Hello, I'm Kristy Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For tonight's reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1992, and the presenter... With Sue Lawley. Castaway this week is a scientist. The fact that his father was a chemist and his mother a bacteriologist doesn't mean, he says, that a talent for science was in his genes. More likely he was inspired by a good school teacher. Support better than most because genetics is his field. He's made a lifelong study of the evolution of the snail, the reproduction of the fruit fly and the sex life of the slug.

Eminent in his field now as head of genetics at University College London, he was invited a few months ago to give the Wreath lectures, during which he confounded all theories of racial purity, told us most of the world's most important theories. Of the world was descended from ten Africans and warned that like mankind today, the dinosaur once believed himself to dominate the world. He is Dr Steve Jones. Let's deal with your First Steve, surely you inherited an aptitude for science from your parents, even if they both proved themselves to be talented at the thing. I suppose I did, but arguably I also inherited an aptitude for playing the piano, but I never learned to play the piano. So I think a great deal depends on one's environment as much as one's genes. Think it's usually impossible to separate the two effects. But you don't deny, do you, that we inherit physical characteristics like wide hips or big noses or red hair?

I think I'll give you red hair. What, we don't inherit the others? The thing you don't often hear scientists say in public, although we say it in private all the time, is I've got no idea. And the answer is to those particular questions, I don't think anybody knows. About things like intelligence. I mean, on the whole, two intelligent people tend to produce a fairly intelligent child or people perhaps... Who can write, their children tend to be able to write. People who can play the piano, their children tend to be musical. It's again true, I mean if you believe that these things evolve, it's hard to know for example how piano playing evolved, and of course what's also true of two people who is that they come from, they live in an environment, they have a household with lots of books in it, they send their children to good schools and they care about their children's upbringing. I really would say it's extremely difficult. In fact, I'd go further and say it's probably impossible. To disentangle the effects of nature from nurture in characteristics like that. So it's your environment that creates you, not what you inherit from your parents? It's both.

It's very unromantic, that. Sound but true. Most science is unromantic. Does love of music run in your family? I wouldn't say particularly. My brother is extremely fond of heavy metal music, which I'm not. So what that tells us about genetics, I don't know. Have you chosen to take to your desert island? Well, I thought if I was doomed to spend the rest of my life on the desert island, I'd better take something that reminded me of my main interest in life, which is about, I'm sad to say, genetics and evolution. So most of the things I'm taking have that kind of theme behind them, some of them perhaps more obviously than others. I'd like to start with is actually has in its title the word which is anathema to all biologists, which is of the creation It's the creation by Haydn, but I like to think We're talking about the creation of the universe here, and I think we'd probably hear the Big Bang.

♪ And ♪ ♪ God saw the light, that it was good ♪ ♪ And God divided the light from the darkness ♪ ♪ From the darkness ♪ at one point to stick out our tongues and see if we could roll it into a tube which I've But I can do it? Can you do it? I can't do it. OK, so what does that prove about us two? Well, it tells us we're different in that particular attribute.

The listeners can't tell whether we're doing it or not, so there's no way of proving this. They have to believe it. But there's also the business of clasping your hands, you said, and which thumb you put over which one as you clasp your hands. Sure. I mean, if people... what these are, these are two perhaps rather silly examples, but surprising examples possibly. Of the way in which any two randomly chosen people differ from each other in literally millions of inherited attributes. The tongue rolling is one. If you clasp your hands together, about half the population puts the left thumb on top of the right, and the other half, roughly, puts the right thumb. Top of the left. If you try it the other way round, it feels very uncomfortable. Does that mean that the people who do it the same way have the same gene? many of these continuous characters as we call them, the genetics isn't absolutely straight. Forward but it certainly has some inherited component. It certainly runs in families, it reflects some hidden genetic diversity. But we all have, each of us, we are unique, we all have a unique genetic plan, don't we? With the exception of

the famous identical twins who we have to keep apologizing about. I oughtn't to actually, as my mother's one of an pair of identical twins. Not only do we all, the people living in the world today, have unique genetic attributes unlike anybody else, but where each one of us uniquely... Different from anybody who ever has lived or ever will live, which is quite an astonishing So every time new life is created it's like a pack of cards that's been reshuffled and has come out in a different pattern. It's like a pack of cards which has got three thousand million cards in it, which is a big pack of cards. Have been used before somewhere along the lines, just the pattern is different each time. Roughly speaking, yes, of course life is never pure and rarely simple. What happens to some extent is unlike a pack of cards, to pursue this rather tortured analogy. ... generation, some of the numbers on some of the cards change by mutation. And it's these mutations, these...

