YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Nurse

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2023-07-24
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2023-07-24
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  1. “Yes, so I have to, you know, you're looking for the middle here, okay? I've had both prime ministers, not the present one, but all the ones before. I've had Kir in the building, I've explained all of this, they are all on board, but Labour's got to start talking about it. Tories whilst in power have got to put the money in and get us into Horizon Europe. That's the first quick thing. Then I'll stop moaning about them.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “AI has been overdone. AI, let's call it, you know what, part of the problem is the name, artificial intelligence. Isn't it already spooky? What we're doing is machine learning. Let's start calling it machine learning and then we don't scare the shits out of everybody like we do when we say AI. So call it machine learning, getting all this data and looking for patterns within it and how you can deal with things. And already it gets less worrying. Machine learning is developed by human beings with algorithms. We can control the algorithms. We need some regulation here. A bit like the social media. Don't let it just all go out of control and try and put the genie back in the bottle. Get to grips with it now. Fundamentally, I think the human race will survive and will deal with it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “U.S. Republicans, but we have to look at Russia too. I was recently in Kiev, actually. I met President Zelensky, become an ambassador for education and science for Ukraine to try and rebuild some of that. I mean, very moving to see all the destruction that's happened. But ultimately, I think we will deal with these things. I mean, we worry about nuclear. Well, remember I'm a child of the 60s. I mean, then we were within hair breadth of nuclear annihilation. We somehow got through that. The pandemic is a shock to us. And this could have been a worse pandemic. And we're still not prepared. You watch what happens. You know, we're all talking about it when we were dying of it. Now we're not dying of it. Oh, let's worry about the mortgages. I'm not saying mortgages are not important. It's gone off.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm an optimist. I think we will deal with things with our knowledge eventually, maybe not as effectively as we should, but we will deal with it. I think that on the whole, in some countries, the political classes, I'm nervous about, I have to say. And I mean, I'm just a U.S.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You know, it's a privilege to follow your curiosity and work out how the world works. It's an amazing privilege. It won't pay as well as other jobs, but I go into work every day thinking, what will we discover today? It is fantastic. It is hard. Most of the time you don't discover things. Most of the times you fail is psychologically difficult for those reasons. But it is fantastic. it's for the public good I mean it's not just that sorts of things are driving the economy and productivity and so on absolutely important as they are it also contributes to our culture to our civilization what we know about ourselves and the world all of this has to put science central to any government of the future”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We do need money, but we need vision. And absolutely what is an open door is Horizon Europe. It's already in the budget. And we are fiddling about, you know, it's rather like Nero, the violin, Rice Rome is burning. Rome is burning and we have to stop it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Of course. And I think the best politicians get it and listen to it. The problem we've got is, of course, they don't think it's a vote winner. And they've got to be mature and rise above it. Now, the rhetoric was there. Boris had the rhetoric, but didn't deliver beneath the rhetoric, as we saw. Astonishingly.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “How do they do it? Sorry, I'm interrupting you. I think politicians can get it. I'm more in favour of your class than you are yourselves in some ways. The political class. The political class.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “WhatsApp? I said, Look, do this, WhatsApp. This, I said, take all the university medical schools and institutions, connect them to local hospitals, and get them back in work and doing testing within weeks. We were doing a couple of thousand tests a day, within weeks, and at one stage we were doing 10, 15% of all testing in the country. I mean, this is absurd. I wrote to Hancock together with Peter Ratcliffe, two Nobel laureates, okay? I got no reply. No, I have to tell you I got no reply from Hancock for three months. And then I got a reply from a civil servant once it was all over. It was outrageous.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “This was Hancock, but I mean, with others. That wasn't such a stupid idea, but it obviously wasn't going to work for nine months or 12 months. So we went through the first wave when most of, was the greatest deaths. In my view, what contributed to that was the lack of testing. Now what we did, and I wrote to Hancock, I got no reply, we can come to it again in a moment.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, we can go there in a moment, but let's just think about what did the government do? It set up big testing stations.