麻豆约拍

The Royal Society represents science in Britain, giving advice to the UK government and supporting scientific research. In this week鈥檚 Science Caf茅 Adam visits the oldest scientific learned society in the world, to meet its President, Sir Paul Nurse.

Paul Nurse is a geneticist who won a Nobel Prize for revealing the secrets of cell division. He tells Adam about his extraordinary discovery that the genes controlling cell division in a really primitive organism like yeast are exactly the same as those doing the job in human beings. Paul also reveals his early scientific influences - including a childhood memory of seeing Sputnik 2 in the night sky, the satellite carrying Laika the space dog.

As Paul prepares to step down from his five year tenure as President of the Royal Society they discuss his role in ensuring that science has a key place in political decision-making and in making it relevant and accessible to the public. And Adam asks the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist about his discovery, in his fifties, that his own genetic origins weren鈥檛 what he鈥檇 always assumed them to be.