought he was the new Darwin, which anybody in the trade will tell you for sure, he was not. And I knew him really quite well from his early days and his life was changed and he was traumatised because he was diagnosed, really in his forties, with, what was it, with mesothelioma, which normally kills within about five years. And this he said, and he was probably right, came from working with the specimens in the MCZ – Museum of Comparative Zoology – in Harvard, which had asbestos all over the place. And when I worked in the power station, one of my jobs was to chip off the asbestos, but I got away with it. And Steve was convinced he was going to die, and we were, you know, we were all very supportive to him. And so he started writing this, what’s the word? His writing started ballooning, you know, he started coming out with vague, wordy, sociological work on evolution. I mean when his early stuff had been, his book, Wonderful Life, which is about the Burgess shale, that’s the stuff, you know, the Pre-Cambrian explosion, Pre-Cambrian life before the Cambrian explosion. In the end, the facts were wrong, but that wasn’t his fault. I mean we now realise there are big connections between the Pre-Cambrian and the Post-Cambrian, but people didn’t know that. But he wrote this book about going with, what’s his name from Cambridge? What’s his name, pompous git? And digging the stuff up and how exciting it all was, and it really had a sense of scientific excitement in it. And he’d made too much of it, this was a world which we… like finding another planet. It was a bit overwritten, but my stuff’s overwritten too. But then after that, he started getting… his last book is utterly unreadable, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I don’t think anybody in the world has ever finished it, it’s completely impossible to read, it’s just a lot of vague platitudes, ‘I have thought this’ and ‘This is the Marxist way of thinking’. And you think, what are you on about man? And he also was rather a nasty man, he was very, very rude, particularly to students, and I can’t stand that. He once… he was arrogant. He came here a few times and he gave lectures, and he always went over time and, you know, I said to him once, he came in – and here we’re always very constrained for time, because we haven’t got, you know. I said, Steve, you really have to give us fifty minutes because we’ve got this lecture theatre for fifty minutes and we have a big class waiting outside and we just don’t have an opportunity to go any further. And so he started blathering on in a bloody boring way about Marx and evolution, and it got to five minutes to go – five minutes, Steve, three minutes, Steve, two minutes, Steve, cut Steve! He carried on. So I turned the lights out on him. I had no choice, you know, there were 150 medical students outside. He was furious, I don’t think he ever came back after that. But another occasion before that, he’d gone on about evolution and genetics and how Mendel was wrong. And it’s always everybody’s wrong and he’s right. And Mendel was wrong, you know, it isn’t the case that one gene controls one character, and Mendel when he looked at his peas, he was a bit dishonest about what was green and what was yellow, he chose… and that was, you know, I know that stuff. But he went on, this is typical science, that scientists always lie, lie to themselves and then they lie to everybody else. And I thought, well that’s a bit over the top, but he gave this talk. Then he went on about Lamarck, you know Lamarck, the French biologist. And Lamarck was the inheritance of acquired characters man and Steve was trying to go on about the inheritance of acquired characters, and this was before epigenetics really got going, so there was nothing in it really. Anyway, he rambled on and he asked, any questions. There was an Indian, young lady student, undergraduate, second year medic school, who stood up. She said, oh I thought that Lamarck said, blah, blah, blah. And he said, oh, you seem to be very clever then, why don’t you come forward and tell me where I was wrong about Lamarck. And this poor girl was completely aghast, and the students booed him, and I’m bloody glad they did. And it’s funny, Steve Jones Page 88 C1672/12 Track 6

I got a letter from somebody, I wrote something – after he died – I wrote something rather nasty about him somewhere and I got a letter from somebody who’d been an undergraduate at Harvard and Dick Lewontin used to do this joint course, and Dick was a bit of a polemicist himself, but he had the ability to really fire people up. And this guy wrote me this long letter about Steve, he said, Steve was useless, he said. He came in once and he said, oh, there’s a fascinating passage I’m going to read to you, and listen to what I’m saying and we’ll discuss it and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. So he read it out, and it was from Linnaeus or something, and it was in Latin. So he read it out to all these biology undergraduates for ten minutes in Latin, which I’m pretty damn sure he can’t speak anyway, I mean he can probably read it in the way I could read it, in other words, you mentally turn it into a romance language so you can find your way through it. But he said, this was ridiculous, this was the famous Steve Gould just mocking us, and that’s what he did, and I find it very hard to warm to him, actually.

[1:00:22] You say somewhere that you think that he and Richard Dawkins actually like each other and get on with each other.

Well, I think they’re the opposite sides of the same coin. I mean Richard, I have a lot of time for, Richard does not think that he, Richard Dawkins, is the new Charles Darwin. He does not think that at all, and he knows and I know, and everybody knows that he isn’t, okay? He might think, and I think he has the right to think, that he might be the new Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog. Although Huxley did a huge amount of real biology as well, taxonomic biology as well. Steve thought he was the most famous, the most capable evolutionary biologist in the world, but you could never understand what his theories meant. What was punctuated equilibrium? It goes fast sometimes and then it goes slow again. Big deal, that’s a theory? I mean, come on. You know, what’s an evolutionary constraint? If you’ve got four legs you don’t have six legs, and you can’t get six legs. Fair enough, what’s that supposed to tell you? You know, these vague theological clouds of nothingness everywhere. But he certainly thought he was the bee’s knees and scientists don’t like other scientists who are not the bee’s knees, even those who are the bee’s knees, they don’t like them saying that.

[1:01:45] When you say that it had a theological element to it…

Well, he always called himself a Marxist. It was never clear to me what he meant by that. He certainly had no qualms about accumulating huge quantities of wealth himself. But yeah, I never knew what that was all about. I mean Marx, quotes, Marx it is said, the evidence isn’t clear, sent a copy of Das Kapital to Darwin, it is said. And it is said that - they did used to have to tear open the pages in those days with a knife - it’s said that it was an un… what do they call it, an untorn, whatever the word is, copy had been in Darwin’s library, but it’s not there now. And Marx certainly talks about Darwin, and in rather an interesting way. He says that Marx sees in the living world the operations of bourgeois society. But Marx doesn’t actually say that the Darwinian rules lead to the evolution of bourgeois society. But Steve somehow seemed to think that there was a, actually very much like Lamarck, who thought there was inevitable progress, as Marx did. Marx didn’t actually, Marx thought there was an internal contradiction in capitalism which would cause it to collapse, and he was of course Steve Jones Page 89 C1672/12 Track 6

right. He saw no inevitable progress. But Steve seemed to think there was a law, that Marx had come out with a law that socialism would triumph, and this was biology. Well, first of all he was wrong about Marx, and also was wrong about biology. So, you know, I don’t think either side of the argument, the Marxists who knew what they were talking about, or biologists who knew what they were talking about, understood what the hell he was on about.

Are you referring partly to that in Almost Like a Whale where you talk about shovelling fog?

Yeah. Well, that was Freud rather than anything else. I think Marx said a lot more than Freud. I mean again, it’s easy to mock people who study very, very difficult issues and cannot understand them. It’s fatally easy to do that and I do that, okay? And understanding human unhappiness and human happiness is a very, very difficult thing to do, and Freud tried to do it with, we now know, an absurd theory, which had to do with the amount of mental, the physical act, the cost of thinking, which actually is trivial. You know, the brain, if you’re thinking or depressed or what have you, the amount of energy used by the psychic energy used by the brain is exactly the same. So he was wrong there, so he tried to generate – I mean I’ve read a certain amount of Freud, most of which I simply can’t understand. The one that’s good, it’s called The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, it’s very, very funny. It points out that all jokes are the same joke, they come out with a sudden surprise you don’t expect. But he came out with vague stuff, which doesn’t in practical, in scientific terms doesn’t stand up. It doesn’t alter the fact that if you were to sit down and lie on a couch and talk to your therapist every day for ten years, and I know several psychotherapists, you would probably begin to feel better about yourself. Now, you might have begun to feel better about yourself anyway, but there’s no proof that that’s true. So the talking cure, as he called it, probably worked. I mean priests have always given the talking cure; you’re going to go to heaven. But there was no science behind it, no real science. And brain science, to an extent, is like that, the search for consciousness. What the hell do you mean? Nobody’s ever managed to define it. So on the other hand, it’s fatally easy to mock, but it’s much harder to come up with an explanation, so I’m in the sort of cheap position of mocking.

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[Track 6]

I’ll just ask some question based on some things we’ve already covered and then we’ll get to the end in the session. The first thing I wanted to clarify is that I wasn’t clear about whether you felt that your father’s focus on his scientific career was something that was sort of admirable or something that you felt was a bit limited, and I’m talking about your view of it then and in retrospect.

