YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Blundell

lines on the record: 42
first: 2007-06-03
most recent: 2007-06-03
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

“I'm going to take lessons in Enderbelli because I hope that eventually I'm going to be rescued from this island, and I hope that I'll find my wife and family and I'll be able to impress them by speaking under Billy fluently.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My last piece of music is the song of the Hebrew slaves because I'm quite often in Italy where I every year look after a school for a couple of weeks, and my Italian friends in the warm evenings sing, and they often sing this it's really the sort of national anthem of Italy.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't have to choose between those both, of course. They both compel me forward, and I just feel that there are plenty of things to do, and I'd like to continue doing them for a little while.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worry about it hugely It's just a very difficult moment because one works first on molecules and then on tissues and then in animals and still one doesn't have any certainty as to what's going to happen in the human body because what one's really doing is targeting one part of it but it's a huge complexity and so we're never quite sure but of course we take as many precautions as we can and use our knowledge to target carefully but there's always a risk and always a concern.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm a little crazy. I get up every morning at five o'clock if I'm under pressure half past four. I do my administrative work, and then at seven o'clock I really get up and go into the laboratory or sometimes go out to my company. I get home quite late. I hope to see my children and eventually go to bed.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next record really brings me both to politics and back to Africa Hugh Maze is one of my heroes, he plays the Flugelhorn and Cornet. He is a South African who had to come out of South Africa for a long time, and somebody who's been immensely powerful in his thinking and uncompromising. I'd like to play his send me.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, many people apart from myself and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution that I was chairing at the time were saying the same thing, and so I am frustrated that it's taken some time, it's now become very much of an issue, and I think that's a good thing. But there are huge problems in being a politician, getting people to change their use of cars, to decrease their use of heating and air conditioning, all of these things are not easy.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and if I were a scientist, you see, on the Macau disease issue, I would say well, I haven't collected all my data yet. But if I'm a science policy person or a politician, I have to make policy now because we know there are things going on and therefore one has to take a precautionary approach. So it's a very difficult challenge.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think originally it's because people knew I had an interest in politics. And so I ended up around nineteen ninety being appointed to be head of a research council. In fact, it was a very challenging time because I was responsible for all of the basic science that underpinned, for example, mad cow disease. And it's very different, really. If one's a scientist, one defines one's problem, and being a clever scientist, you define a problem that you can solve. That's one of the tricks you learn. But as I discovered earlier in local politics, you don't define the problems if you're a politician.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. It's much easier to be a father when you're a bit older. I've been very lucky in having a very supportive wife and wonderful kids.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, well, if you brought up in Africa as my wife was, and if your home is there and we all go back, then the kids of Cusco wild in Matabiland with all their cousins, so once one gets used to that idea, then living in southern India in Kerala or in China or various parts of South America as we have over the years didn't seem to be a problem.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may ask me, but I am certainly not going to tell you. But I can say that one of my nieces once wrote to me and said, Uncle Tom, I've just been seeing one of your cows munching very happily.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I remember is this incredible rolling scenery with lots of people relaxing in this incredible music, and then the end of this ceremony I was led to meet Elder of the Women of the Extended Family, and introduced to the idea that it was traditional to pay for one's right in cows. And so this was a bit of a surprise to me.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lynn is an underbelly speaker from southern Zimbabwe Matbiland. She had come to London when she was, I think, seventeen, made her way up, and eventually ended up in Buckweck College in London where I was. I mean, people often ask me whether I met her when we were travelling across Africa, but I'm afraid it was her initiative and not mine.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was fantastic, it was a laboratory which had been set up by JD Burnal, who was, in my mind, one of the most brilliant scientists, the person who got perutes and crick and many others involved in the kind of science that I do, of course, long before. It had a lot of young people in it, and we had nothing to lose, so we worked together in a very collaborative way, was just amazing.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music goes back to my long travel, and because I ended up in India and there I got interested in Carnatic music, and I recruited myself with a guru in the Vena, which is a kind of large lute with seven strings. So I'd like to play a piece by Vinai Gianthi, who is one of the leading practitioners of the Vena. I think it's a very beautiful piece.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I went to Sussex University, and I decided I guess rather unimaginatively really, that I'd try and do something a little bit similar to what we've been doing in Oxford. In Oxford we were working on insulin, and there's another molecule called glucagon that puts the sugar levels up again. And so I decided I'd work on that, and I discovered to my horror that there was already a Nobel Prize winner called Bill Lipska in the States working on it, and I, rather boldly, I think, probably foolishly retrospect, said I'd like to work on it, and he was just amazingly gentle. And then I asked whether I could see some of the data he collected, and he even provided that. But the first experiments we did, I realized what had been going wrong, and when I changed it I could see immediately what we had to do.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course not You can give him time, and we've been going for a very many years you can explore things, and if you have a process which selects things because they are advantageous, then you can very quickly move on and make progress so that you can get organized and you can get function. You don't need a creator.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess by that time I saw science as a very international activity, and during that journey I've met up with all sorts of friends, and I met through science, and that was also very enriching. But there's certainly things in Eastern philosophy which I found very helpful. In particular, this idea of Christianity and permanence, I think is dreadful. What the Japanese have is a sense of beauty in the falling cherry blossom, and this idea that things can be beautiful just because they change is a wonderful thing that we really don't understand fully in the West.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't leave it all behind, but it got out of control. There were amazing pressures of having a young family, of being chairman of a planning committee in a large city council, and doing science which takes up all your time, and I just found the pressures enormous. My marriage broke up, and I decided that I really had to do science on its own for a bit, but I also wanted to travel, I wanted to get out.