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “We were heavily involved here actually in setting up testing and that's what I'm going to focus on. We failed miserably in my view. I mean by the way I'm not a medical scientist in setting up testing and that was the only thing at the very beginning that was of any help for the reasons I don't have to explain. Now what we realized here is that when everybody was being sent home, that we had all the equipment to do testing. We had all the expertise to do testing. We're a publicly funded body. So rather than send people home, we could set up testing for free, testing for free, which is what we did within weeks, and connect with local hospitals and local care homes, because it's not just testing, it's the logistics of connecting to the front end”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “They'd never heard of the public service research establishments. I mean, they didn't even know what they were. You go into the PSREs, as they call. They never can recruit easily from universities. It's all siloed. We have to break it down. Vision again. Vision in driving it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “By the way, Google DeepMind have labs in here. I mean, we're in close contact with them. It goes back to the spectrum. We need the spectrum. I happen to be a discovery scientist, but I'm not in any way saying we don't need the other. I'm just saying we had to be clever about it. And if you read my report, which is very good if you're having trouble getting sleep at night, by the way, because there's 155 pages of it, you'll see that I talk about a number of things, not just money, but the diversification of how we do research because it's all focused in universities at the moment, which are not always the only places to develop things, places like this can do it. But importantly, we have to increase the permeability of ideas, discoveries, people and technologies between all parts of the system. I went round, talked to 250 institutions and so on. I'd go into a university.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “What we could ask here to do is to say actually Michel Donalan, who has personally to me said she's strongly in favor of it. I mean, so that's one thing. That's the minister that Labour could do. She's the minister of science. She's one maternity leave. He comes back in a couple of weeks. I've had very good conversations with her. We've not had that public endorsement out of the Labour Party. I'm sure they would do, but it's not high on the... Well, lots of them in the agenda.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “On the work that it does and the total that it funds other places like universities and so on, including that 0.12%, is 0.46%. That's what we should be talking about. And there we're pathetic. If we take, for example, South Korea, Germany, which we've mentioned, the US, we're looking at in the order of double that”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Think about what it is. It drives the economy, it increases productivity, it brings societal goods like improving the health of the nation, protecting the environment. All of this has its origins in science and need science. Science should be central to all policy. It isn't. But having DCIT may help there, but it needs to be central. Then you've got to think about the money. And you mentioned the 2.5%. And in a way, that's confused us because most of that money isn't under government control. I mean, much of it comes from elsewhere. So we've lost what is under government control. We're not talking about it. If I was to tell you that the percentage that government spends on research is 0.12%”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's been lagging behind on the total spend and it's got worse on the amount of research that government itself performs because successive cuts in departments on research have reduced that to one third of what it was in the 1980s. So there's been two things that have happened. We've lagged behind increasingly in the total spend and we've gone down dramatically in the amount that government spends and I'm in that category because we're partly government spending here. So places like this are much less now than they were 30, 40 years ago.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Really extraordinary. I have to say I was really surprised because the policy wonks weren't talking about this. I mean, I read this sort of thing. I mean, we talked a lot about, and I'm a bit in that territory, and we were worried about industry spend on science, which actually was much higher because the office of the ONS had lost nearly a percent of spend on science, 1% of GDP, because they weren't accounting for it. Listen to this statistic. We are aiming to be a science superpower. The OECD nations, 3537, that's not G7, G10, it's a lot of nations. We are 27th in the league in how much money the government spends on science.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, I think what we've got, if we look at the Conservative and the Labour positions, the Conservatives say that science is very important and we're going to be a science superpower, but are very tardy on delivering what is needed. Labour doesn't talk about it very much. In fact, it's a bit under the radar. I'll talk about we want a better health system or we're going to have green economy, but they don't think about how the science is developed. And I'd rather that the Labour Party was more up about science so it could show the same interest and then hopefully actually deliver something.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “No, I haven't. I've got frustrated and irritated. I thought Corbyn was a disaster, I have to say. You know, I come from a working class background. I saw what my grandparents did. You know, they had to have all their teeth out because it was cheaper to do that rather than pay for dental care. I was told these stories, I can't forget it. And so I have been there, even though I've been frustrated and irritated. A member of the party, but I'm very low level. I don't actually do.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Now I sort of think they're getting into so much, you know, nobody sees any advantage in Brexit. It got in there under problems about immigration where they solved, give me a break. No. But science is critical for the future of our country. Working with Europe is critical for the success of our science. This is a no-brainer. There's a vision here which is being lost due to excessive interest in spreadsheets and accounting, losing the vision of what science.