Well, I think it was both, in some ways admirable and in other ways limiting. I mean I think he was a very good scientist, and he was certainly a much more mathematically able scientist than I am, but certainly when I was young his life was consumed by doing science and I often didn’t see him during the day at all, he’d leave early and come back late. And that was a bit unfortunate, but what was also very much the case was that he really had no interests at all outside science, except for a bizarre fascination with Wild West novels, of which he had hundreds, the only books in the house. And the village in which he grew up, New Quay in west Wales, where mentally a large part of his mind resided throughout his life, and where in the end he retired to.

Thank you. [01:17] And can you tell me more about the visit to the friend of your father’s who’d become a professor of biology at University of Keele, this was during your A levels. You told me that you went to see him, but I don’t know whether you can remember anything about that?

I do vaguely. I mean his name was Alan Gemmell and he was quite a well-known radio figure in those days. I think he was on Gardeners’ Question Time or something like that. And he had, quite unbeknownst to me, been a friend of my father’s at university and it was the first time I’d ever really visited a university and I was quite impressed. But Alan Gemmell was brutally frank, I mean he said don’t come to Keele, which was probably a bit unfair to Keele. Or Keele’s grown a lot and become more sophisticated since those days. And we talked about where to go and I said I wanted to go to the Welsh universities and they didn’t seem to want me, particularly, and he said have you thought of Edinburgh. And I hadn’t really thought of Edinburgh because it was in the remote far north, so that’s when I began to think, oh, I’ll go to Edinburgh. So in fact he was very useful to me, I think.

Did you get any sense of what he did? Because given that this was your first contact with someone who did biology for a living, apart from a teacher?

Not really in my memory. He did something, I really don’t even know now – he was a botanist, obviously – he did something in plant science and in all frankness I didn’t know what it was.

And what was impressive about Keele?

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Well, I’d never been on a university campus before. He took me round his lab and I’d never been round a biological lab before. So I mean I was basically impressed, is the answer, yeah.

Thank you. [02:58] You said that you’d been in contact with your biology teacher, RC Simpson, since school. I wonder whether he remembered you and made any comments about you as…

Well, there’s a great line in Dylan Thomas, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, where he’s talking about his childhood and he writes about himself in the third person and he talks of his schoolteacher who’s asked, ‘Do you remember Dylan Thomas?’ and the schoolteacher says, ‘Remember him? I remember him by thousands’, which is a great line, which of course teachers generally don’t individually remember their students unless they’re complete horrors or complete geniuses, neither of which I was. But Richard Simpson, it was slightly odd actually, and in many ways rather touching, which was, given the rather unspeakably low level of science teaching at Wirral Grammar School, which is just outrageously bad, I don’t think they could have made it any worse if they tried, Simpson, Richard was one of the few who instilled some interest in his subject, which was biology. There were one or two others. Biologists, nearly all of them, the chemistry and physics teaching was dreadful. And I’m sure he didn’t remember me individually, but for some reason, when I was looking for somebody to dedicate, I think it was my coral book to, one of the things I remembered from school days was looking down for the first time down a microscope at a hydra, and hydra, as you know, is a little green coelenterate which is related to corals, and being quite amazed by it, and that was with Richard Simpson. And I thought for amusement’s sake I would dedicate the book to Richard Simpson, not really expecting, not knowing whether he was alive or what would come of it. But to my great surprise out of the blue he wrote to me, he was quite old then, I think, and we had a little bit of correspondence, we didn’t meet. And then, not long ago, about six, nine months ago, his wife wrote to me and said he’d died, really he must have been quite an advanced age. So that was the tie I had.

Thanks. [05:06] Why did you say that you got your first class degree and class medal by working hard and not by being smart? So the question is either, why did you say that, why do you think that, or why did you say it in that way?

Oh, because I think it. I mean it’s, you know, some scientists, particularly theoreticians, have an insight into their subject which demands obviously some scientific and mathematical background, but they’re really smart. Others, the majority of scientists really, are toilers in the vineyard. And of the toilers in the vineyard some of them, almost by chance, come up with extraordinary results and they win Nobel Prizes, almost always by choosing the right field to work in, and snail genetics was not the right field to win a Nobel Prize in, I can tell you that for sure. So I was a very hard worker, but so were Steve Jones Page 92 C1672/12 Track 6

many of my colleagues and I still am actually, as is my wife. I mean, you know, we both work I would say, I mean I’m a very ineffective worker, I faff around a lot, but we both regularly work six ten-hour days, six eight to ten-hour days. There’s no reason why I should, it’s just that I always have done.

Thank you. Perhaps now is a – I was going to ask this at the end – but as you’ve brought this up, do you foresee any kind of retirement? I ask because very early in the interview you mentioned that your father gave up work and then spent twenty years doing nothing, and then you also said that your grandfather had done something similar, spent thirty years playing bowls.

Yes, it’s odd. Yeah, it’s odd, it’s very strange that. I mean my father, I can’t remember how old he was, he really wasn’t very old, probably about fifty-five. Somebody sent me some pictures of his retirement party out of the blue the other week – it’s down there somewhere. And he’d obviously said, to hell with it, and pulled out and then basically did nothing. I think he was perfectly content doing nothing. And his father, who’d been a captain of an oil tanker in the 1930s, he did exactly the same, and did nothing, which proves that doing nothing is not in the genes, necessarily. No, I mean I can’t contemplate doing nothing.

Why not, why?

Because I’d be bored, I hate being bored. I mean what I’d like to do, I tell myself, I think I’m probably lying to myself, is what I have always enjoyed doing more than anything else, is going away and doing fieldwork. And the irony is, and it’s really a very strange history really, I’ve been on I don’t know how many fieldtrips, fifty, maybe more, and it’s nearly always – and often for two or three months at a time – and it’s nearly always, or in the early days, it was nearly always in consort, not with fellow biologists, but with sort of layabouts and hippies and drunks, who were friends of mine, and used to work themselves to the bone for reasons quite baffling to me. I mean we used to go to Yugoslavia and Pyrenees and Romania and I did quite a lot in North America too, but that tended to be with fellow scientists. And that was the high point. I remember when I became moderately affluent, which I did largely through writing books, I remember thinking, what I’ll do with this money is I’ll buy a house in France, which I’ve got, and I’ll turn that into a field centre where people can come and… Well, I bought the house in France when suddenly the thought of having lots of students coming through gave me a terrible headache, so I never did that.

Thanks. [08:48] Is there something about your particular kind of fieldwork that meant that it was possible to just recruit friends to do it?

Yes.

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Of the kind you’ve described, layabouts and…

Yeah, I mean an awful lot of science, even at the most technical end, is simply a learned skill and the learned skill in most molecular biology labs now is learning to push a button and then the machine does the rest for you. So collecting snails is a rather easily learned skill. I was never particularly good at it, I had friends that were like terriers, they could get ten times as many as me. But there’s no great skill in collecting them, there’s a little bit more skill in analysing what’s going on and thinking of experiments, but they were genuinely uninterested in that, they wanted a free holiday.

Thanks. [09:33] You said last time of discussions about a possible book with Sam Berry, that although you and his views on evolution might converge, there’s something about the way that you two think that wouldn’t sort of match up for a book.

Yes.

And I noticed something in The Serpent’s Promise where you write, ‘The notion that science and doctrine occupy separate or even complementary universes and that each provides equally valid insight into the world seems to me unconvincing’, could you comment further on that, because that, as far as I understand it, would seem to be Sam Berry’s position, that…

Yeah, I think it is.

…there’s a complementarity.