Accidents which are the raw material of evolution. Evolution picks them up and acts on them and leads to the change which we've seen from our fossil But how do you know, because you said this in your Wreath lecture, how do you know that we are all born of a handful of people from Africa? That seems to be the most likely pattern. There are various bits of evidence which suggest that's true. The strongest evidence that we all came from Africa, I think, has to be in fossils, because the fossils are the absolute proof that there were humans living there before they were anywhere else. But the geography is about maps, the fossil record is basically about gaps, there aren't many fossils. So we can build on the dead fossils with ourselves as the fossil genes which have descended from our predecessors. We can look... We can make a family tree of who's related to whom, and when you draw those lines of descent they all seem to point back to Africa.

And also, more important perhaps, if you look at the amount of genetic variation that there is among the peoples of the world, Most variable by far are the Africans, which suggests that perhaps they were the ancestors and we're just a small sample of our African great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers. Just to simplify that a bit because I'm not entirely sure I'm with you, we are more similar to Africans, the rest of the world is more similar to Africans than Africans are to each other. Within Africa, different African peoples are as different one from the other. As shall we say, the population of Alaska is from the population of South America, suggesting Within Africa, as we also know from fossils, people have been sitting there and evolving and accumulating genetic diversity for far longer than they have been in the rest of the world. Record number two. Well, record number two is kind of, oddly enough, a kind of African record, and maybe I'll explain why after it's played. It's a record, I think, all of the time.

Let's know and love Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by The Beatles. ♪ A girl with colitis go by ♪ ♪ Celebrate flowers of yellow and green ♪ ♪ Towering over your head ♪ ♪ Look aboard the girl with the sun in her eyes ♪ ♪ And she's gone ♪ *music* ...and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Now, why is that an African song? Well, most people... Perhaps you've heard of perhaps the most famous human fossil of all, who's Lucy. And Lucy is an Australopithecine fossil from Ethiopia. And it's an almost complete skeleton of a female child, very important in the theory of human evolution.

It's called Lucy because Don Johansson, who connected the fossil in the early 1970s, was playing just that record on his Sonny Walkman while he was digging. Good a reason as only. Let's go back to our all being descended from Africa. How many Gs? Are involved in the difference in skin colour between the darkest black and the whitest white. Again I can't be completely confident of the Because the genetics, surprisingly enough, I've never managed to find a really good genetical study of that, but a good guess... Would be less than 10, not very many. So any black person could have white ancestors and vice versa? In principle, yes. I mean that's of course less likely to be true within Africa, but certainly without Africa, outside Africa, there's good evidence that that's true. And if you look at black Americans, you find that on the average, about a third of their genes come from white ancestors.

Probably early in the days of slavery. So that's the sort of thing which genetics can tell you, which perhaps history won't. Makes a nonsense of racism of any form. Well, I would certainly agree with you very strongly. I would, however, go one step further and say that the issue... Of racism to me, and I've always believed this, before I became a geneticist even, has nothing to do with biology. I mean, that's a political and social issue. And to me the question of how genetically similar or different we are from each other is irrelevant to the question of racism. How much do you feel the weight of the disreputable past... Of your science of genetics, the Hitlerian past of it. Do you feel, does that worry you? It does in some senses. What I find a bit refreshing is the blissful ignorance of all genetics undergraduates about the fact that genetics does have a past. I think it's finally lived through its past.