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It is. I mean, look, I'm wearing a scientist hat and you should listen to me for science. I have also a normal member of the public. Brexit is a disaster. Disaster top to bottom. We have to be part of a regulated system. We've moved ourselves out of it. We have to replicate it. It'll cost more money. It got in just by a couple of percent and yet we went for a very hard Brexit. That's not democracy. I mean, it isn't democracy. They should have said, okay, we've voted, we go out, but we try and maintain as many things as we can.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's the second point. I was going to say it's partly financial and spreadsheet and sort of accounting. And it's partly political. Maybe they're frightened of the right wing of their party, or they don't want to admit that this is something good Because it's in Europe, but it's hugely damaging on recitation.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And it isn't lots of stuff, let's be clear about it. They've already said, you know, you haven't been in for two years. We're not going to charge you for that, but there's certain initiatives which were set up.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The reason they're not signing up, I think, could be partly financial, possibly partly political. The financial bit would be because this has been running for a year, two years already, it's a bit complicated to see which ones you buy into, which ones where you can't buy into, and therefore you might be losing or gaining some money”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And sorry, I'm passionate about that. And there's no scientists involved in this who actually can drive it and say how important this is.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “We used to be leading in this. We could set the agendas. We still can. They want us in there. And we are fiddling around with no vision over this, just accounting and sort of trivialities in my view.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Absolutely correct, and I don't think Mr. Sunak understood that initially. I've heard that he's getting round to that. But that's the point. We spent 40 years building this, and it's being destroyed every month. Everybody, you know, I can recruit from around the world, best scientists in the world. I've lost one of them because they wanted to be part of this. I try, every time I recruit somebody from around the world, North America anywhere, the first question they ask is, Are you going to join Horizon? Honestly, they say...”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “No, Northern Ireland sorted out. We could have instantly rejoined. But we didn't. And why didn't we? For the scientists, we simply do not understand 15 Nobel Prize winners wrote to Mr. Sunak in January, February. I played a major role in orchestrating that. And he took him two months to reply. So, I mean, he's not really on the ball always with that stuff, I have to say. I was a bit disappointed about that. But 15 Nobel laureates said this is absolutely essential. All the academies say it's essential. Every sensible scientist you talk to want to do it. Yet six months later, we haven't delivered it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “We didn't have to come out of it, and in fact, it was part of the deal we would be in it, it was stalled by the European Union saying until you've sorted out Northern Ireland, You can't be in it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, it is big money, but there's too much obsession with the money, and that's actually what's going wrong now when we can get to it. It is actually the network, the collaborations, the fact that you can pull on a population of 350 million to get the best advice, to get the best initiatives going, and to drive science in a proper way. That's the vision of Horizon. And that's what's being lost in the negotiations that we're going on at the moment.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Okay, Horizon is the, if you like, the science discovery vehicle for the European Commission for the European Union, but has relationships with some countries which are outside European Commission or Switzerland, which has now just been excluded because of political reasons. Israel plays in that territory as well. Now, there's three major, if you like, sort of foci for science in the world. Europe, North America and Asia based on China. And if you're outside that, you're outside the collaboration that is necessary to generate high quality science.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I've been very critical of Plan B because I think it is woefully inadequate for the problems that we are facing. In fact, I think it's mainly there so that...”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yes, he's put that together and I was doing a review and I was going to recommend such a thing. And in actual fact, it happened before my recommendations came out. So I think that's a very positive thing too. So the vision is there. Now we have to deliver it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yes, that was from the coalition. I think some of my colleagues are critical of it because they feel it's got distant from them. My idea was that the research councils, which are grouped together, would look after the scientists and UKRI would look after the politicians in a funny way. And I still think we've got to sort of get there. But that was the idea because I wanted a powerful force for science, a powerful voice in government. And I think UK horror can do that. DCIT is a great idea in my view, and that's been brought about in the last months.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “UKRI came from me actually. I did a report for government back 2015-14. We had eight or seven or eight research councils. They needed to work well together. But we also needed, in my view, a single voice to talk with government. And I saw UKRI as making the single sort of major case to governments.