It depends what you mean, I mean what that turns very quickly towards is what the American creationists call ‘teach the controversy’, okay? And that’s been struck down by the American courts again and again, on the grounds they’re teaching religion in schools. And the idea of teaching the controversy, and we’ve had some brushes with it here, is that people who are fundamentally absolute creationists, often Young Earth, you know, 6,000 year old creationists, they say look, look at palaeontology, look at genetics, there’s a lot of controversy – of course there’s a lot of controversy, there’s controversy in every science and that’s what science is about, is about controversy. We are part of that controversy and we want you to teach our views as part of a wider understanding of what’s going on in biology. Well, the idea that the earth is 6,000 years old is so fundamentally stupid, it’s not worth wasting your breath on. And the idea, for example, I mean I’ve actually very recently, in the last few days, have been entangled with it, the idea that somebody who basically believes in intelligent design, that there’s a big god up there designing stuff, they can constantly, for example, until about three or four years ago there was things that were called pseudo-genes, which are genes which look as if they once did a job, which have been damaged by mutation and until three or four years ago it was Steve Jones Page 94 C1672/12 Track 6

thought they didn’t do a job. Well now it’s turned out that some of them do a bit of a job. So that’s immediately leapt on by the intelligent designers and say well that’s obviously, this has been designed to do this job, it’s not a bit of junk like you said it was. Well, they’re right. We were wrong to say it was a piece of junk, but what’s the point of saying it was designed to do it, who’s the designer. So I think that’s where we disagree. We agree in one important sense, and I’ve often talked to him about this, which is you can’t imagine any chimp having a sense of religion or of spirituality, you just can’t, I mean it seems to me highly unlikely. Chimps are much less curious even than dogs are, you know, chimps are basically thick. And there, in my view, and I’ve never really pursued the idea, that’s where – understanding ourselves – that’s where biology comes to an end. You know, you can do all the brain science you like and you can find that this bit lights up when you think of Jesus and this bit lights up when you think of the Virgin Mary, but the interesting thing is that you have these thoughts. And at the moment to me there is no biological explanation as to why you would have those thoughts. There are ideas about them, but there are no testable experiments. So if you want to say there exists a universe of the imagination which science cannot approach, I’d be more or less happy to say yes, but don’t expect me to join in.

Thank you. [12:59] [10 lines deleted at interviewee’s request]

[13:42] Oh, and I wonder whether you could comment on the use of the phrase ‘fell into’ when you describe significant steps in your life, you fell into doing a PhD, fell into being a postdoc, fell into being an academic, fell into doing radio work?

Well, I think I probably slightly overstated that. I mean I had no wishes whatsoever to do anything but become a professional biologist, really from the age of sixteen onwards, I would say. And by ‘fell into’ I probably meant to say, was that I was extraordinarily lucky in my pathway through, because of course in those days, the 1960s, it was easy, now it’s impossible. The number of people who start second degrees, Masters or PhDs, and become tenured academics, is one in one hundred. In my day, my guess would be, it would have been one in two or three, from the sort of, you know, high level – I don’t like to use the phrase high level universities, but from the more reputable universities, if they wanted to. And certainly everybody I knew, or almost everybody I knew who wanted to become a biologist, including being a biology teacher, which is a perfectly fine thing to be, almost everybody succeeded in doing it. But now that universe has now gone. And I regret that, both from the point of view of biology itself, and more important, from the point of view those who I think are being cheated into joining it.

Yes, thank you. And I should point out that you talked about that last time. I think you said something like we were lying to ourselves, then we were lying to them and now we’ve stopped even doing that. Steve Jones Page 95 C1672/12 Track 6

Yeah. I mean I think now people who go into the business are now more aware than they were maybe five years ago what the truth is. I don’t think anybody’s aware until they started looking at the figures, and realising that the university trade has become a classic of, you know, Tory employment policy which is short contracts and then once you get too expensive you get somebody else who’s cheaper.

Thank you. [15:46] As it turns out, AS Byatt is being interviewed in the Authors’ Lives National Life Stories project, which is ongoing, so I don’t know anything about the content of it. But I was wondering therefore if you could tell me more about your sort of detailed memory of first meeting her, because eventually your two recordings will be open.

Yes, I remember very well. I ran for many years on Radio 3, oh, I did dozens of them, a series called Blue Skies. Entirely obscure. Used to go out, most of the time, it went out in the concert interval on Saturday night. Radio 3 Saturday concerts tend to be very heavy, so they don’t have a very big audience. So in the interval everybody would be making a cup of tea. But it was an attempt to make an arts/science nexus, okay? And there had never been a science programme on Radio 3, and I got into it, and I’ve always been interested in that, and we, the way it emerged, the way it evolved was, it started off without much of a theme in each programme, but it evolved to having themes. One would be about meanders, say, rivers versus meandering ideas. I mean some of them, I have to say, were very good. Some of them were complete rubbish. But we did one, which is I think the best one we made, which is about time, both in science and the arts, you know, time dilation, time expansion in physics, time in the novel, how you can spend 400 pages on one hour and then leap forward. And ASB talked about time in her novels, and particularly when writing about the past, trying to relive the past, and she’s a very, very fluent speaker, and she was very fluent and it was a very good interview and we were chuffed with it. And I happened to say, well when I was in France the other week, and she said, ‘Oh yes’, Antonia being quite a grand person in some ways, ‘When I was in France the other week I was writing this, that and the other’. She said, ‘Oh, you have a house in France?’ I said, ‘Yes’. And she said, ‘Oh, so do I’. And it turned out we had houses about twenty-five miles apart. And so I used to go and see her quite a lot and we became really quite friendly. And in her enormous tetralogy, Babel Tower, she has had science and scientists in several of her books, but Babel Tower was going to be built around somebody who, bizarrely, was a snail geneticist and so, I think I probably said this last time, I had many, many long conversations with her which she took copious notes, about snail genetics, much of which went into the book. The character, I have to tell you, is in no way based upon me. What I was, I was feeding her facts. And that I think is to an extent the way she does some of her writing. She researches the factual side of whatever she’s doing, and then fictionalises it. She’s written one recently which I found very hard to read. What was it called? Rongarok, [Ragnarok] is it called? Odd book. It’s a book which turns on not using any words except Anglo-Saxon words, and of Steve Jones Page 96 C1672/12 Track 6

course that just takes the heart out of any English sentence. But it’s a good idea, obviously she learned an awful lot about the structure of English when she was doing it.

And apart from talking to her about snail genetics and her taking notes, how else – if you did – did you help with Babel Tower? Did you, for example, send her papers, send her books, comment on drafts of her writing?

I sent her papers and pointed her at books. I don’t think I commented on drafts of her writing, as far as I remember.

And did you read Babel Tower?

I did, yes.

And what…

It was a bit – what’s the word I’m looking for – it’s a bit encyclopaedic for me. I mean that’s not me being over-critical, it’s that I now, for several years, although I read enormously, I very rarely read modern fiction now and I don’t know why that is. My missus also reads a lot, she reads almost nothing but modern fiction, so we have non-overlapping tastes. I mean I think ASB’s earlier works I found very enjoyable, Virgin in the Garden and so on. This, I think Babel Tower was probably a bit too dense for my tastes, you know. On the other hand, I remember many, many years ago reading War and Peace from beginning to end, without stopping, I mean it was over Christmas. I went to visit my parents and over three days I just got stuck into it and I came out at the end sort of gasping, that was an amazing experience. And I tried to do it again a couple of years ago and I couldn’t do it, so maybe my attention span has just gone.

[20:30] Do you have a view on the sort of deployment of science, specifically in that book or in her other books?

Well, I never really know whether it works or not. I mean in the end science is only science. I mean, Ian McEwan, who also has a house, or had a house close to us, who I became quite friendly with, and his son actually was a student here. Ian does just the same. He’s done a little bit of talking to me, I haven’t seen him for a while, but he talks to psychiatrists. What was it called? What’s his one where it starts off with a balloon? Enduring Love, de Clerambault’s syndrome. Now, he has a chap, Ray Dolan, who was a student of mine when I was in the Royal Free, and Ray is a brain scientist and I think they collaborate quite closely. And this thing, de Clerambault’s syndrome, turns on people who irrationally believe that somebody else is in love with them. And it’s like everything in psychiatry, it’s just another word that means we don’t understand this. But Enduring Love turns on this chap who Steve Jones Page 97 C1672/12 Track 6

irrationally falls in love with the hero and in the end kills him. But there is that. I never know whether it works. I mean HG Wells, for example, who, you know, was an excellent writer, he wrote science fiction and the science itself was very lightly put on, you know, there was never any suggestion as to what the time machine, how it worked, it was just a bicycle you could just get on and you’d pedal off into the future. There was no talk of relativity, even though it was written just before the theory of relativity. So I think that works. A genre of fiction I absolutely despise and never read is science fiction, modern science fiction. It just seems to me bloody stupid. So I think that books with, novels whose foundations are science tend not to work. The foundations of a novel has to be literature, not science, and if it’s the other way round, I think it tends to creak.

What did you talk to Ian McEwan about when you were talking to him? You’ve suggested that he’s interested now in psychology rather than your area of science, but what…

We did a little bit of talking about genetics. I think he’s somewhat of a polymath, I mean he’s interested in everything. And I’m not sure he ever used any of the genetical stuff. I think we talked a bit about eugenics, I remember, and he’s used a bit of that, Second World War type stuff. But we generally used to talk about, you know, what kind of gas cooker have you got, it was about the house. And he sold the house to two friends of mine, so that was another point of interaction. And he used to live in Fitzrovia, in fact in Fitzroy Square in an extraordinarily grand house. And now he’s moved to the Cotswolds, which I wouldn’t have thought would have suited him particularly, but that’s what he’s done.

