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were paid $46,000 per person killed. I'll be back with more news at 11

o'clock. Now on BBC News it's time for the latest in our On The Road

With series of programmes. Matthew Stadlen spends the day with Nobel

Prize winning scientist Sir Paul so Paul Nurse shared the Nobel

Prize for his research. He is a geneticist and runs a large in

London. Anything from New York? is also president of the Royal

Society, the UK's National Academy of Science, whose roles include

recognising scientists from home and abroad and champion in science.

How a simple life came about is really quite difficult for me to

imagine. Also, it is seen to happen rapidly, within a few hundred

million years of the birth of the Earth, we seem to have a primitive

life and that Sinn Scottish short time. Outside of work, he can fly

planes and is an amateur meteorologist. I wanted to get a

sense of what life is like in his Good to see you. How lawyer? Very

good. Please call me Paul. Let's go back to how you started in science.

How did you get to grips with it in the first place? I think I first

became interested in science, at least the first time I can remember,

when I was eight or nine years of age. I got interested in the stars

because they are up there every time you walk around at night. I

read about spat at two, which was the second man-made satellite

centre of bevy of Russians. It had a dog in it. A red in the newspaper

that you could see this satellite if you went out at a certain type.

I did. I went into my front garden and saw this start track across the

heavens. It blew my head off. I ran down the street, trying to chase it.

I told everybody what it was and they hadn't read about it and

didn't have any idea what I was talking about. About 1958 is when

this was happening. It made me think about all the other stars and

what they were. Is it fair to say that you were a slow start at

school? I wasn't... I was rather erratic. I wasn't great As at

school or exams. I would find myself going up and down in the

class, some has been near the top, sometimes being near the bottom. I

came from Norfolk, had an accent, my spelling was bad and all of this

was not great. I gradually got better but even so, I had a great

trouble getting into university because at the time you needed a

foreign language at a level which was a free sick -- precursor of

GCSEs and I could never get it. I failed it six times. In the end, I

had to leave school and work as a technician for a year, trying to

get this exam which I never got. Eventually was let into Birmingham

University without their qualification. They did make me sit

French for my first year at university. Before breakfast, were

you just tell me about the quadruple bypass heart surgery you

recently had? This was recent and issued a surprise. In December, a

couple of months ago, I had a medical because I was going to

Antarctica, to Scott Base. I was very excited about that and it

revealed that I had a problem with my heart. A bit surprised because

some reasonably fit. I go jogging 10 or 15 miles a week. I'm not that

fast but at least I can do it. What it revealed was partial blockages

in three or four lotteries around my heart, no symptoms, none

whatsoever. My doctors in Oxford recommended a bypass. It was very

unusual for them to do that with somebody with no symptoms but they

were worried that the blockages could cause a severe heart attack.

I am sure this has saved my life because I suspect in the next year

or two, that is exactly what would have happened. Time for breakfast?

We are surrounded by scientists. are. This is William Harvey who

discovered the circulation of the blood. Descartes, a philosopher

from France. Descartes, as a philosopher, does he count as a

scientist? He was a good thinker. We count him as a scientist. Do you

have routine? No, I think I'm rather antagonistic to routine.

Why? Maybe because when I was young, we had a very strong routine

and I think I've been sort of fighting against it ever since.

That's a bit ridiculous, given my age now, but probably true. You've

got a letter in the Times today. Yeah, I'm pleased they published it.