A long time and it was a very murky past indeed. As is often the case in science, people are most confident about what they say when they know least. There's been no exception to that. When we look back at what the early human geneticists said in the 1920s, when we were basically absolutely ignorant, we were in the pre-Galileo phase of human genetics. Who were professionals in that instance, were making shocking statements about the undesirability of different races marrying, the necessity to sterilise criminals and the like, which Regard as nonsensical and arrogant. And I think with knowledge has come humility, and I hope with more knowledge will come yet more. But the founder of the laboratory where you work at University College was in fact part of that murky past, wasn't he, Sir Francis Galton? Well, I'm ashamed to say that I walk past his statue every day and I avert my eyes several times a day from it. He was... Founder of it. He, er... Didn't he try to make a beauty map of England? That was... that was one of his many eccentric things. He founded human genetic...

He wrote a book called Hereditary Genius where he tried to establish whether families of which he defined in a slightly odd way, whether individuals in those families tended to be more likely to be geniuses than individuals in other families, and the answer was, not surprisingly, yes. That's what he's... Who's remembered for. He wrote some very other, some other very odd scientific papers. The beauty map is a strange one. He went around Britain with a little brass counting device which we've still got, which he clicked off the score of the... Beauty of females and score from one to five. Totally subjective judgement. Oh absolutely. The low point by the way was in Aberdeen for those who might be listening up there. I'm sure everything has changed since the 1890s. Where was the high point? High point I think was in London. That's clearly true. But it was his work, wasn't it, which became the basis for the Nazis' race hygiene programme in the 30s? bit more directly I think than many people would like to accept.

There's a fairly direct link. I've always been struck by the fact that the title of Hitler's biography, Mein Kampf, My Struggle, is a direct-- translation of the Darwinian phrase, Darwin, Galton's cousin, the struggle for existence. Direct linear relationship between that idea that there are genes for higher or lower races and the terrible political disasters which have in the 1930s and I think we really should not be allowed to forget that. Record number three. Well, record number three, again, I thought it would be nice to get away from something which is quite so politically charged and get back to the fossils and we'll have a piece

the fossil music which is by Saint-Saens from the carnival of the animals, the fossils.

From Sansa's The Carnival of the Animals with Katja and Mariela Labeck and the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta. So nice of music I think particularly nice because there's a couple of fossil tunes in there. I certainly picked up 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' and I know there's at least two more. And the bones were rattling there nicely. Let's go back to your origin, Steve Jones, the Jones family of Aberystwyth, presumably there were quite a few of them. I think there are large numbers of us. I mean, if you get the Aberystwyth phone book, it's a very, very boring book. But if you weren't genetically predestined to become a scientist, who or what nurtured your interest environmentally in science? Well, I think it's the case with many people. Those professions may be scientists more than anybody. I can trace my particular interest in science, and in biology in particular in fact, back to one... Good schoolteacher. I mean, it's a standard thing, the most important social class in any society, which is often forgotten without question as schoolteachers.

Teacher I've never seen hide nor hair nor sense was a Mr. Simpson when I was 13 or 14 taught me by In a really inspired way and made me think seriously at that age that I wanted to be a biologist and I stuck with it. In an inspiring way. I think a lot of biology teachers might like to know. Well, I do it by waving my arms around and cracking lots of bad jokes, and I think he probably did the same thing. But were you in any case quite academic? Were you a bookish chap? Yes, I was always being severely criticized by my parents for not going out and playing football. Breaking into cars and doing all the things you're supposed to do. I used to go to the library a lot. I read that you consumed the works of Dickens before the age of 14. Can this be true? Yeah, it's a terrible admission, but I'm afraid it is. It's somehow nevertheless warming to read that you failed to get into several universities before Edinburgh accepted you. Yes, all the Welsh universities turned me down. Before the days of computer...

Admission to university which there now is, thank heavens. The only reason I managed to scrape under the net was that the University of Edinburgh had a closing date seven days later than anybody else and I managed to get it in the post just in time. I think it's Important letter I ever posted. And you went there to read zoology with genetics as a subset, yes? Exactly, yes. And once again you found a teacher who inspired you? Yes, I hope he's not listening to this programme. Yes, I've got an interest in snails, which I still have, from a chap who's now a professor at Nottingham, Brian Clark. Um... And like many scientists, again, what you do is you're given an essay to write in your first or your second year, and you never finish it. And I'm still writing that essay 25 years later on the genetics of snails. Next record. Well the next record is actually, I think it's the only snaily record I can think of. It's the theme from the Magic Roundabout and I think you'll notice that the snail, most people will know, is called Brian Snail. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.