[23:36] Did AS Byatt speak to you about the origins of her interest in science, which seem to have been related to CP Snow and that sort of thing?

Yes, she did mention it. The other person who I spoke to quite a lot about science was Doris Lessing and I became quite friendly with her. Doris was, you know, she was a remarkable figure, and - stop me if I’ve told you this anecdote – it was years ago, when my first book came out, The Language of the Genes in 1993, and it did very well, The Language of the Genes, largely because it followed the Reith Lectures which had been, though I say it myself, highly successful, not because of my abilities, but because the public simply was not aware of what was going on in genetics and it was all brand new. And The Language of the Genes followed that and did very well. And I went to a book fair in Amsterdam with myself, and my missus came too, myself, AS Byatt – not AS Byatt – Doris Lessing… who’s that lady who came up with the advertising, Go to work on an egg? She’s written many, many, she’s now elderly and she’s written many, many sort of feminist books. What was her name? She used to live in, she lived in Hampstead. How can I forget her bloody name? Fay Weldon. And somebody else, also well known, who was very nice who I see now and again, I can’t remember. So we all turned up in Amsterdam in this book – in fact I was in Amsterdam the other week and I tried to find the bookstall but it’s been turned into a McDonald’s, in Dam Square. And because these famous feminist Steve Jones Page 98 C1672/12 Track 6

writers were there, it was a complete riot outside, there were 400 people queuing up, eighty per cent of them female. So I’ll be sat behind this long desk to sign books. And of course there was a queue of 300 for Doris Lessing and 200 for Fay Weldon and 100 for the third female writer, and zero for me. [laughs] Which I found funny. But there was, after about fifteen minutes this bloke came up to me and he was talking to me about the book, and he said, oh, would you sign this copy? I said, yeah, sure. And I said, ‘Why are you interested in it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I own the bookshop’. [laughs] And I found that highly amusing. But we then went, we had dinner afterwards, then we went on a cruise on the canal on a boat, I remember it well, called the Captain Kok, a most enjoyable evening. And we became kind of matey then and we saw each other, I interviewed her on the radio a few times. And she, I mean she was a woman of vacillating passions. She became very interested in my science, you know, in other words, scientific study of sex, which is what genetics isn’t, but she sort of saw this. And she came up, I was at something with her, and she said in public, I would much rather – looking back on my life – I would have much rather have been a scientist than a novelist. And I’m not sure that was true, but she certainly thought it at that moment. And I think there are probably several people in the literary world who think that. I mean I think… Antonia said something much the same too, that if she went back to university she’d study science. But it’s easy to say that, it’s much harder to do it.

What did you help Doris Lessing with and how?

Oh, nothing specific, I don’t think. She kind of, I mean this was when, ten, fifteen years ago, and as far as I’m aware, she’d stopped writing. She wrote some extraordinarily peculiar science fiction stuff, the Reports of the Delegate from Planet 47, which as far as I could see, was totally impenetrable. I mean her early stuff was brilliant, The Grass is Singing and so on. The Golden Notebook I read when I was fairly young, and that too is very good. But this science fiction set on distant planets, I couldn’t make any sense of it, although I never admitted it to her.

[27:42] Is it just luck that’s brought you together with these novelists, or is there something attractive to them about you and attractive about them to you?

It’s luck to a degree, but it was Blue Skies more than anything else. And I met some really very interesting people from that. I finally walked away from it, it’s probably a mistake, but the woman, Deborah Cohen, who was head of radio science then and now, thirty years later, almost thirty years later, was very, very good. She was furious with me for walking away, but when we’d done so many of them, first of all I couldn’t think of any more to do, and secondly I was then head of the genetics department here and I was completely frazzled, I didn’t have any time at all. But I kind of would like to do it again now, but Radio 3 isn’t interested any more.

[28:30] Can you tell me about relations with John Brockman, which led to the book, The Third Culture? Steve Jones Page 99 C1672/12 Track 6

Well, John Brockman was a bit, for a time, was the Attila the Hun of science publishing. In other words it was, you know, either you’d be converted by the sword to me being your agent, okay? And if you don’t you’ll be beheaded in terms of sales. And he took everybody on board really. He had, well, all the hacks, he had Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, you name ‘em, he had ‘em. And he wanted me to join him and somehow I never did. It was a mistake, I think. He wanted me, to become my agent, and I had an agent, who was quite good, and I shouldn’t really have had any sense of loyalty to the guy, but I did, I mean it’s a commercial relationship in the end. And so I didn’t go over to him, and I think he was rather annoyed by that. And he wanted me to get into his regular sending flatulent emails around to show how clever everybody is, and I could never get into that, it’s not really my kind of thing, you know. I mean I don’t go round discussing consciousness from the point of view of geneticists because I don’t know anything about consciousness from the point of geneticists. So I don’t like that, you know, we are intellectual snobs line and it’s just not for me, and so I never really got involved. I did a little bit, I can’t remember what I did for him now.

It’s a chapter in the book The Third Culture and in his introduction to The Third Culture he says that each chapter is based on his ongoing one-to-one conversations with all of the scientists in the book, so I wondered what you remember of those ongoing one-to-one conversations with him?

Mainly in my case considerable drunkenness, because he used to take us out for expensive meals. No, I think… and we did have quite a lot of conversations. But I mean I’m not saying for a moment that he wasn’t interested, he was very, very interested, there’s no question of it. But like many non-scientists, he saw, or thought he saw in science much more than there actually is. I mean, you know, he thought that there was a key to the universe in science. Well, there isn’t, simple as that. And there’s a guy called Daniel Dennett, [whispers] who’s a pain in the arse, you know, and Steve Pinker who again, I know, not well, but I do know, they see much more in science than I see. Now that may be that simply, you know, if I’ve seen further it’s by climbing on to some of the shoulders of giants, and I haven’t. But I’m much more linear in my view of science than they are. I mean Steve Gould, you know, science explained everything. But as Steve Gould knew nothing about science, that didn’t make much help, didn’t help much. But no, I’ve never liked the interplay between science and philosophy, they seem to me mutually exclusive areas, so I never really get involved in it.

[31:34] He felt that he was seeing the emergence of a third culture where instead of, as CP Snow imagined, literary intellectuals conversing with scientists and coming up with something together, that scientists were now conversing directly with the public and were replacing the tradition…

There’s an element of truth in that. I mean, well people tend, the BBC in particular, which is the main, has always been the main promoter of science in British culture, I mean I was down there the other week actually. What was I doing? Talking to somebody at the BBC Trust. And I don’t think the BBC Steve Jones Page 100 C1672/12 Track 6

realised what a big seller science could be, really until quite late. I mean they had Attenborough, they had a thing called Tomorrow’s World, which was actually more technology than science, which were very popular, but they didn’t realise there are a lot of good science communicators out there. They tend to pick the same ones again and again. I’ve been definitively unpicked, I have to tell you. But – and these programmes are popular, and they’re cheap to make. And so I think there is, as Snow put it, I mean Snow, I mean Snow was in Cambridge at a time of such extraordinary stupid snobbery, the people in the arts faculty actually thought they were smart, I mean where they get this idea from is a mystery to me. I mean there’s an enormous difference between being an academic specialising, shall we say, in English literature, and being an academic doing physics or doing biology, because if you’re a scientist you’re producing the product. If you’re a literary critic, you’re commenting on the product. And I would far rather be doing the former than the latter, and the latter, to a considerable extent, seems to me futile. And as I think I said previously, the other great joy of being a scientist is however mediocre you are, you’re still doing science. The difficulty in being an artist is, if you’re mediocre, you’re not doing art.

What did you learn about him, John Brockman?

Oh, not a lot. I mean my wife is a New York Jew, so I knew a lot of New York Jews, and he’s in that culture, which from my days of the University of Chicago in Harvard I’m very familiar with, and in many ways it’s an excellent culture, no question of it. It tends to have a very abrasive edge, which is a lot of people who are pretty smart trying to prove to the others that they’re smarter than they are, which is never something which has really attracted me. And I think there’s elements of that, he’s very competitive, there’s no question.

Who was your agent, the agent that you…

[34:23] It was a guy called Peter Robinson, who’s not very prominent, but he’s a perfectly capable agent. He worked for a company called Curtis Brown originally and then walked off and worked for another one now called – what’s it called? PLR Books or something, I can’t remember. I think financially I probably made a big mistake by not going with Brockman. But, you know, so be it, that was the decision, probably was an unwise one, but that’s what I did.

