YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Evans

lines on the record: 41
first: 2008-02-17
most recent: 2008-02-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, it would be the Messiah. And of course, that's the piece with Simon singing it. But I love the Messiah, totally, so that would remind me of it.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I've thought about this it's very difficult I'd like to take something which will help my imagination to continue. So what I'd like is a good anthology of poetry maybe the largest amount you can get on my raft.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My final piece of music is actually really some of my earliest memories of music. This is a piece that my parents had, and they loved. I don't know why they loved it, it may have been something to do with their courtship. But I did have very wonderful parents, and this will remind me of them.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we do, and I think we've sold them the wrong thing. We said, come and be a technician, come and make the new drug. Forget it. Come and be a visionary. Try and understand the world you're in. I think that's what we should be saying.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it doesn't look very gentle at the moment. I mean this Nobel has given me a platform, and one of the things I've been trying to do is to look at the understanding of science for school children. Why do not enough school children come through into science these days?”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a wonderful, the whole week as a wonderful glittering week. And yes, it's very nice that you can take the whole family I had. Judith had my two sons in there, wives and we had the five grandchildren Claire's new baby not by now born was five weeks old One of very nice things was after the ceremony and the king has presented you with a medal and then sort of informality starts and the committee shake your hand and then the people in the hall can come up and greet you and the first of my family was my grandson George who managed it through the legs of all this milling crowd and got to me. It was lovely.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next piece of music is do you hear the people sing? Now this is because I have been fortunate enough to be able to become a trustee of breakthrough breast cancer and for me it is I see the men involved. As the angry Here Many lost our mothers. Our wives, our daughters, or maybe not lost, but they've been seriously affected by breast cancer. And a lot of the active support to break through the supporters, despite the sort of female publicity of this, are men, and they are angry men. This causes a political song. It's about political democracy, but I also see it as about the broader democracy of the movement of people to make things better, and I find it a very stirring. Uplifting.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She is well, she works herself very hard for breast cancer charities, and she also helps to run a group in Cardiff as she works as a volunteer for breast cancer care. She does a lot.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, both Judith and I needed to know everything we possibly could about it. This is our way of coping. We needed to understand, we needed to understand the treatments. It has been very difficult, and I have As I say, I do admire her immense courage and fortitude going through all the treatments and the chemotherapy and so on. In a brave way that I don't think I could do.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, just after we'd... decided to move there. Judith found a lump in her breast, and it was a nasty, malignant spreading breast cancer, and she has been through the whole gamut of treatment with considerable courage and fortitude, and Really amazing and has supported me in my new job while this was all going on as well.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, if great advantage on the desert hand is nobody can see me doing it I haven't managed to learn Welsh properly so you know you can't”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, well this is the Welsh national anthem. I'd rather like this because it reminds me of my time going to Wales and as I've said we've had very happy times and it was a very good move and I put this here this will remind me always This wonderful period of my life in Wales.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very nice summation, whether it's fair is difficult to say Yes I mean it is actually I still find it Literally unbelievable that I have a Nobel Prize. It is such an amazing thing. honour and achievement. So it's still I have to pinch myself from time to time, Martin, have you really done that or is it just a dream?”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes Well, it was out of the blue, I didn't know anything about Cardiff at the time, but I investigated it, and then it turned into a wonderful opportunity. Here I had the chance now to do something more than my own work. I had the chance to go and set up, mould a whole new broad biological sciences. I'm very keen on it being broad, and I wouldn't have gone in to say a medical faculty or anything like that, but I'm very happy to go in where there's the biomedical side, but also the biological side. And that's what I had in Cardiff.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's entirely fair to say I was overlooked and so on, but I think I knew that my position was not going to advance in Cambridge So no, I wasn't lived, I was in a very good situation.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soon after we moved to Cambridge Simon, my second son, who had been singing in the church choir in London, wanted to get into a nice choir, and we fortunately found him a place at Christ Cathedral School in Oxford, singing in the Christchurch Cathedral choir. But, of course, it was a long way away from Cambridge. So Simon had to go away to boarding school there, and the family had to travel up and down regularly to Oxford, particularly on a Christmas day, for instance. The whole family had to go up to fetch him.