Original theme tune from the Magic Roundabout. So you began to study snails, rather perhaps as Darwin studied giant tortoises, or is that too grand an analogy for you? Um, it's fairly grand. I guess the... They're both sluggish, they have that in common. Um, they're my snails, the beauty of snails is you don't have to run very fast when you pick them up. We're counting the lines on the backs, isn't it? Yes, the main reason for studying snails is that they carry the genes on their shelves, as it were. You can actually tell a lot about what genes they carry from the patterns on their shelves. So what have you discovered through studying snails for so many years? many years. Unfortunately. You've only got a 40 minute program. You could have given me a series of 12 one hours. What I've discovered I'm sure is a complete lack of interest. To everybody in the world apart from about 10 people. It has to do with the fact that the patterns of genetic change in snails have a lot to do with the... In which they behave when they're exposed to the sun. So that's why snails in different places look different.

Fruit flies next and a research fellowship at the University of Chicago. Now why did you change from snails to fruit flies? Too much of an arid specialist, and also I mean fruit flies have more of a buzz about them so to speak. If you're going to work... On genetics, in those days you really had to work on fruit-lized Drosophila, because they were the classic organisms for doing genetics on. Now since then, in the last 20 years, there's a new species which has become much more popular and much more useful, which is ourselves, and that's a complete reversal, because 20 we knew almost nothing about human genetics, but that's altered. But 20 years ago everybody was working on fruit flies, so I felt I should join on the bandwagon, and on it I jumped. But how can you study a fly? I mean, you can't mark it like a bird, you can't tag it, you can't follow it around because they all look the same. What do you do? Well, you do terrible things to them in bottles, Beta, a lot. I did lots of breeding experiments in the lab. But I did, in fact, spend several years trying to chase fruit flies around the deserts of California. I was interested in how far they migrated.

In how much the genes move every generation. And I've also done quite a lot of work on the mating behaviour of fruit flies because a lot of genetics is just that, it's the scientific study of sex. Fruit flies mate by buzzing at each other and they turn out to be mutations. Changes which alter the shape and the sounds of those buzzes and that's very very important in their evolution. But how do you discover all of that when you're chasing these flies? The answer is with difficulty. We mark them by putting fluorescent dusts on them and chasing them... In the desert with an ultraviolet lamp, which is a very peculiar thing to do, and I was shot at a number of times, but fortunately people missed every time. You were shot at by what, people who thought you were plainly mad, I think. Mad or bad, certainly dangerous to know. Record number five. This too is an evolutionary one. It's about Orpheus going down to the underworld to find himself a mate, and appropriately enough, at some time during his rather unlikely adventures, if he and his mate...

Find themselves turned into two flies who make an interesting courtship song.

Angus and Lillian Watson singing part of the Fly Duet from Act 3 of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld with the English National Opera Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. About your work and our understanding of genetics and how it affects moral and really rather sinister issues such as racism and the creation of a master race. But there's another moral issue isn't there and that's foreknowledge, the ability to predict the future of a fetus, the ability to predict death. Yes I think That's really the one issue of genetics which people until recently haven't begun to come to terms with, is just that. It does tell you a great deal about perhaps what your own fate might be. Quite clear now that there are certain unfortunate individuals who inherit particular genes which if they learn about it, they know they're likely to suffer from quite severe and distressing diseases perhaps early in life, perhaps later in life.