We put this in yesterday. It is a letter trying to encourage the

government to spend more money on science. Back to my office. How do

you see your role as President of the Royal Society? The Royal

Society is the science academy for the United Kingdom and the

Commonwealth. My role really is to be, I would say, the main advocate

for science in the country. That is how I sum it up. And should your

role in any way be political? Is there a danger that your role could

become political? I think we should keep away from pure politics. What

I think I have to do, and the Royal Society has to do, is to inform the

public about scientific issues that are relevant to politics and

policies. That is of too tight. Policies that are important for

promoting science. Policies which involve science in a big way, for

other activities that we have to do in the country. We have to have a

role on that but I like to keep it separate from the politics as much

as possible. As a scientist, do you enjoy the administrative role?

you know, I don't really, and that sounds a bit odd because I do quite

a lot of administration and I run things. I don't think I'm too bad

at it but what I really enjoy is doing my own research. Surprisingly,

for somebody who does have quite a heavy administrative responsibility,

I have a very active research activity and research lab. That is

what I really enjoy most. If why do you take on the administrative

roles? I think it is mainly because I feel guilty. I feel privileged

that my own research has been supported all my life. I've been

following my own curiosity to try and understand the natural world

all aspects of the natural world better and I think I have to pay

society backing some way. Because I'm not too bad at administration,

that is how I pay it back. Really, I feel it is what I have to do to

pay for what I really enjoy doing. What sort of state you think

Sciences in in this country? It's a loose question but can use a

matter? I think science is fantastically powerful in the

United Kingdom. I don't think this is fully recognised. We are one of

the leading nations in science in the world. Almost certainly second

only to the US and that is only because we are small and don't have

the budget. I think we need a bit more support for science. We are

incredibly cost-effective. We are truly world leaders in science and

have been for a very long time. simple terms, can it be possible

for scientists to be influenced in their scientific findings by money?

Scientists are human beings and they are influenced by other

factors, including money. Some scientists work for commercial

ventures for example. Some academic scientists might want to take a

scientific discovery and commercially exploited. The danger

there is that there may be wanting to get a certain scientific outcome

because it is important for their commercial venture and you have to

be extremely wary of that. You have to be very self-critical to make

sure you are not distorting the science by what you want the

science to actually show. Paul is dropping in on a meeting before

showing me around his apartment at the Royal Society, which comes with

his role as President. There is an irony for a geneticist but actually,

you don't know who your father is. I don't. This was really quite a

shock, a surprise for me. Relatively recently, I'm in my

early 60s, and about five years ago when I applied for a green card in

New York, high for the first time got hold of my life for birth

certificate and it indicated that the person I thought was my sister

was actually my mother and I was brought up by my grandmother and

grandfather, who I thought were my father and mother. My real mother

got pregnant when she was young, 17 or 18, and I have no idea who my

father is. And all of this was kept secret from the and it is a real

irony. Here is a, a geneticist, that is my trade, and I'm

completely confused about my own genetics. What impact have that

haven't you? I have to say, I was unsettled. It was a real shock. But

I was brought up very happily. My grandparents were very supportive

and I had a very happy childhood. Really, all I feel is I'm grateful

to them. They were doing the best for their daughter and for me and

it worked out fine in the end. we talk a little bit about your

interests? He wore a glider. I'm a glider pilot and a fly aeroplanes

as well. I've heard a story or read a story that you landed an

aeroplane on its tummy, on its... That is true. I was having a

problem, flying an aeroplane and the undercarriage jammed up and I

couldn't get it down so it was a bit like one of these sort of

disaster movies was to buy was circling the airfield and I ended

up landing it with the undercarriage up, on its belly. I

had to switch the engine of to do that because the propeller would

have hit the ground otherwise so it was quite a stressful half-an-hour,

I can tell you. Try to tell me what was going through your mind. It was

an extraordinary half-hour because the weather was beautiful, it was

calm up there, I was flying over the Oxfordshire countryside. Were

you on your own? I was on my own. I was talking to the control tower.

It was very calm, very British. I knew it was going to be quite a

dramatic arrival. It was the contrast between the calmness,

floating through the air up there, knowing within five minutes and was

going to be landing without an undercarriage and without a mention.

Did you think you're going to die? I never think that and I didn't

think it on that occasion either. I thought it would get it down. My

main concern was that I didn't cause damage to the aircraft.

flying help you to just switch-off from science? Or, when Europe there,

is that when you're most creative? Totally. I'm not thinking about

science and I'm floating around. I am thinking about other things. It

think it is very good to sometimes switch off completely from what

obsesses me most of the time which is understanding aspects of the

world and the Science and the cells are a worker. I don't think about

them at all. When I come back to that, it is fresh because I have

had a few hours completely away from it. I think that's important.