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, well this is from the Messiah The particular piece is their sound has gone out. It's a piece that I tried to use the name from in a publication when I was just explaining about these pluripotential cells, and I wanted to say that their sound has gone out to all lands because they had now, once upon a time they've been rather isolated little study, but now people were really latching onto them. The scientific editor totally refused to let me use this because it wasn't a scientific phrase and no dude know what it meant, so I hope by putting it on this program everybody now knows what it means.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I've been talking about, so in my cells we can say OK what does this Jean really do? Let's try inactivating it and see if it does any change. And that's what we've been able to do with these cells for mammals, for mice, and That's given us the possibility of saying OK, what have we found from the human genome? They've found a sequence. But what does it do? What does it really there for? Said this is a way of finding out what really happens in the real animal.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I first had these cells I knew that what I wanted to do was to mutate them in culture, to find particular mutations and test them in the mice. That was clearly the way forward. I then had a phone called from Oliver Smithers, and that was because about month six weeks before he had published in Nature his results showing that you could target a gene in tissue carture cells, and I knew that that was the way forward with our cells, and of course he did as well, and so I went over to see him flew over at one weekend with some cells in my pocket to show him how to work them.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's significant just to cut to the chase because these cells have the remarkable property and these are mice, remarkable property of being able to be kept in the laboratory, but then any one of them can go back into a mouse embryo and form part of the resulting mouse, including the germ cells, the sperm or the eggs, and that means that if we have a genetic change in our cell in our laboratory, that genetic change can be transmitted through to the whole working animal in this case a mouse. That has given us the experimental approach to genetics.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should be played at enormous volume, in fact, supportive parents were seen to be at the back of the hall with their hands over their ears.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when we're in Cambridge, my elder son Christopher formed his own rock band, and annually in those days there was a Cambridge rock competition, and he did quite well in it in one year coming into the final. And what I'm asking to play here is his signature piece, really Germans in the Shire, he and his two colleagues in the van called the Desmonds are playing this rather wacky track about their camping holiday experiences”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think I can. I think it's a matter that it's understanding, I think, is so important. Many people look at practical benefits outcomes, experiments and so on. The real thing is the understanding, the intellectual approach, seeing how it works, asking the next step can we see a little bit further how it works. We are very, very interested many of us, and I don't just mean the scientists, but the general public in the understanding of the universe in which we live. Now we are actually living in the biological universe on the thin surface of this world and this is our own home universe and I think not only should we study the stars in the universe outside the cosmos but we should study what I call the stars within ourselves and we have done”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I went to old Mona's lectures in Cambridge, and they were wonderful revelation of the way that it was going. And then we had Sidney Brenner, and he gave a series of seminars in his rooms in Kings, and I can remember packing in there and listening to all the latest stuff.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think It had all been happening during that time when I'd been studying in Cambridge there had been the Nobel Prize for Jacques Amondo.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She did, she did, she did, and of course It's a wonderful uplifting sort of song that you can revise and get yourself back into swing with.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Edith Piaf, singing. Now, this is a song of mental defiance. And I can remember singing this with a volume turned up loud to the record, with tears running down my face when this is later on after Judith and I had been engaged and then it didn't seem to be going right and Judith went off for a year to Canada and I thought I'd lost this wonderful girl of my dreams it was a very black period but Festival I didn't regret anything and I don't and I shan't. Secondly Judith did come back and I've had a wonderful life with her ever since.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I had to bring out all the big guns and invite her to a Cambridge May Bull. Which we had a wonderful time at, and after the ball we'd planned to go up to Granchester for breakfast is one of the things you do and punt up the river. And so I had a blind date with another couple who wanted to do the same thing and wanted to share the punt. So we started off. The river was in full flood and worked hard to get part of the way up towards Granchester. And then the other chap took over. It turned out that he didn't know how to punt. And we just drifted backwards it was terrible. So I had another girl and then Judith, you know, said oh she'd have a go, tucked up her huge great ball gown, took the punk pole and I thought she's the girl for me.