Professor Andre Geim Beautiful Minds

What does it take to be a scientific pioneer?

To reframe and popularise evolutionary theory?

To reveal a new material and win science's most coveted prize?

Or discover one of palaeontology's elusive missing links?

Is the key to brilliance talent, ego or just plain good luck?

What makes a beautiful scientific mind?

Professor Andre Geim hit the headlines in 2010 with graphene,

a groundbreaking new material.

The discovery of graphene is one of those wonderful,

quite rare occasions when you do something very simple,

almost playful, and yet make a profound discovery.

It's a discovery that won Geim the highest honour in physics

and made him a scientific superstar.

The Nobel Prize is THE biggest thing you could get as a scientist.

It's like having ten Oscars.

But Andre Geim's path to the top has been anything but orthodox.

A Russian emigre, he's a scientific entrepreneur

who's had to constantly reinvent himself.

His originality, his creativity, is extremely important.

His experiments have led him to bizarre discoveries -

from levitating frogs to a tape that sticks to surfaces

like a gecko's foot.

Watch how it goes in.

Playfulness has been central to the way he's challenged the orthodoxy.

Andre exemplifies all that is not logical, dull and boring.

With a little bit more experience, you can drink liquid nitrogen.

'Andre is different.

'He is a sort of entertainer and a showman.'

He likes this. He enjoys these kind of things.

Loves to provoke people,

loves to poke their finger in them and look whether he can stir them up.

Annoying your colleagues is one of the pleasures I will never give up.

He doesn't suffer fools gladly.

I should imagine that if you don't shape up in Andre's lab,

you probably get the boot.

How did developing his unique approach to science

enable Andre Geim to work the system to his advantage

AND make the discovery of a lifetime?

Andre Geim's life's work has been to gain a better understanding

of the materials that make up the world around us.

Ultimately, it's related to the question, what is life?

How life is organised, how we function, how our brain functions.

The study of materials

is part of a discipline known as condensed matter physics.

We know that trees, forest, everything consists of atoms

and molecules, but understanding how individual atoms

and molecules behave, doesn't help you to understand

how this pine cone grows.

That's where condensed matter physics comes into play.

Condensed matter physics is broken up into many areas.

Just one subject can be a scientist's life's work.

But Andre has made switching fields a feature of his career.

One thing that you find in science is that many people

spend their career doing research on what they did

as an undergraduate research project or their PhD and they stick with it.

Andre's dramatically changed fields several times and that is unusual.

Andre Geim's Nobel Prize is partly as a result of his ability

to see the bigger picture, to look at different areas

and see how different phenomena in science are interconnected.

Andre is driven by a relentless pursuit of new ideas.

Studying physics is my daytime job and it's my hobby as well,

and you need to enjoy your hobby.

And so, if you do the same thing all over again during, whatever,

40 years of your active career, you get bored.

I am trying to search for new phenomena

and to search for new phenomena, you have to stray from the trodden path

into some unknown areas. And each time, when there is a possibility

to stray away, I try to do that.

But while straying from the conventional path can be risky,

Andre has repeatedly turned it to his advantage.

To survive and get funding and to get papers in good journals,

we've got to be the first to do the stuff.

So there is this very competitive element.

I would say almost a sporting element about it.

So, there's this combination of creativity

and this feeling of competitive sportiness in science

that's very exciting, I think.

Andre is exceptionally, exceptionally, exceptionally driven

and exceptionally competitive, I would say.

The roots of this ambition were nurtured by an unconventional,

yet idyllic, upbringing.

In 1950s communist Russia, Andre's city-based parents

thought he'd be better off with his grandmother in Sochi

on the shores of the Black Sea.

It was a pretty happy childhood.

I was left by my parents to live with my grandma

for the first seven years of my life,

and every summer I returned for three months to stay with her.

Andre's interest in the scientific method was cultivated by days

spent on the beach, near the weather station

where his grandmother worked.