This is your balcony. It is not bad. It really isn't bad. There is Big

Ben and the Houses of Parliament. It is a fantastic sight, really

good. And you telescope. Yeah, this is on my balcony. It doesn't have

the actual optics on it, that is inside, but I can move it over here.

This will track the movements of the stars and planets and I come

out here in the evening and use it. Another way to switch off? Another

Do you have to pinch yourself and think, I cannot believe this is

happening? All the time. I remember, one I would -- when I decided to do

a PhD, I thought if I was really successful, I might become a Fellow

of the Royal Society. To end up being President of the Royal

Society and to end up having a Nobel prize was way beyond my

I am joined the a with ball at his London lab. Every cell has a

nucleus. Every time one divides into, the nucleus divides into. But

Matty has been doing is plotting when the nuclei divide into two. We

can market the timing of what is happening. What research are you

doing? I am interested in cell division, we are made up of

billions of cells. We all came from a single fertilised cell, which

underwent many divisions. My research is focused on what

controls the Division of a single cell into two, four and eight, and

what controls the shape of cells. They are my two major research

problems. The cells you are researching our yeast cells. They

are, which sound strange. But yeast cells have many properties that are

identical with human cells. They are simpler and cheaper to work

with. The processes that we investigate can understand in yeast

cells will often apply to human cells. That is incredibly powerful,

because we can do the research on a simple system then applied to a

more complicated one, that is our selves. Tell me actually what you

won the Nobel prize for. What I actually won the prize, which I

shared with a colleague here, in Cancer Research UK, Tim Hunt, and

an American scientist, what it was was working out the basic mechanism

by which a cell divides from one into two. What controlled that the

production process. That is important for growth and

development of every living thing. It is also important in cancer,

because it is when the cell division goes out of control that

you get cancer. And has there been progress made from that Noble Prize

winning discovery, and Cancer Research? Or cures for cancer.

I like to explain it, it was not aimed at curing cancer, it was

aimed at providing the right background from which cures could

emerge, in other words, if you did not understand the processes that

we investigated, it is more difficult to think about

controlling cancer. It is more a background work, out of which work

into cancer can emerge. So you are not a medical scientist, but you

science may help medical science. Exactly right. Having won the Nobel

prize, how do people's reactions t you change, as a scientist and the

human being? First the, journalist would not talk to Lee. -- first,

journalists would not talk to me if I did not have and have a price.

People think I have a sensible thing to say about everything,

which is not true. You can get sucked into what are called

Nobelitis where everything you say is like a pronouncement from God.

You have to be careful of avoiding that. You can be taken too

seriously about things. Do you think there will ever be a catch

all cure for cancer? I do not think there will be a single cure for

cancer. Partly because cancer is a catch all for many different

diseases. Probably 200 are 300 different diseases which we list as

cancer. We now know they all have different sorts of causes,

different genetic damage that gives rise to cancer. As a consequence,

there will never be a single cure. What is going to happen is that we

are gradually going to cure bits of cancer and over time, the problem

will get less and less. I believe that. But they don't think there

will ever be a single cure for cancer. Are you able to say in very

broad terms what people are trying to achieve in terms of cures for

cancer? Yes. Cancer cells divide out of control. But they are very

similar to normal cells. What most researchers are looking for his

first small differences between cancer cells and normal cells. And

seeing if they can exploit those differences to try and kill the

cancer cells bus leaving normal cells OK. -- cancer cells. But you

get a lot of damage of normal cells. What we hope for is better

treatments that will be more specific act killing cancer cells.

When you say the negative control... Was at the normal number us?

Down to catch up with nor -- more members of his team. It is just

knew, they have not done any. you don't know? Are you excited?

