The daredevil pilot who’s shaking up science
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse talks about his new institute, women in labs – and his passion for flying
It is the most highly regarded job in British science, so one expects a certain gravitas from those who have served as president of the Royal Society. Sir Paul Nurse, who has recently completed his five-year fixed term in the post, doesn’t seem to quite fit the bill.
At 67, the cheerful-looking, ruddy-complexioned man certainly doesn’t look like he has spent his best years in a laboratory. Yet it still requires a leap of the imagination to picture him as a motorcyclist and death-defying pilot in his spare time. The motorbike, he agrees, is “probably a bit of a risk”. But despite one particularly hairy moment in the skies, which resulted in him singlehandedly crash-landing his plane in 1997, he has doggedly continued to pursue his love of flying. “You can make [it] very safe,” he says.
That Sir Paul, who jointly won a Nobel Prize for working out how yeast and then human cells divide, has reached the pinnacle in his field as both a researcher and administrator is all the more remarkable given that his failure to pass French O-level at the sixth attempt jeopardised his chances of a university education. Fortunately, Birmingham offered him a place – conditional on his taking French lessons – and his boyhood curiosity in the natural world wasn’t wasted.
Fascinated by insects and plants, and a keen stargazer, he had an unusual childhood. He grew up believing that his mother, who gave birth to him at 18, was his sister and that his grandparents were his parents. They all lived together for two and a half years before his real mother married and left home. He still doesn’t know who his father is and, as a geneticist, the irony isn’t lost on him.
This unconventional start in life notwithstanding, he went on to become not only one of the country’s most high-profile scientists, but also an active father to Emily, 36, and Sarah, 38. “I wasn’t so good when they were very little, but after they got to five or six, I was,” he says. “I was pretty busy and my wife [Anne] was brilliant at it.”
His daughter Emily is a physicist at University College London and involved with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, so the issue of gender equality in science is close to home for her father. But he remains good friends with Sir Tim Hunt, who caused controversy with remarks about female scientists last year. Sir Tim resigned from his honorary professorship at University College London after being quoted as saying that his trouble with “girls” in labs is “you fall in love with them, then they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry”. He shared the Nobel Prize with Sir Paul in 2001. The pair are now colleagues at the Francis Crick Institute, the research partnership Sir Paul is creating at a cost of £650 million, and it’s here that I’ve met him today.
“He’s a lovely man,” he says of Sir Tim, “and I’ve never seen chauvinistic behaviour, but he said things that are chauvinistic. He apologised, but it just kept going and going. He was hounded and I felt very sorry for him.”
Sir Paul’s credentials in this respect seem fairly flawless: he has always run a roughly gender-balanced lab and intends to make life easier for women in the field by helping them through the early child-bearing years. Women at the Crick will be allowed to work part-time in an attempt to increase the numbers of female scientists who remain active.
“When I started in science there was clear bias against women,” he says. “That has changed significantly in the 40 years I’ve been a scientist, but the percentage of women who get to senior positions is low.”
What may raise eyebrows, however, is his assertion that gender plays a role in how scientists work. “I’ll be caricatured for being gender-stereotyped, but men tend to have rather directed thinking to get to a certain goal; women tend to explore in a more complex way all the things that could be influencing something. Sometimes you need one way of thinking and sometimes the other, and having this blend, I think, is really powerful.”
Four years ago, Sir Paul underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery and though aware his diet might have been responsible for his condition, he admits he is still not looking after himself all that well. “Perhaps I like food and drink too much,” he says. “Do I drink a third of a bottle of wine a day? Yes.”
And, yes, he still flies, despite that summer day two decades ago when he very nearly brought his career to an untimely end. The skies were blue and he should have been packing for a family holiday in Turkey. Instead, he decided to steal an hour high above the English countryside.
When the undercarriage of his aircraft jammed, he was unable to lower the wheels and entered into what he describes as one of those bizarre British conversations with the control tower: the sort where the weather and what you had for tea are discussed between arrangements for the deployment of the emergency services. Realising the propeller wouldn’t clear the ground, he was forced to switch the engine off, but still managed to land safely, albeit drenched in sweat. “I just felt I would get it down,” he says.
The experience might have prevented a more timid man from returning to the air, but last summer Sir Paul flew a glider in the Pyrenees. “I know when you talk to me I sound crazy, but I’m not,” he says.
He is clearly right, and it’s easy to imagine him making a compelling case for the sciences to those he calls “our political friends”. Yet he failed during his tenure at the helm of the Royal Society to persuade the government to match the European Union average of state funding as judged by percentage of GDP.
“We’re extremely good at science,” he says, “probably second only to the US in terms of quantity and quality, and much more cost-effective. But we don’t invest enough in it, so we are failing there.”
Arguably this is no longer his concern, but he has others: his research focuses on questions such as what controls the shape, reproduction and speed of growth of yeast cells. Since his Nobel work on cell division may turn out to be helpful in the fight against cancer, his prognosis for the disease seems important. So is it good news?
“I don’t think cancer will ever be cured,” he says. “I think we’ll see gradual improvements in treatment – which we see all the time – and what we could look for is the fear of cancer gradually being eliminated so it’s seen as a bit like a heart bypass: dangerous but something you can manage.”
Is he secretly hoping for another Nobel? Only three scientists – one of them Marie Curie – have won two Nobel Prizes in science, and Sir Paul says he feels no pressure to win a second. “My primary motivation is a curiosity about the world and trying to understand things I can make progress with,” he says. “Some Nobelists do [feel pressure to make a second great breakthrough] and they start to think they’ve got to take on some huge new problem that is impossible to undertake. Science is the art of the soluble. You’ve got to have a certain modesty in what you can actually address.”
This might explain his reluctance to rule out the existence of a deity, for all that his belief system is steeped in the scientific. He rates the possibility of a divine creator as “0.1 per cent or lower” and describes himself as a “sceptical agnostic”. As he reasons: “If God is unknowable, it’s very difficult to know that something that’s unknowable doesn’t exist.”
Immersing himself in the knowable is the easy option, then. Though only Sir Paul could make it look that way.
‘I just felt I would get it down,’ he says, after he was forced to switch off his plane’s engine