She was a meteorologist responsible for the weather station

on the Black Sea coast.

The weather station was sort of 10m away from the sea,

because she needed to take twice a day how high the waves were

and the temperature of the sea.

These recordings went somewhere to the centre of the city or so on.

So that's... That's a pretty nice time. I'm missing it very much.

Andre had excelled in physics at school,

so it was a natural choice for a degree.

HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

But getting into a Moscow university would prove a test of character.

Initially, he decided not to aim for the very top.

I was from a rather provincial city which was what,

maybe 1,000 miles away from Moscow, so confidence wasn't there.

So, I went first to the second-tier,

but still a very good university in Moscow.

LECTURER SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

I took the exams and I failed. Failed miserably.

Faced with the unappealing alternative

of conscription into the Red Army,

Andre went back to his parents for a year of intensive study.

But when he sat his retakes, he got a shock.

Problems were difficult, OK? Surprisingly difficult, yeah.

So I got a pretty low mark, not a fail, but a low mark

and I realised that this was not enough

to pass through the exams and get accepted to the university.

Andre was uneasy,

and after the exams, his fears were confirmed.

I remember I came from this exam back to the hostel

and there were people whom I explained to previously

how to solve those problems for them

and they got highest marks and I got very low marks.

He could think of only one explanation.

Every Russian passport stated its owner's ethnicity.

Andre was of German descent.

In this Cold War era, he was viewed with suspicion.

For the state of the Soviet Union, I was a German

and I was a potential immigrant and a threat to the system.

It was a pretty unpleasant experience to learn this policy

for the first time in your life

as a sort of idealistic person who comes to a university

and thinks that he's equal to everyone else,

and then you find out that some animals are less equal than others,

only because they have this different ethnicity.

Convinced of his ability, Andre took an unusual step.

He applied to Phystech,

the top physics and maths institution in Russia.

I think that Phystech was a sort of elite institution

because of Phystech's system.

If you are lower in standards, you just simply don't get there.

You have to work hard to reach the level to get through the entry exam

and then to survive in Phystech.

The gamble paid off.

Phystech were more interested in Andre's talent than his ethnicity.

He was in.

Now he had to survive.

Our group was around 100 people which entered to deal with physics.

And within this group of 100 there were winners

of international Olympiads in maths and physics and so on.

So essentially, creme de la creme of the brightest kids.

We all incredibly suffered during this first half a year

when we had to be brought up to the level of those kids

with a strong background.

Being amongst an elite

ignited Andre's naturally competitive streak.

After half a year, there was half-year exams.

Five or six of those.

I managed to get Excellent,

the highest mark you can get in all of them.

And then it was, "I can do it."

At Moscow's state science park of Chernogolovka,

Andre embarked on a PhD into an obscure area of metals research.

But he quickly realised there was little here he could make his own.

The PhD subject was probably one of the most boring subjects

one can invent, OK?

It was really a ridiculous exercise

trying to dig very deep into the area.

It was not interesting to anyone,

including some people like myself who were involved in the subject.

But there was an upside - he learned skills that would prove invaluable.

His supervisor, Victor Petrashov, noticed Andre's talent in the lab.

He was an extremely quick learner.

He learned how to make samples,

how to grow crystals, how to mount them in a cryostat, everything.

So, at the end of day, he got all the...

He got all the skills to do professional research.

While doing this exercise, I learned how to do all sorts of things -

machining, microscopes, tiny, nice devices and so on,

and this skill I picked up from Victor, who is one of the,

probably, most green fingered experimentalists I have ever known.

Andre had met his wife,

fellow physicist Irina Grigorieva, at university.

She recalls how he already stood out from the crowd.

I remember people were saying then, and Victor Petrashov also said,

that Andre has this very rare combination of very green fingers,

so he can really do things with his hands, but at the same time,

has a very, very good understanding of what he is doing

and a very broad overview of things.

So, it...