[34:51] Can you say more about coming to know the other people in his circle, the people who he had recruited such as Dan Dennett?

Well, it’s a smallish world, this, I mean I kind of had known on and off these people anyway. And when I was in, particularly in the States, I mean I was in the circle, I mean I’m ashamed to say it, but I was in Chicago in particular and later in Harvard, I mean the people around me were the absolute Steve Jones Page 101 C1672/12 Track 6

leaders of the field of evolutionary genetics. I mean I wasn’t, but they were. So you tended to see, you know, people would come through the lab all the time, so I knew quite a lot of people in the trade, there’s no question of that. The irony is, as we look back at the people who seemed to be the absolute leaders, with the benefit of hindsight, which is always a very useful thing to have, they were probably, quite a lot of them, quite off the real line of truth, but that happens all the time. So yeah, I mean I knew quite a lot of these people, there’s no question. But I knew Steve Gould quite well and Steve and I always had a rather distant relationship, but Steve had a distant relationship with everybody and he got stranger and stranger as he got older. And he was ill, which certainly wasn’t a help. But he was a classic of the guy who had, you know, who described Chesterton as having ‘hearty degeneration of the fat’? I can’t remember, but he had the equivalent of that, you know. He had an enormous corpus of knowledge which to him gave him an insight into the universe. Now, I’ve got an enormous corpus – I’m blowing my own trumpet – but I do have a huge corpus of knowledge about biology, more than most people, because I’ve written such diverse books, but I don’t think it gives me any insight into the universe at all. And I’ve just never had any interest in doing that.

Thank you. [36:48] You’ve just mentioned that you regard the BBC as being the key promoter of science in sort of popular culture.

Yes.

And then you then said that you’ve been unpicked. When and how…

Well, it’s a matter of observation really, I mean I used to be on all the time. Ah, I think people come in and out of fashion, is the answer. I did a very peculiar thing the other week, which I’m not convinced really worked, which was a BBC 2 science quiz show, with Jim Al-Khalili and various other hacks. It didn’t quite come off for me, I think it kind of worked, but there was talk of making a series but it seems… Brian Cox was, almost needless to say, the chair of it. But the series seems not to have happened.

So it hasn’t been broadcast?

Well, they had a one-off. It didn’t quite work. I could see – Alice Roberts was in it too and she’s good – but I could see it could work, but this was creaking. It stopped and started, it didn’t have much of a flow. But I don’t think it’ll go anywhere.

[37:59] As you’ve mentioned Jim Al-Khalili, could you give us the sort of insider’s view of The Life Scientific, how it works? Steve Jones Page 102 C1672/12 Track 6

I think it works very well, actually. I mean I don’t often listen to it, even though I used to do a lot of radio, I don’t listen to a lot of talk radio, I listen to a lot of Radio 3, music. I think it works very well. Jim is a sympathetic character and he’s a very nice guy and he researches his subjects, you know, he’s not like somebody, like Melvyn, who knows a lot, but Melvyn tends to… Melvyn has researchers, there’s no question. But Melvyn tends to go in and wing it a lot and he does it very well. Now Jim doesn’t do that, he researches and they ask, what are we going to ask, and if he says this, what are you going to ask him next? And that willingness to put time into preparation really shows. And he’s very good at drawing people out, you know. I mean I’m easy because I’m glib, as you’ve noticed, but one of the things I said on In Our Time once, that evolution, human evolution was the survival of the glibbest, and I thought that somebody would pick that up, but they never did. But he’s very good, you know, a lot of scientists are not good at talking about themselves, but Jim has been very good doing that and I think he does an excellent job. You wouldn’t have thought that a series of interviews, now quite a long series – how many he’s done, I don’t know, dozens, I would say – with scientists would work, but they do. I think largely because the Radio 4 audience, which is a very homogeneous audience, you know, of a certain age, of a certain education level, is simply interested in that kind of thing and going through people’s personal experiences talking about their science is a very good way of doing it.

What I mean is when, do you turn up, not having met him before and just start…

I kind of knew him already. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

And is there any discussion before about the route through it, because unlike me, he’s only got thirty minutes, so I wondered how he selects the things…

Well, he’s got an editor, it’s not as live. It’s almost as live, you know, it probably runs to thirty-five. But I can’t remember, is the answer. I think we may have… but we do, I’ve known him, I can’t remember how I got to know him, but probably again through Blue Skies, but I’ve known him for a long time. So I guess we must have talked around it. And we have the same kind of sense of humour, so we’re quite matey really. I honestly can’t remember.

Okay. Thank you. [40:38] Oh yes, we’re nearly there, but could you comment on your use of economic metaphors in Almost a Whale?

Almost Like a Whale, yeah.

If you can’t… I’ve got examples. Steve Jones Page 103 C1672/12 Track 6

Can’t remember what they are.

Okay. Things like this. ‘The ecological market determines when plants and animals should make the biggest investment of all, to reproduce.’ That’s one. ‘Like any business, life must diversify its manufacturers or fail.’ ‘Natural selection scrutinises the value of every animal using an exchange rate based on kinship, analyses the market and comes up with whatever best transmits the DNA.’

Well, that’s actually, that’s a statement of game theory, which came out of economics originally and people like George Price, who you probably haven’t heard of, was the founder of behavioural ecology, who was here, and killed himself in Drummond Street, cut his throat. George was the first person to bring those economic models into biology. And now that’s very widespread. So that sentence, which is actually not a bad sentence, now you read it out to me, is actually a summary of quite a lot of ecological modelling, game theory, you know. When you’re fighting for a mate, when should you stop fighting, when you’ve decided that you’re not going to win, you know. There’s no point if you’re… the answer is if you’re fighting with somebody are you going to be a hawk or a dove, are you going to give up, are you going to continue fighting? And the answer is, you have to assess what the other one is and copy exactly what they do. And so… but that’s now grown left, right and centre into all parts of animal behaviour. And animal behaviour really was and to an extent still is, a science without a theory, you know, they just look at this bird goes cheep cheep and this one goes quack quack, and that was the science of animal behaviour. It’s got better than that, but it’s still floundering a bit. But the irony is that those animal behaviour models have now gone back into economics, and again, with what value I don’t know, but there are lots of publications where you say, alright, we’ll give you a hundred dollars and you can gamble with this guy and if you lose you’ll get 500 dollars, but if you win – if you win you’ll get 500 dollars – but if you lose you’ll have to give your hundred dollars back again. And when people – and they have panels of people playing these games in investment companies. Whether they gain from them, I don’t know. You know, bear in mind that the stock market follows over the long term an absolutely random model, so I don’t think there’s really much in it, but they think it’s worth it. So the economic analogy for evolution by no means is original to me.

Thank you. [43:21] And I didn’t know who George Price was until I read The Serpent’s Promise and one of the chapters begins with it and I’ve got that down as something that I’d like you to tell me more about, that is your experience of him.

Well, it was limited. I mean George was beginning to go mad at that time, and as I say in the book – Sam had more experience, Sam Berry had more experience than I did, because Sam, who I’ve got a lot of affection for, is somebody whose religion is very, very important to him, and George, who had been an atheist, as he fell deeper into depression or bipolar disorder problems, schizophrenia, was Steve Jones Page 104 C1672/12 Track 6

desperately looking for a way out, he was seriously ill, and he was picked up by that very fine church over in Fitzrovia. I can’t remember its name. What’s it called? The most beautiful church, Victorian. I can’t remember, Teulon was the designer. But he was treated very well by the people there, as lots of church people would. But he became really a religious maniac and he used to run around, literally, the lab shouting, ‘Have you got a hotline to Jesus?’ and shouting at people. And Cedric Smith, CAB Smith, who’s a guy who’s much less well known than he deserves to be, I mean he was basically a saint in human form really. Cedric was in at the very beginning of mathematical genetics. He was in with RA – you probably don’t know who these people are – Fisher, RA Fisher, and all these pioneers of statistics. And Cedric was very self-effacing, but he too was tremendously religious, he was a Quaker, and he lived in complete poverty. And I remember going to his funeral and being astonished to find that at a Quaker meeting none of the people there knew that he was a famous scientist. You see George, because I had the lab, the office next to Cedric, and I then took over Cedric’s office after his demise, George used to come and make a nuisance of himself then. But because Cedric was such a kind guy, he would waste time talking to him, but I think he found it very painful because he was clearly really going downhill fast.

And how did you, when George came to you, what…

I was rather unhelpful, largely because I was, you know, I mean I was very young then, I mean I’d only just started, and I was rather in awe of the guy really, I didn’t know how to deal with him.

