BBC Radio 4
11/10/2011
Jim meets Paul Nurse, Nobel prize-winning geneticist and President of the Royal Society. [1.]
Paul Nurse is a geneticist who was actually brought up by his maternal grand mother as his mother. He didn't find this out until he was in his twenties, after he has established the direction of his life's career.
But he talks about a couple of photos that his mother, whom he took to be his much older sister, had close to her. In particular a picture of her holding his hand on the occasion of her wedding, when she is about to embark on her newly married life and see far less of him.
I hope I have the details of this sufficiently correct.
In the program Paul Nurse doesn't dwell on this. He doesn't have time, it is not the focus of the program. But he does note the irony that he is a geneticist while, unbeknown to him, he had not known his own immediate genetic origins.
An example of unconscious knowledge. And a complex and painful situation.
This raises, once again, what the drivers are for the objective point of view.
I often feel that this is something I have only ever skirted round the edges of. For instance Paul Nurse has risen to great prominence and has had huge institutional responsibilities. Good science needs huge teams to collaborate, it needs such institutional settings. But it also needs a form of objectivity. It is quite concordant with Freudian thinking that this entails repression (and suppression - not of the political kind).
Lacan, well this is a more complex story.
Lyse Doucet speaks to Masood Khalili, Afghanistan's Ambassador to Spain. [2.]
It is true that the role of Ambassador has traditionally been given to cultured and educated individuals. Nevertheless, the nature of this Masood Khalili's cultural sophistication is most instructive.
I was thinking of pointing out, rather pithily, that the current crisis is that we are borrowing from the future what will come to be tangible, but does not belong to use to put a lean on.
Whereas we do not borrow from the past as that no longer is.
But, of course, we can and do borrow from the past.
We live in a society which ever more looks to the future and shuns the past.
A society that measure adulthood by being able to attract the attention of other, en mass, who then become a target to be sold to.
A society where it is the norm to plan on people's future behaviour (indeed future people who may not yet exist) and an ability to predict, to some extent to influence, it.
A society, in short, that does not value what is nor what has been.
Now listen to Masood Khalili. He is a man who believes that to be a man, to be an adult, we should 'glorify the works of the Lord'. An in his ever word, at least in this interview, he beautified everything that he turned to. He even had the grace to allow that honour to his German doctor who looked after him after a most horrific gun attack in which his dear colleague was killed. He has the doctor say something like "Your shrapnel wounds are like the stars in the heavens spread over your body."
He carries some 200 odd pieces in him from the assassination.
So what is it, to be a man?
One can see the intrinsic antipathy to so called Western values immediately.
1: Paul Nurse, Nobel prize-winning geneticist.
2: Masood Khalili, Afghanistan's Ambassador to Spain.
Renamed from “radio-contrasts-borowing-from-the-past” to “radio-contrasts-borrowing-from-the-past”.