Yeah, people said already then that he was quite exceptional, yes.

Communist Russia regarded science as a vital asset.

But at a time of deep economic hardship,

research institutions were chronically under-funded.

It's very hard to explain how bad it was,

because that's the only... Wax and shoestring is the only...

is the only description I can think of for this one.

You need...

something really minor, like a different type of screw,

you won't find it, you need to make it yourself.

You need a different type of glue, or any glue,

it's a search which would last for a year or something like that.

You need a piece of rubber, it's again...it's a whole problem.

We had to do everything ourselves,

starting from tiny soldering iron to some electronics.

And it took time.

And that was actually a huge problem.

This is why ratio of scientists and supporting staff

in Chernogolovka was one to five.

So five people worked for one scientist

to provide everything for his research.

And this actually worked but some people were frustrated.

Although Andre continued working in Chernogolovka after his PhD,

staying in the Soviet Union was going to hold him back.

But in the late 1980s, the Russian political landscape was changing.

Economic and social reforms under Gorbachev

gave many Russians new freedoms.

More Russian scientists were able to travel on an exchange programme

with the Royal Society.

And in 1990, Andre was granted a six-month visiting fellowship

to Nottingham University.

The young Russian quickly made an impression.

Yes, I remember very well when Andre first came to us

on his Royal Society visiting fellowship.

I mean, he's physically a large presence

and he's got a very loud voice

and he was a very memorable person when he first hit the labs.

I've got a very vivid recollection of that in the mid '90s, yes.

And Nottingham made an impression on Andre too.

Its state-of-the-art facilities for researching semiconductors -

devices that lie at the heart of modern electronics -

were in stark contrast to Russia's underfunded labs.

It would prove a turning point.

I always try to be in the top tier,

but without really trying to excel.

How can you excel when you get such limited resources

like wax and a shoestring?

And then you go to Nottingham,

then you immediately find out that you can compete

and you can compete at international level.

So it changed not only scientific possibilities,

it changed sort of my whole perspective

on what I could do with my life,

I found out that, wow, I can compete.

I can do something more what I'm trained to do.

I can...yeah, I can realise myself.

And that was the moment

when I sort of switched from being in the top tier

trying to really doing my hardest and trying to doing my best,

trying to excel.

Despite only having a background understanding of semiconductors,

Andre threw himself into lab work.

It was pretty clear that when Andre came to us he was something special.

It was obvious from the very beginning,

he was a really committed scientist

who worked very hard, with a very good knowledge of the field.

It was remarkable how quickly he moved from his subject

that he did in Chernogolovka into semiconductor physics

and become familiar with it very quickly.

Andre brought his own unique perspective to the research.

The main thing was that he was able to take some of our ideas

and run with them himself.

So I was always very interested at that time,

and still am, on resonant tunnelling and Andre did some very nice

experiments at lower temperatures than we'd bothered to do.

So he was always able to find, to turn up some new thing

and delve deep into it.

And he managed to publish two papers in six months.

For anyone, OK, especially as a post doctoral researcher

to publish two papers in a journal within such a short spell of time,

it was...it's an exception.

It was becoming clear that he had to find a way of staying in the west.

I think by the end of the period, I realised that there was no way back.

So by the end of six months I started looking

for post doctoral positions around.

So, for me, I knew that if I like to work and enjoy work,

I have to find a place where it's possible to work.

And Russia was not an option at that time.

At the age of 36, Andre applied for his first permanent position

in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

His unconventional approach divided the panel that interviewed him.

I remember quite well.

It was sort of a controversial nomination I would say

because, well Andre is not a standard character,

so he definitely was different from anybody else.

I sort of liked him and found him interesting

and funny and intelligent,

but there were also some other people who were very much in doubt

that he was overdoing it

and overselling himself, and some people shared my belief,

so I was sort of torn between two opinions, either this is a genius

or the others thought this may be the biggest miss in your life.