You said that sometimes homeless people came into the department that he had helped.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, he used to sit and drink in Soho Square. Nobody could afford to sit and drink in Soho Square any more, but they were… I mean it’s actually got better over the years, but the lab was then north of Euston Road in Stephenson Way, where the Indian restaurants are, Drummond Street, and a completely dismal little spot. And [laughs] I remember one year, just thinking in left field, we have every year, we had every year, times when people would, students would be shown round and so on, and they’d often bring their parents with them. We used to do them in the lab, and I came in on one of these days at about ten in the morning and there was a big police line, ‘Do not cross’ just outside the labs. And these parents were queuing up looking puzzled at each other, and somebody had been murdered and dumped on the steps. [laughs] One of these drunks, they had a fight. I don’t think any of those students came to UCL. So it was a pretty grisly area, and so there were lots of, you know, unfortunate people hanging around, which George used to pick up and bring in. But they never caused that much trouble.

And you say that Sam had stronger relations with George than you?

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I’ve never really spoken to Sam about it. I got the impression he did, yes, because George was very interested in Sam because Sam was religious. And he wasn’t interested in me because he didn’t really know who I was, and I had no interest in religion.

Thank you. [47:34] Why have you given many talks to schools?

Well, it’s a thing I do, you know, I’ve always done that. I mean I’m kind of good at it. It isn’t all altruistic. I go to schools conferences, for which I get paid, and I’m very happy to do that, I can tell you. I give a lot of that away, but that’s another issue. But if any school writes to me, I generally, as long as it’s not too far away, I’ll say yes, okay? And I’ve spoken hundreds of times, literally hundreds of times, at schools, all over the place. The irony is that the kids I speak to are not the kids who need somebody to come to speak to them. And I go through a – I did one in Bristol the other day, I’m doing one tomorrow, I think it is, or the day after, in Leeds in the town hall which sits two and a half, 3,000, there were 3,000 in Bristol – and, you know, if you’re standing in front of 3,000 or four and a half thousand in the Dominion Theatre, you know, it gets the adrenalin going and I can give them a damn good talk. But if you look at the list of schools, they’re all, nearly all private schools who come. I was actually talking to the guy who runs it and he said, look, we’ve tried to get state schools to come, we offered them reduced prices and so on, but they just can’t do it any more because they’re so wrapped around by regulations in the curriculum, they can’t do it. So that’s an issue, but I think it’s better that I talk to somebody than I don’t talk to anybody.

But why… I can imagine other scientists and other science writers being approached by schools and saying no thanks, so why do you do it?

Well, I just do it. I mean I think it’s my duty really, to be rather pompous about it. It’s a strange thing, I was thinking about it the other week. I have vivid memories in school of, which as I keep saying, at really not a very successful school, one of the things it was particularly, I mean many things it was dreadful at was music, right, it was just dreadful. I mean there was a music teacher whose idea of a lesson of music was to put us in a room with a record player and go and have a fag outside, and that was it. And once a group, a well-known wind band came, called the Dolmetsch Quartet – I think they were a quartet – and oh, bloody got to listen to this horrible music, terrible, bloody awful. I’m not going. Come on, we have to go, so we went. And I’d never heard professional musicians before, and I was probably twelve or so, thirteen, and I was completely amazed by it, and I’ve always remembered that and maybe I’ve possibly amazed one or two of the 200,000 kids I’ve spoken to. In fact I was in a meeting this morning with Bob Winston, Robert, Lord Winston, and he does the same thing for the same reason.

And what questions do school children tend to ask you? Steve Jones Page 106 C1672/12 Track 6

Well, in the format it tends to be, in that format it’s difficult to deal with questions, because there are so many of them. There are evolution – do you believe in evolution is quite a lot of it, and I always say of course I do, and I explain why. One which comes up horribly frequently is, what about the gay gene? It’s still around, that ludicrous idea, and I try to explain that what do you mean by a gay gene. But, yeah. And another thing is about stem cells, they ask. I mean, I think I probably told you, the occasions when students with cystic fibrosis have come up to me and said they’re going to be cured by gene therapy, because their biology teachers have told them. Now there, I mean that’s quite alarming, the beliefs that some kids have in the power of genetics, which it simply doesn’t have. But yeah, you know, to be rather rude, their questions are often quite predictable.

Do they ever ask about evolution and religion, that question?

Yes, yes. Islamic students most of all, of course. Often in quite a heated way. I mean I’ve had – it seems to have died away in the last couple of years – but certainly over the last five years we’ve had some trouble with Islamic students, of whom there are many at UCL, particularly in the medical school, complaining that they’re forced to study evolution, which is against the Qur’an. And I’ve had some interaction with them, but what I say is, I mean I say look, do you believe in Mendel’s laws, which obviously I teach. Yes, I do. Do you believe in the fossil record? Yes, I do. Do you believe in mutation? Yes, I do. Do you believe in, you know, molecular trees? Yes, I do. So you believe in evolution then? No, I don’t. And so it’s a mindset thing. And I have a line, which I mentioned earlier, which was actually, at the end of one of my evolution lectures to the public, I say many people hated the theory of evolution, if you like, because they thought it reduced their standing as human beings, it dragged them down to the level of the apes. I feel now, and I think many people then began to feel, they realised, actually what it does, it enhances the status of human beings, because even though you’ve got ninety-five per cent or whatever of your DNA in consort with chimpanzees, in no sense at all, are you ninety-five per cent a chimpanzee. So that’s what I try to say to Islamic students, I say look, what evolution is telling you is that the human condition, including human religion, is something which is unique to ourselves and maybe brings us up above the rest of the living world. But they still won’t take it. But the irony is, in the Qur’an there’s no mention at all of anything which you can interpret as evolution. There is of course in Genesis, but there’s nothing like that in the Qur’an at all. The only thing which is in there which they say disproves evolution is that God is all-knowing. Well, fine if you want to believe God is all-knowing, I have no problem with that, and why that should disprove evolution, I don’t know. They don’t like the randomness in evolution. And one of the standard arguments, which completely baffles me is, if we evolved from chimps, how come chimps are still around. Well, first of all of course we didn’t evolve from chimps, chimps and ourselves evolved from a common ancestor. And if rats evolved from mice, how come there are still mice around? And they look at me blankly and they think, oh, maybe he’s right, but they don’t change their minds.

And public talks, why give those? Steve Jones Page 107 C1672/12 Track 6

Well, again, it’s stuff I do, really. I mean I do quite a lot of, I like going to book festivals, they’re always a laugh, and I meet a lot of people, these kinds of people at book festivals. I always go to Hay, I’ve been to Hay too often, probably twenty times. Yeah, I enjoy book festivals and I like an educated audience and the book festival thing is really part of your contract as an author, you know, I mean you’re expected to promote your book and I like promoting my books. I don’t think it makes much difference to sales really. So I do quite a lot of that, but I do a lot of University of the Third Age, that kind of stuff too. Yeah, so I just do it.

Are the questions that those audiences ask predictable in the same sort of way?

Again, because of the setting, where you often have a very large audience, it’s difficult to interact. I fear I have to say they tend to be, yes.

[55:15] Could you tell the story of the origins of and the writing of The Serpent’s Promise? So the sort of, why did you write it, the process of writing it and then the reaction to it?

Well, I mean as I say, I think I say in the preface, you know, I’m a serial plagiarist, I mean I plagiarised the entire works of Charles Darwin, which was a very interesting experience actually. I really am very glad I did it, I learnt an awful lot and certainly my admiration for Darwin went through the roof. And then, almost out of the blue, came the idea, and I’d come up with the phrase before in one of the books, the Bible is the world’s first genetics textbook. And I began to think, well maybe I could build on that, and I did. And the book’s a bit episodic, you know, but so’s the bloody Bible, you know, so you can’t blame me for that. But there’s all kinds of interesting stuff in it. [microphone dislodged?] There’s all kinds, what I found interesting stuff in there. I fought my way through the entire Bible – let me put this bloody thing back in again – much of which of course is cosmically tedious. But it was interesting, I was reading the King James. The thing which is interesting was to read the King James and then read The New English Bible. Oh God, how anybody could believe a word of it after reading The New English Bible is a mystery to me, but still. But, there is an awful lot of stuff in there, as I say in the book, which is factual. The example I always give is in Leviticus, the obsession with disease and cleanliness, which has to do with the fact that Leviticus was written at about the times when the first cities emerged and the first epidemics came. Then there’s stuff about the visions of the saints, and I say in the visions chapter, as what’s his name, the psychologist said, William James said, it’s foolish to say that all the visions of St Hildegard and so on were mental disorders. Well, it is foolish, I mean I agree with that, but there are uncanny overlaps between well studied mental disorders and the descriptions that visionaries have, and the use of drugs in religion is very, very common, including singing, which of course blows off the carbon dioxide in your body and gives you oxygen starvation in the brain. And all this seemed to me perfectly legitimate stuff to talk about and I’m not sure it entirely works, but it’s there. The last chapter I was quite fond of, and I hadn’t known anything about, which is Steve Jones Page 108 C1672/12 Track 6