Yes. Ball is chairing a love meeting. -- Paul. Anything from New

York you wanted to ask? Everything is good so far. No major disaster

here. Very good. I have been checking someone of the candidates.

Spending time with you, there is the hint of Robin Williams about

you, the actor. I have been asked for his signature on more than one

occasion. I must tell you, once, I am an adviser for a research

institute in New York and some years ago, Robin Williams came to

do something in the institute and somebody came up to him and said,

Paul, what are you doing here? He, a film star, had been mistaken for

me. Will you tell me what is going on here? This machine is used for

growing microbes, drawing yeast and bacteria. I, the pizza oven. There

are lots of tubes. -- I call it the pizza oven. Here, I am growing

yeast and the need to shake it so there is enough air to get into it.

I cannot stand there all day, shaking it. So we stick it on this

sticky green stuff and shut the door. It will gradually start

shaking. How important is this in science? -- how important is

scepticism. If you are sceptical, you will test you ideas properly.

The problems occur when you think you know what the answer is before

you start work. Because all you do will find stuff that support your

own ideas. If you are sceptical about what you are doing, about

your own ideas, then what happens is that nature can deliver answers

to you. Because you are open to alternatives. What sort of power

must is there between a discovery in a lab like this, doing

biological science, and his application further down the line

in medicine? It can take a long time, because what we are trying to

do is understand how living organisms including ourselves work.

That is complicated and takes a long time to take a Discovery tour.

Where you understand enough to be able to use it for application.

That can take many years before that can happen. Tricky question.

What in your opinion is the biggest single scientific discovery ever,

in any field of science? That really is tricky. I will have to

give the two answers, one for the biological sciences and one for the

physical sciences. In the biological sciences, I would say it

has to be evolution by natural selection. That is the unifying

idea of biology, which we associate with Charles Darwin. In the

physical sciences, I would say it is to do with understanding the

nature of gravity. From Newton are through to Einstein. And what that

means for all the motion and everything that happens in the

universe. A what do you think is the biggest scientific discovery

yet to come? It is a silly question because we're dealing with unknowns.

That is a really difficult question. Again, I will give you two answers.

I think in biology, it would be neuroscience, what is the nature of

how the brain works and the nature of consciousness? That is what I

would say is the most interesting question. In the physical sciences,

probably the origin of the universe. He do we fully understand the

origins of life? We don't fully understand the origins of life. I

think we are pretty OK once we have simple life and how we go from

simple life to our cells. But how a simple life came about is really

quite difficult for me to imagine. Also, it seemed to happen rather

rapidly. Within a few hundred million years of the birth of the

Earth, we seemed to have primitive life. That is a short time. Do you

see science and religion as necessarily incompatible scheme --?

I do not have religious beliefs. I have some difficulty in pursuing a

scientific approach and also thinking of religion, which seems

to have so many contestable Balts and ideas with the net. --

contestable phos. -- fops. Back to Paul's apartment or an event

organised jointly by the Royal Society and British Academy. It has

struck me that on tiny things, your career and your reputation has been

made. Was there a eureka moment that led to the Nobel Prize gene

there were actually two of them. remember one when it was just in my

mid- twenties, looking at these dividing yeast cells under the

microscope about saw something unusual, cells dividing, and a

header flash of light, a real light bulb going up in my head, that told

me that the cells were defective, in had gene that controlled cell

division. Ted header second one where I didn't experiment with

collaborators in the laboratory which showed at the same genes that

control cell division in this yeast also controlled it in us. So there

was a mechanism that was universal, essentially all living things. That

was a fantastic insight into the unity of life and also, the

importance of using simple systems to study medical problems relevant

to us. Did those moments make you very happy? I go wild. I runabout,

shouted, told everybody. They think I am crazy. I say, this is what it

means, look at this! Ago a bit crazy. Can science be boring gene

it can, most of the time it is boring. Doing routine things are

very carefully and not making much progress. Good evening, everybody.