And eventually I called other people to get the same advice

and I roughly got the same contradictory advice

and in the end said, "Well, let's just give it a try."

Once installed, Andre had to adapt to the Dutch way of life

and the constraints of the job.

In some sense, when you are a post doc you are sort of like a buccaneer

which goes for treasure hunts

and you don't care about the casualties around you.

Whereas, when you go in a permanent position,

you have a bit different responsibility

so you have to get used to that.

He was expected to sort of fit in the existing structure

and start contributing

and I don't think that's what he wanted to do.

What the group was doing, he wasn't interested in that.

He didn't think it was worth his effort.

He did not want to work on that,

he wanted to work on something else and that wasn't possible.

To make his mark, Andre needed to find his own area of research.

The lab wasn't equipped to study any of his previous specialisms.

But it did focus on the study of materials in magnetic fields

and Andre was able to create his own research niche,

investigating the behaviour of superconductors.

Not a huge boom or big bang,

it was a relatively minor niche area but it was new.

It is attributed to myself.

Repeatedly moving departments was beginning to pay off.

Each time you move from one country to another country,

from one university to another university,

from one city to another city, you are forced by your life to adjust,

to adjust to different environment,

whether it's social or academic environment.

And especially initially, you are forced to change your direction.

You are forced to learn a new subject,

you are forced to get some additional piece of knowledge

and after a few times, it becomes sort of like riding a bike.

And changing direction brought Andre his first taste of the limelight.

He started to look for more areas he could investigate,

and came across the idea of magnetic water -

the claim that a magnet can change the interaction

of water and minerals, helping to prevent limescale.

Allegedly, when you put a magnet on top of your tap with normal water,

at least some people claim that there is no more scale in your kettle.

Andre thought that if this effect really existed,

the place to test it would be in the lab's powerful high field magnet,

so he did something radical.

I just pour water inside the magnet,

it's apparently not a very scientific experiment to do,

it's pretty expensive equipment, and you won't find many scientists

who will pour water inside their expensive equipment,

and astonishingly, instead of water ending up on the floor,

we found out initially small droplets of water levitating.

To his surprise,

the water didn't fall through the hollow centre of the magnet.

Then starting putting whatever, from beer to wine to cheese

to sweets to bread to tomatoes to strawberries inside magnetic field.

They came home saying, "Everything is flying! Everything is flying!

"Bread is flying! Cheese is flying! Tomatoes are flying!"

So it took me some time to understand

what they were actually doing. But they started with water,

and then they found that everything was levitating.

Andre recognised that this was diamagnetism.

It's well known that everything in life is a tiny bit magnetic.

But this phenomenon can only be seen

when an object is placed close to a magnetic field.

Until Andre put water in the high field magnet,

few people believed diamagnetism

could possibly be strong enough to levitate an object.

People, even my peers,

at some conferences where I presented this result,

couldn't believe that.

People thought, I think many of them thought it was a hoax

and try to find out that it's manipulation of images and so on.

Next, to make his point, Andre did something really bizarre.

It was probably first time when I realise

that it's important to add to scientific research

a sort of wow factor.

So you think it should be something alive,

and frog was the smallest thing we could find to fit inside the magnet.

My face couldn't fit inside the magnet by any means,

it was something like that, a hole, and yeah, the frog was an image

which catched the imagination. We tried many, many different things,

spiders, grasshoppers, even hamsters,

but the frog was both small enough and alive enough

to appeal to general public, especially school children.

That was very exciting time. It was very exciting.

Of course, all the headlines and the papers,

he liked that, I think he liked the effect of it, it was nice,

but I think he liked that it was possible to make science

so beautiful and interesting to so many people. I think he liked that.

Watch how it goes in.

Andre had hit on a winning formula.

Again inside the magnet.

Exploring ideas away from his core expertise could lead to

attention-grabbing discoveries.

