David King

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser Prof Sir David King. He's had a testing four and a half years in the job - his tenure has coincided with an epidemic of foot and mouth disease, as well as a series of ongoing public health controversies played out in the media, such as the safety of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and concerns over genetically-modified crops.

He was born in South Africa and brought up in a middle-class suburb of Johannesburg. As a teenager he was taken by his school to visit a township to see how black South Africans lived. He says it was an eye-opening experience and, while he pursued his scientific studies, he also took a stance against the political regime and wrote letters denouncing apartheid. His activism brought him to the attention of South Africa's secret police - he was questioned and left with little option but to leave the country. He came to Britain and continued his studies here. He pursued an academic career - he was made the 1920 Professor of Physical Chemistry at Cambridge University in 1988, a post he still holds, and has recently been confirmed for a second term as the Government's chief scientist.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cosway this week is a scientist at the height of a distinguished academic career, he's still
0:34.3	the professor of physical chemistry at Cambridge, he was asked to take on a more public role
0:38.9	as chief scientific advisor to the government. For the past five years he's found himself in the thick of every scientific and medical
0:46.3	controversy that's going from foot and mouth disease to the safety of the MMR vaccine
0:51.0	and GM crops. It's a tricky job, though he works with politicians he has to
0:56.1	stand above politics. Independence should come easily to a man who was brought up in South Africa
1:02.0	but became isolated from both his parents
1:04.4	and his country by the stand he took against apartheid. He was virtually kicked
1:09.1	out of the country by the secret police and has spent his life since here in the UK. Openness, honesty, transparency
1:17.0	is my mantra, he says. We can't keep the public on side unless our scientists can say what they mean. He is Professor Sir David King.
1:26.0	Four and a half years David King as the government's chief scientist and you've just
1:31.4	been booked for an unprecedented second term and it's been a roller coaster ride as I've said foot and mouth
1:38.1	MMR nuclear power climate change the first thing that strikes one about all of that is the breadth
1:44.1	of the science. I mean you can't possibly be an expert in it all so how do you operate?
1:49.5	The way to handle it is first of all to recognize that a professional scientist who's worked
1:54.9	all their career at the cutting edge of science is able to pick up topics outside
2:00.6	their normal area of speciality fairly quickly. And secondly in my job I can
2:06.4	call in the experts to give me a personal seminar. So if you take foot and mouth
2:11.0	disease I very quickly found that I could call in
2:15.0	virologists, epidemiologists, vets, to talk to me about it intensely.
	...

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