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is loaded well my mother's brother was the professor of astronomy in Cambridge, and his wife used to put on lunches. On one of these a babe kindly invited Judith, so I remember meeting this lovely girl sitting on a big square radiator they had who could sit and warm your behind on this radiator. And so I thought she was I thought she was rather nice, actually.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, I don't know. I suspect I've been becoming more able to deal with people if I could put it that way throughout my career. I think I started off not particularly happy in social situations. Through my career I've come to realise that actually I've always liked people, and now I can get on with them fairly well as well, which is double benefits.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's not a matter of course no I desperately wanted to get to Cambridge I'd worked exceedingly hard to do these exams, but then in a way and I suppose I'm unusual in this when I'm prepared I quite enjoy exams for me it's the final performance I've been preparing for I got there and I found suddenly there were all these other people just like me who were talking about the sort of science I was interested in the same way and I found it wonderful.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My second piece of music is Tommy Steele, singing the blues. This is a wonderful piece of music, and I remember it. The memory of this gives me my bedroom at home in Orpington, where I was studying, I was doing homework on a Saturday, and there was a fate nearby where they were playing this again and again at top volume. It's just coming in as the piece of music. And it's a wonderful piece of music.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was encouraged, and I think probably my mother was wonderful there. I think she had a policy always answer every question. She wasn't teacher herself, but she was very keen to put her whole effort into bringing us up. I've had a very straightforward schooling, really. I if I go through my secondary school, I went through St. Dunson's College, I slowly worked my way from the bottom of the form to near the top of the form in most of the subjects. I was never noticeably the best, but I was certainly near the top all the way through.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I think so. I mean, I've often been asked have I always been a scientist and I've been think back you think back into far back as you can remember and did you feel any different? I was the same person then, I think. Certainly it seems to me I was the same person and the sort of things I really liked doing were very much the same. Just as I've become a bit more sophisticated and been given rather better tools these days.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a difficult question you should ask other people about that. I think I was a lovely little boy. What sort of hypersection? Quiet, probably rather introverted. Little boy I was very interested in all sorts of things around me. I loved to sit and things out and to try and make models.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was close to my grandfather. He was a wonderful man. He was very much a self made intellectual. His love was poetry, music and the Baptist church where he was the choir master for over forty years. He was a very intellectual man, a very nice man too. I loved him”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I really understand the process it is a dark process that goes on behind closed walls and they ask for nominations and universities, professors and so on can send in and do send in nominations. What happens to those? Nobody knows except for the committee.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is Langlang, the Chinese pianist young man who is playing Rakmanoff's second piano concerto. Now he played this at the Nobel Prize concert, and I remember he came to sit at the piano in a hush, and he then controlled the entire audience with his presence before he played a note, raised his hands and bang into the music. It was a wonderful performance.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well two things first of all we worked in collaboration but only in so far as I had got in touch with them both and they got in touch with me we've never worked on the same project together at all And the other thing, there's this wonderful image from Isaac Newton of standing on the shoulders of giants, the idea that all of the work that's gone into building this pyramid in the past, you're able to help just a little bit. And it lovely thought that maybe people, and I know they are, are now standing on my hypothetical shoulders, and taking the subject on it's lovely.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found out the family first, and then I found out Cardiff University and the Vice Chancellor to tell him. We had only a few minutes then before the phone started ringing We'd been to a friend's wedding, so at least I did have a suit with me and I was then whisked off to the television studios.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was near Cambridge in my very oldest clothes in our car with a sander in the back of the car just been from the hire shop, and I was on my way to my daughter's house where we'd been desperately trying to help her just clear up enough for the imminent birth of a new grandchild. And I got voicemail message saying Martin, would you very urgently please call this number from one of the sectors in Cardiff? And yes, it was the Secretary of the Committee, told me the news. I then tried to sort of take it in and talk to him and say, well, can I know more about this and when is it? And so on. And he said, I'm sorry you'll hear all about this very shortly, but I have to go now this four minutes time. I have to be at the press conference to announce it. So we heard just before the world.”
2008-02-17 · Desert Island Discs · Martin Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source