the sociology of religion, the way that religion in societies always starts with inequality and the more unequal a society, the more religious it is and the more important religion is, and that’s absolutely universally true, the evidence is overwhelming that it’s true, right from the beginning of agriculture onwards, that’s when religion began, with the idea of property, you know, as Marx himself actually said. And there’s a lot of good sociology in there. So I did all that, then the reviews came out and I was completely baffled by them, because they basically said either you shouldn’t have written this book, for reasons I don’t understand, or that I had misunderstood the Bible. Now, I say in the beginning, I think, that this is a science book, it isn’t a book about the mysteries of Jesus and that kind of stuff. It isn’t about that, it’s about the Bible’s attempt to understand the world around it. And its attempt was a very noble attempt, it came up with satisfactory explanations for its day, which in the end nearly all turned out to be wrong. But that doesn’t matter, an awful lot of scientific explanations turned out to be wrong. But nearly all the often hostile reviews turned on – and they were often written by religious people – is that I was demeaning the Bible, that I didn’t realise that effectively all of it was myth and metaphor and parable and in the preface to the paperback, I said, you know, to my great surprise I discover I believe more in the truth of the Bible than many religious people. I probably told you the story with – do you know who John Polkinghorne is? Yeah, well John, who’s a very nice guy, I mean John is not somebody who loses his temper, but he’s a very enthusiastic believer. And I was on the radio with him and he was absolutely furious with me. And I said, look John, let’s take this chapter about floods, you know, Noah’s flood. Now, we know, you know, I know, that there were major floods in the Middle East in those days, there are claims that Noah’s flood was due possibly to the legend of the Black Sea, you know, the Dardanelles opening up. That probably isn’t true now, but it was thought at the time. And so that’s what I write about, what’s Noah’s flood about, it’s about floods, why can’t I write about floods. And he said, ‘Noah’s flood isn’t about floods at all’. I said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well what’s the ark about?’ ‘The ark is completely irrelevant.’ And I have got quite a lot about the ark and the archaeologists and all the mad people going up for the ark. I said, ‘Well, what about Noah?’ He said, ‘That’s what it’s about, it’s about one man’s unique relationship to God’. And Noah, you remember, was the only one who God saw as a righteous person. And I thought, if that’s the interesting thing in the biblical flood legends, I’m missing a lot here. And obviously these people thought I was missing a lot. Well, I am missing a lot, but I think they’re missing a lot too.

Thank you. [1:00:52] More generally, what’s been your experience of letters, emails, phone calls in response to your writing from religious people?

I probably can’t get to them. You see those four boxes there?

Yes.

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They’re completely filled with them, I have thousands of them. And generally, I have to say, I ignore them, because you get into a, you know, a Malthusian disaster. In other words, you write back, they write back again. I’d say almost none of them are of any interest at all. There’s one guy, I think he must have passed away by now, but from 1991 onwards, at least once a month, more often than once a month, whenever I wrote something in the paper or appeared on the radio, he would make a collage, quite a big one, beautifully done… I don’t think I’ve got any which are really accessible. All I know about him is he lives in Sheffield, because it’s got a Sheffield stamp on the envelope. And these things are works of art. And he’d get, what he would do, he’d go to old encyclopaedias and so on and photocopy images from them, then he’d go to bits of the Bible, the KJB, and photocopy that, and then he’d juxtapose them and put my writings in. And I look at these things and they were hallucinatory, I mean you could sell them for a lot of money. I thought of making a book out of them actually. I never did it. And he’s really the only interesting one I’ve ever really had. There’s a subset which are more problematic, of people who write because somebody in their family has a genetic disease. Now, I do respond to them, but my response is always the same, which is that I’m not a doctor, but there are these, for example, Alzheimer’s or what have you, or Huntington’s, there are these support groups, all of which are good, and this is the support group for Huntington’s, I suggest you contact them. But that’s kind of died away now because the web has kind of, now that everybody has access to it, that’s kind of overtaken it. But to be frank, the writings from religious people are just to me, are just vapid, I mean I don’t see any point in replying to them, really. I have a chum in the States, Jerry Coyne, you should look at his web page, it’s one word, ‘WhyEvolutionIsTrue’. And Jerry and I worked together a lot on drosophila, and Jerry is a very, very good scientist and a very hard worker, very, very effective and has done some tremendously good work in science on speciation. And he’s written the standard work on what species are, I still don’t know what they are – I’m not sure he does – but he has become obsessed with creationism. And he’s written a book which has sold, to my despair, hundreds of thousands of copies, called Why Evolution is True, which is a very straightforward, plonkety-plonkety- plonk, case for evolution. And he’s had thousands of letters, which he responds to. And he’s now got a webpage called Why Evolution is True, and he must spend four hours a day on it, nearly all attacking creationists and, you know, theologians who accommodate science. And he’s written a book called something and faith, which in my view is almost unreadable, I’ve tried it, and he’s put huge amounts of effort into it, just attacking the most obscure theologians, people I’ve never heard of, somebody called Plantinga, he attacks constantly, because they try to put theology into evolution, or evolution into theology. Why bother, is my response, what is the point? Hitting these people is like, as I often said, it’s like boxing with a jelly. You know, you can hit it as hard as you like and it’ll quiver a bit, and it’ll come back and it’ll still be a jelly, and so, why bother? That’s my view. So I don’t really interact with them.

Did you reply to the man who made the – man or woman, we don’t know – who made the collages?

I’ve no idea who he is, all I ever get is the collage. I would love to reply to him, but I don’t know.

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[1:05:02] Why have you kept the letters?

I once thought there is a book or anthology of some kind to be made out of these and when I started I used to think, oh, as one does, you know, you throw… oh Christ, I’ll answer them, I mean I’m just the same here, I’ve got dozens of them here, I’ll answer that. But then time’s arrow takes over and you don’t answer them, so I just took to throwing them in a filing cabinet. But I don’t really even do that very much any more.

Thank you. [1:05:35] I wanted to ask about the strong statement at the end of The Serpent’s Promise which seemed – it may not be – but it seemed to me slightly uncharacteristic because you’ve said earlier today about the slightly more modest view you have of science and its ability to answer everything and solve all problems than some of the Brockman people, but I think the final – I meant to bring it, my copy…

So yeah, the…

But you know what I mean, where…

Yes, I say the answer is science, at the end?

Yes.

Yes. Well, I think I’m saying something slightly different there, because in the last chapter I’ve been going on, the problem in some senses isn’t… to me, religion, or religions, religion is a big problem. I mean just in political terms it’s a big problem, you only have to look at the Middle East now, or look at the wars of religion, look at Ireland. Again and again and again, people hate each other because they have different untestable beliefs, okay? And so they believe in different mysteries and of course they’re completely sure that their mystery is right and everybody else’s mystery is wrong and they’re willing to kill for that, okay? Now, the only system of knowledge where we all follow the same belief system is science, okay? And nobody’s going to kill, and I don’t think anybody ever had killed because, in statistics say, they believe in Bayes’ Theorem, which is a particularly statistical… where other statisticians hate Bayes’ Theorem. But it’s the same mindset and one day, one of them or the other will be right, is likely to be proved right, but they’re not going to kill each other. But when you end up with irrational systems which people believe with a passion, then that always ends in tears. So that’s what I was saying there, I wasn’t saying that science explains everything about what it means to be human, but I was saying in purely operational terms, in practical terms, if you want a belief system which unites communists and conservatives and you come to this lab, I mean in this lab we’ve got people from all over the world, lots and lots of Chinese students here, in that lab in there, I never get to Steve Jones Page 111 C1672/12 Track 6

speak to them because they have their own little Chinese university within the university. Now, quite a lot of those kids, I can assure you, they’re very hard working, very able, they will have been pretty carefully scrutinised before they’re allowed out, okay? I mean they will be along with the Party line, they won’t be dissidents of any kind, an awful lot of them come from quite privileged families in China, whereas we also have, you know, drug taking lefties and kind of rabid Conservatives. But when they get into the lab they’re all talking the same language. And I think that’s the strength of science, it’s the universal language, it’s the only universal language and that’s the interesting thing. You look at scientific papers now, they’ve now got bizarre numbers of names on the authors’ lists, often, and if you look at them – in fact I was doing it this morning at this meeting I was at – you know, they’re O’Reilly, Zebrowski, and then a Pakistani name and a Chinese name. And you think, you know, this is a new society, and I think that’s worth saying, that’s what I was trying to say there.

