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Jonathan Amos The Voice Behind BBC Science A Day in the Life · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Okay, so hello, folks. Welcome to another episode of Science
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: of the Times. I'm Simon Khalid.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: And I'm Tim Coulson. And today it's a little bit different.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: We have a science correspondent from the BBC on, John Amos.
• 0:22
  Speaker 4: Well, hi, guys. Although I should make one little correction.
• 0:25
  Speaker 5: I've just stepped back from the BBC. But I do
• 0:29
  Speaker 5: have the tattoo in the sense that I worked for
• 0:32
  Speaker 5: the corporation for 38 years, which is quite a while.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: So it's in my DNA.
• 0:37
  Speaker 4: It's in my DNA. I hope they.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Gave you a carriage clock when you left for that service.
• 0:43
  Speaker 5: No, they don't do that anymore. They do, however, give
• 0:47
  Speaker 5: you a little bit of money to go and buy.
• 0:49
  Speaker 5: I got this letter from them when I told them
• 0:51
  Speaker 5: I was leaving. And they said, so you can have
• 0:55
  Speaker 5: a leaving present. It was something.
• 0:58
  Speaker 4: Like £ 765. 42p, something like that. Quite specific.
• 1:06
  Speaker 5: I had to spend the money on something, but it
• 1:10
  Speaker 5: had to be done by a preferred supplier. In any
• 1:15
  Speaker 5: large organization, this would normally mean furniture, or in the
• 1:18
  Speaker 5: case of the BBC, it would mean cameras or microphones
• 1:21
  Speaker 5: and stuff. So I eventually managed to get a camera.
• 1:24
  Speaker 5: I could have had it engraved, but that would have
• 1:27
  Speaker 5: had to have been within the sum itself as well.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: So, Jonathan, can you, for our listeners and viewers, can
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: you tell us what your area of expertise were within
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: the reporting that you did for the BBC?
• 1:42
  Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I started out as a general reporter back
• 1:44
  Speaker 5: in 86. I did some freelancing coming out of journalism
• 1:50
  Speaker 5: school and then sort of got a short contract with
• 1:54
  Speaker 5: the BBC in Cambridge. Stayed there for a number of years,
• 1:58
  Speaker 5: got put on staff, moved to London. where I started
• 2:03
  Speaker 5: to do some of the science reporting that I'd started
• 2:08
  Speaker 5: in Cambridge.
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: You can't avoid it, right?
• 2:10
  Speaker 5: I mean, if you're in Oxford, Cambridge, you're in that
• 2:12
  Speaker 5: golden triangle, you know, you get a task thrust upon
• 2:18
  Speaker 5: you as a cub reporter, go and interview this person.
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: And it could be anything, right?
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: Who was the first person you interviewed then about science?
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Can you remember?
• 2:27
  Speaker 4: About science? I don't know, but I.
• 2:32
  Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean, I think you know this, Tim.
• 2:36
  Speaker 5: I had one of these Road to Damascus events, which
• 2:40
  Speaker 5: I should sort of put on the record here. So
• 2:45
  Speaker 5: I came out of school with very little science education
• 2:49
  Speaker 5: at all, did no biology, did a little bit of
• 2:52
  Speaker 5: physics and chemistry, which I dropped early. I was more
• 2:56
  Speaker 5: interested in playing sports, football, that kind of thing. But
• 3:01
  Speaker 5: when I arrived in Cambridge, I discovered this whole new
• 3:04
  Speaker 5: world that I just didn't know exist. And a key
• 3:09
  Speaker 5: interview was, I think it was April 86 or 87,
• 3:11
  Speaker 5: I can't remember. My producer said to me, go and
• 3:15
  Speaker 5: interview Greg Winter. I didn't know who this guy was.
• 3:18
  Speaker 5: He was, I think he was director, deputy director of
• 3:21
  Speaker 5: the laboratory molecular biology at that stage. And he had
• 3:26
  Speaker 5: humanized monoclonal antibodies. This was a mystery, total mystery to me.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: And I spent- Many of our listeners won't know what
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: those are.
