Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the chemist Professor David Phillips, tireless in his efforts to popularise science.

He's combined a high-flying academic career with a love of performance and mischief.

More than a quarter of a million people all over the world have been enthralled by his chemistry

lectures, which are marked more by sudden window-rattling

explosions than dry chemical equations. His love of science has taken him on an

extraordinary journey. At the height of the Cold War, he swapped a post in America for a place at

the Academy of Sciences in Moscow where he partied with the Bolshoy and was interrogated by the

KGB. Science, he says, is about a group of people with different skills who are joined by a common

goal.

Now that sounds to me, David, like a very idealistic view of science.

This group of people, colleagues all working together, but surely you must have to at some

point be in a way competitive, prove to your colleagues that you've got something that they're not

yet on to.

That's true. I mean you obviously have to have something to bring to the party and there's no question that science is competitive. And yet it's collaborative at the same time. We all pool our knowledge if you like and that is used to go on to the next stage.

So one likes to be first to show something is happening and be right of course

But that then allows a whole host of other things to happen afterwards by other scientists

We make a huge contribution to the world we live in and we live in a molecular world. Everything around us is made of molecules, chemicals if you like.

To put it impolately, you are just a walking bag of chemicals.

You're not the first person to say that. it impolately, you are just a walking bag of chemicals.

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