Sir Alec Broers
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2001
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Sir Alec Broers. As a professor of electrical engineering at the forefront of research into microchip technology, Sir Alec says of his work, "If cars had made the same progress as electronics have in the past decade, then you would be able to drive from Cambridge to London in half a second". He chooses eight records to take with him to the mythical island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Mir Ist So Wunderbar by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Luxury: Lots and lots of chocolate
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an engineer. He might have been a singer. It was a choral scholarship that took him to Cambridge in the early 60s from an upbringing in Australia. |
| 0:40.0 | At Cambridge he was at the forefront of the scientific development that led to the onward march of the silicon chip. |
| 0:46.0 | For 20 years after that he went to work for IBM in the States, a playhouse for electronics he called it, |
| 0:52.0 | and then returned to his university where |
| 0:54.4 | eventually the post of vice-chancellor possibly helped compensate for the |
| 0:58.3 | colossal drop in salary. Under his regime investment and government funding are making Cambridge University a high-tech business-orientated training ground, |
| 1:08.0 | the envy of academic institutions all over the country. |
| 1:11.0 | Get universities and industry to work together he says. |
| 1:14.6 | Everybody can gain a bit of the best of both worlds. He is Sir Alec Broers. It all sounds |
| 1:20.7 | so simple Sir Alec but I bet it isn't. |
| 1:24.0 | No, it's not simple, but there's a great deal to be gained on both sides, and I think that's |
| 1:29.9 | what people are waking up to, that industry that's really doing research can provide |
| 1:35.8 | wonderful facilities and then if you have a good idea, an original idea that can really |
| 1:41.0 | flourish, they can make it flourish. Of course as I say that that's in a sense very obvious but you must have trouble with one side or the other the academics or the businessmen |
| 1:50.1 | you know always |
| 1:53.0 | always which side which side give you most trouble I don't I won't take sides I mean we have to work on both sides but that is a very good point and that's a lot of academics have worried that they may lose their freedom |
| 2:07.0 | I argue strongly against that |
| 2:09.6 | But you're you are taking them on in a sense, aren't you? |
| 2:13.0 | You are stirring up the British academic institution by saying, |
| 2:16.6 | come on, wake up, look at this, we've got to go forward hand in hand with business. |
... |
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