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Rockefeller wing. I ran the Rockefeller University actually in the US, which was completely different. And they've lost the plot. And that, well, you're the political people, but I think social media has a lot to do with losing the plot, quite honestly. We unleashed it on the world without thinking about the consequences of it. And that means anybody can say anything they like, and they're not challenged. And that's undermining it for sure. And we need to kick back on it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The UK is not too bad. I've worked across the world, I run an institute in America, I advise across the world. The UK is not too bad. I mean, you know, modern science was invented here. We are very poorly supported, and I've done a review for government, which we can talk about if you have time. Which absolutely demonstrates that. But we need a political system which will take advice from science and listen to it. Now what we see, particularly in the US, is of course with the Republican Party a disregard. Or I should say part of the Republican Party. There's a part that's been utterly eclipsed. It used to be called the...”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Right, well, the first thing I'd say, I don't think the solution is to get lots more scientists in politics, in fact. What we need is politicians who have got a different skill set, who take science seriously and take truth seriously, and who will establish good contacts and interactions with scientists.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “It may have something to do with the characteristic activity of science. A tension on very fine detail rather than the bigger picture. I'm going to be provocative here, an obsession with truth. You know, if you're in politics and something gets sort of roughly like this, it doesn't matter. My hands are going up and down next to each other. It perhaps doesn't matter which way you go, you make it work. That isn't how scientific discovery.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Fraunhofer stuff. George Porter, who was a no goal or it present of Royal Society, he said it's like building a building with insecure foundations. You can go higher quickly and then the whole thing collapses. And you need to have a balanced approach, discovery and application for societal good.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And what we do is capture stuff in there. Of course, people who are interested in societal good, in driving the economy, all of which depends on science. Let's just get that out there. I mean, science is essential for it. I hope we might get into a bit of discussion where we are and Horizon Europe and all of this sort of stuff. But if you just invest in application,”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Well, let's take Germany. You have a series of what's called Max Planck Institutes, which are like here. Then you have a series of what are called Fraunhofer Institutes, which are more deprived. There is a problem with that though because they are separate, as I said. Now what we've done here is to be Max Plankish but not snobbish about it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “But we are not snobbish about that. We say we want to do that, we'll do it with a company, we'll do it with a biotech, and if people want to go somewhere and get it going, or we start things here, we do all of that. So it's discovery coupled with a great capturing process.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “You're more on the curiosity side? You're absolutely right, and we need both. And often what I find is that my colleagues can either push one or the other when actually you need both. And the way we work here is to hire hugely creative and people who are a bit out of the box and let them discover stuff. Which the white haired committees can't really think about. I mean, by the time they get programmatic strategy, they've lost it. I mean, you know, they just come up with the absolute obvious. I mean, I have to say. But then you need something else. You need to capture. You need to have a mechanism for capturing discoveries that could be useful. And they may not be developed here because the sort of person like me who's a bit anarchic is not the right person to develop something.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Science is a spectrum, and this is often not understood. There are commonalities across that spectrum, you know, the pursuit of truth, doing good experiments, testing things, and so on. But if you are at one end of the spectrum, as I am, you discover stuff. You discover stuff. And that is not very well pursued if you are too top-down. If you try and direct people, you actually stuff the creative spirit. I mean, you know, it's like telling Picasso to paint something in blue or red or whatever. I mean, it's just darved. But if you go to the other end of the spectrum where discoveries are turned into useful applications, it has to be top down because you're trying to cure a disease or something of this sort. And you need to know where you are in the spectrum and how to deliver it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The cells have got to start growing, then they've got to dividing. So that means in thinking about cancer, which is a complicated disease, you have to understand that. But secondly, it turns out that because it's so central to this process, that drugs which inhibit it or alter it have turned out to be really useful in dealing with some cancer. So particularly breast cancer. There's drugs now that are coming on the market that are proving to be very effective. But there's another point to be said there. This was discovered in the 1980s and it's taken 30, 40 years before this work can be applied.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Exactly. So the unifying idea behind all cancers is cells growing and dividing out of control. So understand how that division is controlled is actually central to understanding cancer. You can't really understand any cancer without thinking about this. But in other words, it gives you the conceptual framework for thinking about it.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yes. So I then went and saw George Osborne because it was on the edge of being cancelled. And George was very positive about it and actually pushed it over the line. So in fact it was both a labour and Initiative that brought this thing.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source