Andre is different

because he's a real, actual scientist of the 21st century,

because, er, now we have to

have more publicity to popularise science

and say, in 19th century or 20th century,

you could be a sort of monk, you could work with your science

and you wouldn't care what other people think about it.

Yeah. So, liquid nitrogen...

So, without glass...

Inside, no problem.

APPLAUSE

But Andre is different.

He is sort of entertainer

and showman - he likes this, he enjoys this kind of things.

He enjoys doing things for public, and it's great

and example is his levitation of frogs.

The Physics Prize...

Along with a colleague, Andre won an Ig Nobel.

The Ig Nobel Physics Prize is awarded this year to Andre Geim

of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands...

A light-hearted award given each year

for unusual achievements in scientific research.

..for using magnets to levitate a frog.

After accepting it, I think we both were proud

that we had enough sense of humour

and whatever it's called,

the sense of self-deprecation, to accept this prize.

Many of Andre's colleagues believed that no serious scientist

should accept an Ig Nobel.

I like to have fun in my life, OK,

so sometimes I say there are few pleasures in our life,

and three of them we know - good food, wine, and women or men,

depending on your position in this world.

But people forget about the fourth pleasure,

it is pissing off your colleagues,

and I had a lot of this due to Ig Nobel prize.

Annoying your colleagues is one of the pleasures I would never give up.

However irritating he might have been,

Andre was now juggling several job offers.

After six years in Holland, I already sort of acquired a reputation

and had been offered several positions around the world,

and Manchester...

came as one of many.

But it was special that...

..people offered this position together with Irina.

A job at Manchester University

didn't just mean Andre could work with his physicist wife Irina.

It offered him the scientific freedom to start his own lab

and pursue the subjects he wanted.

But it was a gamble, too.

Every time you move from one place to another, you take a huge risk

because OK, sometimes you don't get what you hoped

or sometimes you get more than you bargained for,

like I got in Nijmegen - in both senses, OK.

But it depends on your confidence.

I was confident enough that

eventually I'll manage to build something.

The strategy paid off sooner than he thought.

Andre set up a system that became known as

the Friday Night experiments.

A deceptively casual-sounding arrangement

to encourage his team to play with ideas.

Essentially, it's never one night. There is a long process

trying to accumulate knowledge to lead to experiment,

you just don't press a random button, you just try to see

what can be done. Even pouring water inside a magnet,

it takes time to think that it's worth doing and why doing this.

You need to acquire knowledge,

and then settle down with the experiment you want to do.

But, er, but essentially,

it's very simple, quick experiments where you try to do something

and when it works, you can proceed,

when it doesn't work, you just drop it.

It wasn't long before one of these experiments hit the headlines.

It's the stuff of superheroes -

walking upside down on ceilings and scaling skyscrapers.

Well, move over, Spider-Man,

because scientists in Manchester have developed a sticky tape

so strong, it could enable man to do just that.

Andre had been inspired by an article

about the incredible climbing ability of geckos.

The tiny hairs that cover geckos' toes attach to nearly any surface

through a weak electromagnetic bond.

The force of this bond is minute,

but a million hairs working together create a very sticky foot.

Andre wondered if he could design a material

that would replicate this effect.

The tape we produced, it was a small piece,

square by square centimetre, it never worked as good as a real gecko,

it got spoiled after a couple of attachments

and we had to use very tiny pieces of the square centimetre

to repeat this experiment many times,

but it was a proof of concept that we humans, with our existing facilities,

are at the edge of reproducing, mimicking nature.

These scientists have proved the technology works -

the next stage will be to see if this material can be made

more durable and if it can be mass-produced.

If they solve that problem, then people really will be able

to walk up walls and along ceilings.

Andre's playful new system was proving fruitful.

If I looked back at the number of things I tried,

at least I tried more than a single step, but three, four steps,

it's a remarkable success rate, I think it's more than 10% for sure.

Which actually tells everyone a very important story.

When you are along this rail track

and moving in the same directions, there is a very little chance

to find something new, but when you scout into different areas

your chances of success grow remarkably quickly.

