Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a businessman, the son of a Yorkshire carpenter, he's today chairman of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

It wasn't until he found a job in a pathology laboratory in his local hospital that he realized where his true interests lay.

In fact, he was 23 before he went to university, but from that late start he accelerated

fast, taking a first-class degree, heading a research unit, working in America,

and eventually returning home to join the company he now runs.

Last year he was voted the country's most impressive industrialist, a position he's

earned by being tough, determined and ambitious. The way science is being done is

changing beyond recognition, he says. It's no longer a bloke shouting

Eureka I've found something in a bottle he is the chairman of glaxo welcome

Sir Richard Sykes does that mean Sir Richard that science is no longer as exciting as it was now that it's become big

business and done corporately.

Oh I think science is still extremely exciting.

In fact you could argue that it's even more exciting than there ever used to be simply because

it's moving at a much rapid pace.

The results come much faster than they ever came in the past.

But it tends to be a number of small eureka's that eventually end up to be a big

eureka rather than just one big eureka.

But it's not like a man working on his own when the Eureka really belonged to him.

No, because I think that's very, very difficult today. People working teams, they work across disciplines,

in fact they work across the globe on many projects, and that's the way the big science operates.

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