Becoming more and more true for example many many different cancers heart disease and many of the illnesses which which plague modern life turn out to have strong genetic component. And typically it's possible to say this by testing, this fetus will develop cancer. Colon aged 25. That's putting it perhaps a bit too strongly. This child is more likely than average to develop cancer of the colon would be a better way of putting it, because we can never be absolutely sure. Good example, in fact, because a colleague of mine in my own laboratory just a few months ago carried out the first test of that kind on a foetus and it showed that there were Because in that particular individual, actually, fortunately, the child wasn't carrying the appropriate gene. But tell me what else... Give me a few more examples of what we might ultimately be able to predict about a fetus. I think... My g-

I'm rather plucking figures out of the air, but my guess is that up to half of all... People born, one could have a fairly good chance of what their most likely cause of death is, and that's rather a guess, the figure, from studying their genes. Sooner or later. Good heavens, that they would have a weak heart. But there's a positive way of looking at it. I mean, I think the most important thing is to be positive about it. What happens with these various genes is that they make you susceptible. To particular environmental agents. For example, there's a classic one, which if you have this gene, which is rather rare I'm about to say, and you smoke, which is a terminally stupid thing to do anyway, irrespective of genetics, then you are not just likely but almost certain Emphysema, which is a very painful breathing disease when you're young. Now it would be feasible, it would be feasible...

Perhaps to tell people you are at particularly high risk if you smoke and hence to advise them not to smoke. But I wonder how acceptable it is. I mean we've already accepted haven't we that we can foretell the sex of a foetus. With an amniocentesis test. We also now, I think, accept that the prediction that that-- Could suffer from Down syndrome or cerebral palsy and again prospective parents can decide whether they want to terminate that pregnancy. Now... I wonder what happens when you are faced with the choice of if you give birth to this child it is likely to die of heart disease aged 30. Choice and in some ways I think a geneticist, I mean particularly a non-medical geneticist like myself, as I must always say, I'm not a physician and I don't know in detail. Genetists are the last people to answer those questions because they're questions which should be answered by society and the question of whether, I think it's true to say, that the question...

Whether parents should decide whether to continue with the pregnancy or not, should absolutely be made by the parents themselves. Of course, but it becomes a form of genetic engineering, doesn't it? If, through genetic... We are being told things and therefore asked to make a practical decision. In a sense you must have a view as to whether you think the knowledge ought to be used. I think it's a good general view in science and in life which is that ignorance is bad. And that generally has worked. There's a bumper stick and an excellent one if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. I think the best that scientists can do, biologists can do, is to inform people of what choices are available to them. And I think the experience... The difference has been that when people are informed of these choices, they do make what seem to be very intelligent decisions, in genetic disease for example. Next piece of music. Well again, I thought perhaps it would lighten the mood a bit, we'd get back to the evolutionary...

In fact, to human evolution, a very important document in the history of the theory of human evolution, which is Tommy Steele with the cavemen. *music* Still singing rock with the cavemen. You know, there's a new theory about the origin of human language when in our history language first appeared. And the new theory is that song came before speech. That record makes me doubt the theory very much. What are you going to do on the desert island, Steve Jones? I suppose in many ways it could be business as usual. Oh yes, somebody I can't hear.

A better place to be because for an evolutionist an island is a natural laboratory where evolution can take place more rapidly than anywhere else and our great... Charles Darwin, of course, as everybody knows, went to the Galapagos. People tend to think he thought of the idea of natural selection, that he actually did. But he was certainly very much impressed by the biology of islands and that led him to the theme that different species have different species. Of animals could change one into the other, so I wouldn't have a dull moment on my desert island. What you couldn't do, of course, on your own, on a desert island, is breed, which again, according to your lectures, is the healthiest thing genetically the human race can do. Well, you shouldn't... if you look at people on islands... And of course there are people who live on different kinds of islands, there are islands surrounded by water, your desert islands, but there are sort of intellectual desert islands in the sense that there are strict religious isolates, for example, where we have people who refuse...

To mate or marry with others outside the group, what happens is they become inbred. That leads to is a certain danger of particular genes which are usually rare. Becoming more and more common by chance. And some of the island peoples of the world are living natural genetic laboratories for human genetics. The island of Tristan da Cunha, for example, is one. The religious isolate, the island, the intellectual island in North America, who are the Amish, are another one. Have a number of otherwise very rare genes which happen to have risen in frequency and hence very very important in human genetics. But are they genes for the good or genes for the bad? Cases they become noticed because they cause inborn errors of different kinds. So in these cases they're genes for the bad. But... Go back to what we ought to be doing as far as geneticists are concerned. We should be what ideally... Travelling from continent to continent, breeding out with people from as far away from where we come from as possible.