Being unafraid to explore new ideas

lies at the heart of Andre's method.

But there's nothing random

about his knack of selecting those with real potential.

He considers thousands of ideas and possibilities,

and always refers them,

"Is this really new? Is this really different?"

And he's deliberately involved with finding it,

and then jumps upon the one which has a high potential

and that, I think, is not a general attitude of most researchers,

I think that is sort of special.

I think Andre, that's one of his really great strengths,

that he can see those things that are promising,

and that they would create new systems

or would allow us to do something new.

And again, I think it is based on

his exceptionally good understanding of science and broad view of it.

Crucial to the success of the Friday night experiments

is a willingness to abandon ideas when they're not working.

This is actually very difficult decision, to cut losses in science,

because you are tempted to continue one metre deeper,

one metre deeper, and deeper and deeper,

maybe to the centre of the earth, sometimes people do.

It's a practice that close colleague Kostya Novoselov has also adopted.

The first thing which I learned from him

that you need to be smart

and courageous enough to say "OK, I was unsuccessful,

"my model didn't work, this didn't work.

"We should stop, and there are so may other ideas out there

"that we can always find something new."

You don't need to spend the rest of your life

trying to push in this direction.

It was a Friday night experiment that kick-started

Andre's greatest breakthrough.

As materials become thinner, their properties change.

Andre thought it would be interesting to test

thin pieces of the carbon material, graphite.

I was looking for new areas to expand

and looking for something new and interesting,

and one of the many, many, I would say, ideas

which was on the back of my mind,

was trying to look for thin films of graphite.

After weeks of trying to polish a sample down to thin pieces,

one of the team had an idea.

Suddenly, a mature researcher who was working next to us

in the same in the same lab on completely different project,

he said, "Why do you use polish?

"Why you just don't use Scotch tape to peel thin layers?"

Using tape to clean the surface of a graphite sample

is a technique used in labs all over the world.

Because the tape is usually thrown away,

no one had looked twice at the layer of peel that was left behind.

You see, it's on the surface, nothing spectacular,

everyone knows that it's sort of material which splits.

Then you put it together and make a fresh cut,

essentially it gets twice thinner.

So you make another cut, and so on.

And then you ask yourself a very simple question -

how thin you can make graphite

by repeating this twice, twice,

twice and so on, what the thinnest material can be?

Under the microscope,

the thinnest graphite flakes were nearly transparent -

just a few nanometres thick.

No one had ever managed to make graphite this thin.

This was an experiment with real potential.

I realised immediately that we can really make thin pieces of graphite

and it would be a new experimental system.

Whatever it will bring us, I didn't know, I didn't want to know,

I just knew it's a new kind of experimental system worth studying.

Very thin layers of materials are practically impossible to make,

because as a system tries to minimise its surface energy,

it pools into tiny islands.

But for the first time here, they had a very thin,

continuous layer of graphite that was stable.

Graphene.

Graphene is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms

arranged in a perfect hexagonal lattice.

It's so thin, it's the very first two-dimensional material.

Once the team had isolated graphene,

the next step was to see how it conducted electricity.

When they applied an electric field to it,

Andre and his colleagues were stunned to see

significant changes in its properties.

Essentially we could change conductivity

through this bit of graphite, and for me it was eureka moment,

because I knew how much and how long people during the last 100 years,

essentially tried to make this so-called "metallic transistor,"

and then suddenly, within couple of hours, after using Scotch tape,

we managed to do this better than anyone before.

And I thought, "Wow!"

As technology becomes more demanding,

scientists have been searching for a more efficient material

than the semiconductor silicon.

Metals were once thought to be ideal candidates,

but their electrical properties proved hard to control.

Now it seemed they had found the very first metal-like material

that could be manipulated using an electric field.

To be certain, the team repeated the experiment more than 50 times -

and got the same results.

