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 2007. My cast away this week is the leading British scientist Sir Tom Blundell.

From medical advances in the treatment of diseases such

as diabetes, AIDS and cancer to his radical recommendations on climate change, his accomplishments

have fundamentally shifted our understanding an approach to some of the biggest challenges of our age.

Indeed, his only spectacular failure is his inability to conform to the cliche of the white-coated boffen wedded to his microscope

and unable to engage in life beyond the lab. Whether it's mapping out the tiniest building blocks of life,

playing the trumpet and a jazz band, or the love affair that saw him paying

for his wife in cows in a traditional ceremony on the Plains of Zimbabwe, he is endlessly

inspired to experience firsthand the wonder he finds in the world around him.

Tom, you've lived a very full life so far. Is the passion for scientific understanding

inseparable from the passion to experience.

It is. I love my science. It's incredibly stimulating. I find it the most exciting thing I do. But I can't do it without

doing other things in parallel. So even when I was a young scientist, I got involved in politics, it gave me a different

dimension.

And so now when I'm still heavily involved with my own research team looking at the fundamental processes of life.

I still like to be involved in something which will influence our lives more immediately.

Yet for a fair amount of time you were quite ambivalent about science.

Was there a moment that you properly fell in love with science?

Well I could do science so I did it.

But I didn't find the joy of it until I actually began to do it in a laboratory in Oxford.

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