Thank you. [1:08:52] We don’t know, your interview will be interesting to all sorts of people, and so I hope you don’t think this is a sort of trivial question, but would you be able to say something about the experience of living next to Amy Winehouse?

Well, it was a brief experience. It was an odd experience really, and ended in tragedy. Because it was really only for a year or more that Amy… the house, Camden Square, which is where we live, which is actually rather a grand square, we’ve lived there for a long time – too bloody long, in my view, but that’s another story. We bought a house, Norma and I, we’ve been attached – I often say that the most important year in my life was 1979 because I found my wife and lost my country, this was Mrs Thatcher of course – Norma and I got together in 1979 and we had quite a, she lived in Primrose Hill, I lived in Islington, and we had five or more years quite successfully living apart, but then we decided to set up together. So we sold both my little house in Barnsbury Square, which has since then become grotesquely professional, and her little tiny flat in Primrose Hill, which has since then become cosmically fashionable, and we put our cash together and we bought a house with a sitting tenant in the basement, in Camden Square. And it was run down as hell, the house, and the old boy who was eighty, he lasted until he was ninety-four, he was a very nice guy. So we moved in there and it’s got grander and grander and grander, and the house next door belonged to an elderly lady who was a bit of a recluse, who’d been the headmistress of the Camden School for Girls many years before. The house was tremendously run down and she used to let out rooms. And then she died and a long period went on where rumours abounded that Amy Winehouse was going to come and live in it, and Amy’s dad, Mitch, it turned out these rumours were true and Amy – have you seen the film?

Not yet.

It’s worth seeing, it’s very depressing. It’s Mitch, her dad, he had a mate who was a builder, and this builder came and did the house and really made a complete mess of it. He was a north London, small, Steve Jones Page 112 C1672/12 Track 6

Jewish, jobbing builder, just not really, didn’t have, I don’t know what the word is, the experience or at least didn’t have the machinery to completely strip and gut a large Victorian house which hadn’t been touched for forty or fifty years. So he did this rather odd conversion on it and took a long, long time, but finally Amy did move in. And we never really knew her much at all. We used to see her now and again, we used to see her in the garden and she seemed, you know, our windows overlooked her back garden, and she seemed a perfectly happy person, nice person, sitting in the garden. I never knew, I’ve never had any real interest in modern pop music at all, I find it awful, but we listened to some of her stuff and she had a hell of a good voice, I’ll tell you that. And then I came home one Saturday in June, four years ago was it now, and police tape everywhere, twenty-five policemen, police buses, and that’s when she was found dead. And since then, for a long time the house stayed empty, and then somebody else, Lord – what’s his name? I’ve forgotten his name. You can find him, he got into the House of Lords by giving a million dollars to the Conservative Party, and he uses this place as his London pad. He’s been quite friendly to us, but we don’t know him really. He completely re-did it and now lives in a completely re-re-done house. So the only experience really which we had with Amy was the event itself, which was really quite traumatic for everybody, and then the endless stream of pilgrims, which still come. There’ll be, I would say, in the summer on most days there are at least a hundred people come every day. And her dad wanted to turn it into, first of all, a refuge for alcoholics, which, left- winger though I am [laughs] made us sort of cringe a bit. But Camden wouldn’t have that because it’s… Then he wanted to turn it into offices for her foundation, and Camden wouldn’t have that. And I think that’s true, these are residential. So in the end they sold it. But I mean if you see the film, you can see that she was a seriously ill person, I mean she really was.

Were you asked after she died to sort of comment on your experience of her?

Yes, all the time, and I always said no. I mean, we had a lot of press coming in. We had people in our front garden, which I used to kick out. People ringing up, and I always said the same, you know. Basically, this is a family tragedy, I do not want to comment on it, and that was my line. Thank you. Oh, you wrote a newspaper article before she moved in and used the fact that she was going to move in to talk about soundproofing. Was it ever… did you hear music?

No, she was a perfect, as far as I can see, she was a… she had a sound studio, a big one, in the basement, but of course that was in the basement. And ours is a semi-detached house, so we were detached to her, but I didn’t hear a sound, I never saw any sign of trouble at all. She had two minders, who were very nice, big, burly British West Indian guys, and she used to go, she was quite, you know, she was in your face, I mean there was a little café down the road she used to go to. But the minders used to go with her because she was, she was tiny, just to stop people hassling her, but she was, you know, you would see her out and about, that’s for sure. And I became quite friendly with the minders who were very nice.

[1:14:47] Steve Jones Page 113 C1672/12 Track 6

What are you working on now and what are your plans next?

What am I working on now? Well, I’m struggling with a book, which isn’t going particularly well. It was an… my publishers asked me years ago to write my autobiography, and Richard has written his, which is a most peculiar work. But Richard’s background – Richard Dawkins – background is so different from mine. He comes from a Kenyan rich farming family. He pretended, his book pretends that he came from a poor family because they only had 500 acres in the Cotswolds and not 10,000 acres in the Cotswolds. And then of course he went to some, which was it, school? I can’t remember, some grand school, went to Oxford. And he’s a perfectly nice guy, but it was going to be a three- volume autobiography, he managed to cut it down to two. He’s a very nice guy and I have a lot of time for him. But I thought, you know, my experience had been so different from his that it might make a story. It certainly wouldn’t make a story which is my life and you’re welcome to it, but you know, how did I get interested in biology, and then an awful lot about the snail stuff, some of which really is very interesting. And the snail stuff itself all in the end, and a lot of the other stuff I did, had to do with what’s called thermal ecology, thermal relations in sunshine, and I did quite a lot, though I say it myself, of fairly clever stuff on this kind of thing, which is not in the public mind at all. So I had an idea for a book, which I haven’t put a proposal for, and I’m still struggling with it, which is, the working title, which won’t be the final title, is Here Comes the Sun. And it’s about the way in which our lives and evolution from the very beginning has been driven by the solar cycle. And it’s fairly, I’ve got a chapter I’m working on now, on circadian rhythms, which are much more interesting than I… like, as always happens, these things turn out to be much more interesting than you ever think. You know, if you have sleep loss you are doing something very, very dangerous. Three nights of sleep loss is badly going to damage your health. It’s far more dangerous than anybody thought. Shift work is basically lethal. The average shift worker loses fifteen years of life expectancy. And so there’s a lot of stuff in there. The thing I know a lot about is the energy flow through ecosystems, you know, how much energy does a snail use when it gets a leaf, how much energy does a bird get when it eats a snail. That’s a bit less interesting, I haven’t started working through it. But that’s one I’m working on, but it’s not really coming together because it doesn’t have enough people in it. I like to put, like in the Bible book, or the one I’ve just finished, the French Revolution book, which I think is good, that’s got people in it and it’s got interesting people in it. Now this one doesn’t have many people in it. I’ve got Proust in the – inevitably – in the sleeping book, you know, because of the madeleine and all that stuff. But I don’t quite know how to get people into it and that’s what I’ll need to do. But it’s early days, I’ve only been fiddling with it for two or three months.

So have you abandoned the idea of writing something autobiographical…

No, this would be that.

Okay.

Steve Jones Page 114 C1672/12 Track 6

Because I would put, you know, I mean I’d put my snail stuff in. I mean, I said to my publishers when they asked me to write an autobiography, I said well I really couldn’t write an autobiography, I’ll give you a title, which would be Scrubbed Clean by Chardonnay, which is, you know, I’ve forgotten most of it. And when you’re out in the field there, you got used to the fact, you know, for example, I mean I’ll put it in, when we were working out in the desert in Death Valley, we used to get shot at all the time from, there’s lots of crazy people in California, but out in Death Valley in the early seventies, late sixties, which is when I was doing it, there were a lot of very crazy people living in these little oases, springs, salt springs where they’d maybe have a trailer and a car and several guns and they’d live… they were kind of survivalists, right? And you get too close to them, they’d start shooting. They’d tend to shoot over your head, but I’m not sure that all of them were shooting over your head. And one of the places we visited had Charles Manson in it, and we were shot at, but we didn’t know that it was Charles Manson. So there’s, you know, lots of stories of that kind. I mean I was in prison in Yugoslavia, I was arrested for having maps. I was in Romania when the Russians invaded, thought to invade and they just invaded Czechoslovakia. So there’s lots of these stories, but somehow I find it very difficult to weave those in, really. But I’ll have to try, I haven’t really tried.

[end of track 6 – end of recording]