They had uncovered the most exciting material in physics in years.

The first finding that lead to absolutely great excitement

was that it was possible to make this very, very thin film

and it was conducting.

It was possible to measure, actually, its properties

so it conducted current, and it conducted current very well.

It was stable, nothing happened to it,

and you could tune its properties, you could tune its conductivity.

I think that's when the excitement went through the roof.

Andre and his team submitted a paper on their results to Nature,

one of the world's most prestigious science publications.

But it was rejected. Twice.

One of the referees literally wrote, "This paper does not offer

"much new and exciting things. Why should we publish it?

"It can be published in a secondary, third year journal," so that was it.

Andre refused to give up.

The team rewrote the paper

and got it accepted by Nature's main rival - Science.

Its publication was just the beginning.

The paper inspired scientists everywhere to investigate

graphene's properties further.

In 2010 alone, more than 5,000 papers were published worldwide,

with Andre Geim's lab in Manchester at the forefront.

The new research revealed just how extraordinary graphene really is.

Its massless electrons never stop,

moving at a 100,000 kilometres per second.

They behave more like subatomic particles,

usually found in space or a nuclear explosion.

Before now, scientists needed something like

a Large Hadron Collider to study these exotic physics.

It is indeed like a philosopher's stone, or it almost delivers magic.

It is truly amazing.

It's so beautiful, such a beautiful system,

the way in which the electrons move.

And all in just this one system.

Graphene is a wonder-material.

This is graphene. Let's call him Mr G.

It has so many superlatives to its name.

What makes Mr G a really super material

is the combination of his unique properties.

G is the first 2D crystal ever known to us, the thinnest object

ever obtained and also the lightest one.

G is the world's strongest material, harder than diamond

and about 300 times stronger than steel.

G conducts electricity much better than copper.

G is a transparent material.

G is bendable and can take any form you want.

But it's not just physicists that are excited by graphene.

Its unique combination of properties have also sparked a race

to exploit its commercial potential.

Such an incredibly thin, yet conductive, material

could have dozens of functions -

like this flexible touch screen.

A prototype has already been created.

There's a lot of hype at the moment

and some of those speculations will never work out,

but there are so many possibilities. I would be amazed,

purely by statistical chances, if this material wouldn't work out

in a few areas where it would not disrupt the technologies

that currently exist and wouldn't offer us something new,

even as consumers.

Andre and his colleague Kostya had revealed a new material

that not only promised to revolutionise the study of physics,

but also the world of electronics.

I think what's lovely about graphene is that it's so simple.

You know, you can explain it in one or two sentences -

it's a single layer of carbon atoms all held together in this mesh

that you can roll up, fold up and do all sorts of amazing things with.

You don't need to understand quantum physics or Einstein's relativity

to be able to appreciate what a potentially wonder material

graphene could be.

And Andre's wonder material seems to precisely fit

his unorthodox approach.

I think something in the discovery of graphene is also related

to being provocative, just to show to anybody else that what you say

cannot be, "Yes, it can be, ha-ha."

That's sort of characterises Andre a bit.

So it's the perfect discovery for him?

Yes, fits the person perfectly...for sure.

The discovery of graphene is one of those wonderful,

quite rare occasions when you do something very simple,

almost playful, almost trivially fun and yet make a profound discovery.

Andre Geim won global recognition for his achievement

and it wasn't long before the ultimate accolade.

There was a telephone call,

and a lady told me that "It's a very important call,

"please don't hang up."

And so I said,

"OK, are you going to tell me that I've won the Nobel Prize?"

The 2010 Nobel Prize in physics jointly to Professor Andre Geim

and Professor Konstantin Novoselov.

Apparently it was not in the script.

It really came as a complete surprise for me.

You could see it from my pictures.

I was absolutely unprepared, unshaved and undressed that day.

I was sitting on Skype to people in Holland,

discussing some recent experiments

when a phone call came from somebody with a thick Swedish accent.