I don't think is a word, you know, aut is a sort of eugenic term to what we don't like. What is happening is clearly... That people are no longer marrying the girl or the boy next door. It is certainly happening, generally speaking, that there is much less in reading, much less marriage of relatives in human populations. The reason for that is obvious, it's increased transport. I think the most important ever eugenic device was probably the bicycle. People began to move from village to village. That because of that, because we're having less inbreeding, we're getting less like island populations, we're getting more... Quite large continental outbred population, so we may be going through a period of genetic health which will greatly... Anything which geneticists can do, this simple behavioral change will lead to a change in human evolution. What about you as an individual? Are you playing your part in this? My, I'm afraid to say, my Darwinian fitness, my genetic value is exactly zero as I have no children.

- Partner from another continent? - From the United States indeed, yes. Record number seven. I thought I'd like to have a bit more of a Genetical record in fact a eugenic record eugenic comes from the word Eugene Eugene well-born and my next record is from Jean Onyegin.

What are the pollinators from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, played by the orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, conducted by Sir Colin Davies? I think one of the most... Daunting points that you made in your lectures. What a relatively small way down the road geneticists were. I think you drew the analogy of if you were going from Land's End to John two miles from Land's End so far? Yes, I mean there is a programme which is hoped to be finished by the year 2015 to read off the genetic message in a single human being and that's a message which is three thousand million letters long. Get a vision of how much that represents. The way I try to illustrate it is by talking about the sequencing... Being equivalent to walking from Land's End to John O'Groats via London. What's been done so far, we haven't yet got to Penzance, so there's a long way to go yet.

You've been quoted as saying, and I find this very odd, Anyone can be a scientist. What do you mean by that? That sounds ridiculously modest with respect. No, I actually think it's a real truth, which I think most scientists would acknowledge. It is absolutely not the case, it seems. That any one of us or anybody can be a good artist or an artist of any kind. To take a trivial example... For example, nobody would have written Eugene on Yegin if Tchaikovsky hadn't written it. Somebody would have discovered the structure of DNA if Francis Crick had not done so. I once made a radio programme a long time ago about a field course we run in Spain, where we do things, we study the biology of various animals and look at genetics in the field, which is fun to do. And a friend of mine who's got a five-year-old child said, Well, that's all very well, but that's exactly the kind of thing my kid does in playgroup.

Your child is doing science in playgroup. He's finding out things, discovering things. And all that science really is is a big playgroup that's not really as much fun. And I have yet to find a five-year-old child who can't do something in a playgroup. And I think the same is true with an adult who can't do something to help in the progress of science. Sounds very convincing but at the same time aren't you perhaps guilty of taking for granted something that you've been, whether it's genetically... Or God-given, and that is that you have an astounding clarity of thought. Well, delete the astounding. You have clarity of thought, and that is not something that everybody has. I find that statement very confusing. All right. Let's you off record number eight. Number 8 is the last record and having had the 60s in with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I'd like to... Play something by what was without doubt the best band of the 60s which just disappeared. It was called the Incredible String Band and fortunately enough they came out with a great The Evolution Rag.

♪ Broke heads, my children dear ♪ ♪ If you want to save yourself time and tears ♪ ♪ History Picnic, 'cause follow me ♪ ♪ Evolution up the slopes of the sea ♪ ♪ Up the slopes of the sea ♪ ♪ Slips of the sea ♪ ♪♪♪ Evolution Rag from the Incredible String Band. So Steve Jones, which one of those eight records is the one you'd take if you could only take one? - Well, I'm afraid it's predictable. It's got to be Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. - The fossil record. And your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare? There's a series of books, I know I'm not allowed a series, but there's a series of books by Anthony Powell called A Dance to the Music of Time, which actually is a really lovely way of describing evolution. If I have to take just one of them, my favourite one is called The Valley of Bones. And your luxury?

At University College London, where I work, we honour our founder, Jeremy Bentham, by keeping his stuffed body on the premises. I'd like to honour the... Present Minister of Education, Kenneth Clark, by taking his stuffed body to my desert island.

Thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.