Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist, like many of the cleverest in his field, he's a games player,

most at home when he's pitting his wits against the challenges of the universe.

Such a mighty contest doesn't permit specialisation.

Theoretical physics, astrophysics, zoology, ecology, biology are just some but not all of the fields in which he's worked.

Brought up by his mother in genteel poverty in a Sydney suburb,

it was a teacher as so often who inspired the career he's enjoyed.

It's taken him to all the best places,

Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and for the

last half of the 90s he was chief scientific advisor to the British government.

As the man who gave Tony Blair a crash course in GM crop technology, he understands the need to balance

humanity with the avalanche of increasing knowledge.

But he admits that the blending of passionate values and cold analysis does not come easily.

Now the president of the Royal Society he is Bob May. Now Lord May indeed

people's peer. Which do you prefer? The passionate values or the cold analysis, Bob?

I don't wish to make the choice. They're different things. We need to ask with the potential

that science opens to us, what are the doors we want to

open and what are the doors we want to keep closed? What's the kind of

tomorrow we want to build with the possibilities? That's about values and

beliefs and science has no special voice in the choices we should make.

Indeed but when you became as you did for as I say the second half of the 90s

...