Immediately, he said, "You have 45 minutes of normal life left,

"just spend it wisely."

I now ask you to step forward to receive your Nobel Prizes

from the hands of His Majesty The King.

The Nobel prize is THE biggest thing you could get as a scientist.

It's like having ten Oscars, every Oscar you could ever win.

And of course, there's only one every year for the whole world

in each subject so, yeah, it is absolutely the biggest thing.

APPLAUSE

I treasure other prizes as well, but within a few months,

you realise that the Nobel Prize, indeed, is very special.

For whatever reason it is, we don't know the reason how it's organised.

It's probably the same like in the Olympic Games.

There are many people who say,

"It's important to participate, not to win."

We know the winners.

We do not treasure as much bronze and silver medals.

Gold medal is something special, so in a sense, in science,

it's probably ten times more important

than an Olympic Gold medal.

I think it changes your life, I think you suddenly become

a media star, you've got lots of new pressures on you.

People want a bit of the action.

I think for weeks and weeks afterwards it's very demanding

and you have to go to this ceremony in Stockholm

and experience all this.

Then come back to your lab and try getting back to work.

MUSIC: "Swedish National Anthem"

If you don't think that you are sort of competitive enough,

you're probably not a good fit to be in the top tier of science

and you would never win the Nobel Prize.

So when you've got one,

it's sort of a stamp that you are one of the fittest and then

some people with a certain predisposition start thinking,

"I'm a genius," or something like that, and other people think,

"I have to prove that I'm worthy of this Nobel Prize,"

and they start working like mad and go mad eventually.

I think it takes strong legs to carry the burden

of a Nobel Prize.

Everything you say starts having a relevance

which is far beyond what you wanted.

That may make you crazy, that may make you overestimate yourself.

APPLAUSE

But despite the Nobel circus,

Andre's eye is still firmly on research.

It was a very short period,

it's only one year gone since the Nobel Prize

and it makes me wonder how disruptive the Nobel Prize

was for research. Honestly speaking,

I think 3 months out of this 12 months went into something else

rather than research, but still there were nine months

of very intensive research.

We're still looking for this high temperature, room temperature

and above super conductivity.

It will probably remain for the rest of my life as a dream to fulfil.

Andre will never rest on his laurels, never.

The pace of his work is exactly the same as it was before.

Another Nature physics paper out on Sunday,

I know they're working on another big paper.

I can't imagine he'll ever slow down.

Initially forced by circumstance,

Professor Andre Geim has developed a style of research that allows him

to take risks and deliberately explore territory

away from the mainstream.

His playful methods and instinctive ability to spot promising terrain

are backed up by clear thinking.

Andre has this very rare ability to see the big picture,

but at the same time, seeing all the small details.

To use a metaphor, I think he can see the wood,

the trees and the grass all at the same time.

That I think is very typical of Andre. He finds something new,

he doesn't stick to that thing,

he situates it in its environment, in its history, in its content.

He's also very fair.

Everybody who did something in that direction earlier is recognised,

he doesn't try to make himself better by ignoring his predecessors,

and that makes that when the thing catches attention

it immediately gets a momentum which picks up

because the whole field is covered

and that, I do think, is sort of peculiar for Andre.

His method has borne extraordinary results.

Geim can lay claim to seeding three new areas of research

levitation, gecko tape and graphene.

And he'd like more scientists to follow his lead.

Everyone can do it.

The way we are doing things is just too comfortable

and we need to put ourselves out of the comfort zone

and try to do something

which we wouldn't think about doing a day before.

I'm doing this because I'm trying to get new experiences.

Jumping to another subject is another way of getting experiences.

I haven't lost this childish attitude,

trying to get as much as possible out of the world

in terms of impressions and experiences.

This is it. I'm not thinking about any legacy or anything like that.

My brain is not dead enough for this.

# I planned each charted course

# Each careful step along the byway

# And more, much more than this

# I did it my way. #

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