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next piece of music is strange fruit, which began as a poem written by a New York school teacher, but was made famous by Billy Holliday, one of the key points in my life was when in nineteen sixty four I won a prize for a travelling scholarship, and I got on a greyhound bus with my wife at the time for three months, and we just headed down south, and we saw the discrimination that there was there, the emerging movement to get rid of it. And of course that's reflected in strange fruit.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not by chance I've ended up in a very visual area. It just fascinates me, but yes, I see the molecules, their shapes to me, they're real, but of course they're very, very small.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in many cancers you have mutations in key molecules which change the shape and change the function, and so they in some cases don't function, but in other cases even more disastrously, they function all the time. And so, for example, one of the things we would want to do when that happens is to target that molecule, that enzyme quite often with a very small molecule to turn it off, and that's the secret to modern drug discovery, modern medicines.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely and the science that you do which is really basic and fundamental is exactly the same science as you need to make new medicines, so in fact from my laboratory we've spun out a company which now has a hundred people on the science park, and there we make cancer drugs and we use exactly the same ideas. We try to understand the shapes and we then try to target those shapes of the molecules and that's how we design new medicines.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's a rather good analogy, because in a sense what we're doing in molecular biology is understanding how nature has played with a theme and what you can see is actually the evolution of rather primitive ideas, primitive molecular structures, which have then been elaborated so that they carry out all the complex functions that allow you and me to be what we are.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd like to move on to Charles Mingus because he brought together this sense of the roots of jazz, the blues, together with very modern jazz. It's incredible improvisation.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because in the nineteen twenties Inslin was discovered and it was used and shown to be able to keep diabetics alive. But really people didn't know what it looked like, and in the nineteen fifties Fred Sanger was a famous Cambridge Nobel Prize winner, had worked out what the linear sequence of amino acids which make up a protein, but we still didn't know what it looked like in terms of its architecture, and just as with town planning you need to know about the shape and the architecture if you're going to understand function. So this molecular level you need to know the architecture and that's what we defined.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, at that time I am parallel, I was very much involved in science because I had joined the team of a very famous scientist Dorothy Hodgkin and we were working on this problem of the insulin molecules architecture and so I was doing science and it was a huge conflict and a huge tension and”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact I got more involved in planning than education that was because the main issue in Oxford at the time was building a motorway from the west into the centre and then driving it through the south part of the Oxford Meadow and crashing into East Oxford where I lived, and when eventually I became chairman of the planning committee I stopped the motorway building, introduced more pedestrianization, more bus lanes and more conservation areas.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what politicized our family was education. I had passed the eleven plus and so of my sister. My brother went to a secondary warden, but I should say that later he ended up being a professor at the age of thirty one. So that just shows 11 plus. was a terrible system and selection was completely arbitrary.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I found Oxford was a wonderful place to be, the first evening I arrived I heard someone playing the clarinet playing some jazz, and that was a friend called Dave Mekin, and we played in a jazz band together for several years. That led me through friends into increasing political activity, and so that was another thread I was very active not only in the university but in the town of Oxford.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to do a paper round and when I was thirteen I eventually managed to save up enough money to buy a cornet and this was one of the first things that I played on it with a group of friends in our first traditional jazz band.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was tremendously upset and resented it. Of course I'm not very good at painting and probably I'm not a very good musician either. So they were probably right. But I think they were wrong to the extent that you can't do both.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody in my family had ever been at school beyond the age of fifteen, my parents had no idea about university. I went to a country grammar school, continued in the sixth form to do art, and I was poured out of the art class just before the A levels so that I could do well on the science and get a state scholarship, and it was really just following the school that I've ended up going to Oxford to do science.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father felt that tremendously, looking back I know he was as intelligent as many of my colleagues in Cambridge. He had this amazing ability to think through things in a rational way, but he had no confidence in himself. My mother was very arty and the very opposite of that in many ways, but she was also, I think, very bright. And so yes, I guess they probably did encourage us all. Because they saw possibilities if we were encouraged.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents didn't have any ideas really about what I was going to do. They just had this wonderful talent to encourage me in everything I took up, whether it was painting or music or doing work at school I guess I was curious”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a huge excitement to see something for the first time. It's an enormous privilege. I can remember when as part of a group in Oxford in the late 1960s, we suddenly for the first time saw emerging from our work a picture of the hormone insulin which is involved in diabetes. We were the first to see that. It was just amazing, and of course it gave us so many clues about new things and of course what we could do in medicine.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last summer I went to Brazil and went to Manaus and took a boat up the upper Amazon. That was amazing, incredible journey living above the water above Cayman.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is something that I've discovered. Relatively recently its Gibbeto Jill, whose an amazing Brazilian musician, who's actually now Minister of Culture in the Brazilian government. But he was thrown out of Brazil for his political views, and it sums up a lot of what I feel about the world.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me just say that if you look at life in the very microscopic form, very much smaller than we can see with light, the architecture of the molecules of life are just fascinating and beautiful, so there's many, many pleasures which are parallels with art and with music, the symmetry and the beauty and the melody of science.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could do science, so I did it. But I didn't find the joy of it until I actually began to do it in a laboratory in Oxford, and then I suddenly discovered that it was not just about solving problems, but it was about seeing things laterally experiencing new things, new ideas. It was much closer to art and music than I'd thought.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is I love my science. It's incredibly stimulating. I find it the most exciting thing I do. But I can't do it without doing other things in parallel. So even when I was a young scientist I got involved in politics it gave me a different dimension, and so now when I'm still heavily involved with my own research team looking at the fundamental processes of life, I still like to be involved in something which will influence our lives more immediately.”
2007-06-03 · Desert Island Discs · Tom Blundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source