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: We should ask Simon for the actual definition.
• 3:40
  Speaker 5: But as I understood it back then, these were, they
• 3:43
  Speaker 5: were described to us back then as silver bullets. That
• 3:47
  Speaker 5: was really how they were being advertised. George Collar, Cesar
• 3:51
  Speaker 5: Milstein had managed to kind of engineer immune molecules to.
• 3:57
  Speaker 4: Do specific tasks.
• 3:59
  Speaker 5: And of course, these were engineered using rodents in mice
• 4:04
  Speaker 5: and rats. And the human immune system is pretty smart.
• 4:08
  Speaker 5: It soon realizes, hang on a second, this molecule may
• 4:11
  Speaker 5: well be a defensive molecule, but it's not ours. And therefore,
• 4:14
  Speaker 5: we're going to crack down on it. And what Winter
• 4:17
  Speaker 5: did was to extend that research to kind of full
• 4:20
  Speaker 5: human immune system to accept these molecules. And Well, I mean,
• 4:25
  Speaker 5: the world has been changed by them. I was just
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: looking at the most valuable monoclonal antibody on the market today,
• 4:34
  Speaker 5: which is a drug called Keytruda, which has annual sales
• 4:37
  Speaker 5: of $ 25 billion.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Not bad.
• 4:42
  Speaker 4: It's mad, isn't it?
• 4:43
  Speaker 5: Even my dog now. My dog has a monthly injection
• 4:47
  Speaker 5: of a monoclonal.
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: Antibody, which.
• 4:51
  Speaker 5: Which stops pain in her legs, in her arthritis that
• 4:56
  Speaker 5: she has. So she bounces around thanks to this work.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: So, John, you sort of, I guess it was quite
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: a journey. You went from, okay, so you went from
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: winter and the monoclonal antibodies to then sort of specializing
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: in the polar regions and also sort of European space.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 5:16
  Speaker 5: Yeah, because I was working in Cambridge, I was obviously
• 5:21
  Speaker 5: starting to get very interested in all the science that
• 5:23
  Speaker 5: I hadn't done. The Greg Winter episode was really a
• 5:28
  Speaker 5: key moment, a milestone for me, because it convinced me
• 5:31
  Speaker 5: that this might actually be an arena in which I
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: wanted to specialize and do a lot of reporting on.
• 5:37
  Speaker 5: I just felt I needed that education that I missed.
• 5:41
  Speaker 5: So I enrolled with the Open University, did seven years
• 5:44
  Speaker 5: with them.
• 5:45
  Speaker 4: Quite deliberately.
• 5:48
  Speaker 5: Sort of making an education that would allow me to
• 5:54
  Speaker 5: do lots of different things. So, you know, I did astronomy,
• 5:57
  Speaker 5: I did particle physics, I got some biology, obviously geology,
• 6:03
  Speaker 5: ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences. You know, I quite deliberately went
• 6:08
  Speaker 5: and picked very diverse sciences and In order to to
• 6:13
  Speaker 5: do the reporting that I wanted to do. And, you know,
• 6:17
  Speaker 5: you kind of put your hand up in situations in
• 6:20
  Speaker 5: a newsroom where somebody says, oh, we want to cover
• 6:23
  Speaker 5: this story. It seems to be quite big. It's a
• 6:26
  Speaker 5: science story. And then a lot of people in that
• 6:29
  Speaker 5: room will sort of duck behind the chairs or the
• 6:31
  Speaker 5: desks because they don't want to do it. And mine
• 6:34
  Speaker 5: was the hand that always stuck up in the air, said,
• 6:37
  Speaker 5: I'll go do that.
• 6:38
  Speaker 4: I'll do it.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: So why don't people want to do it?
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: Is it because they think science is hard or because
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: they think scientists are incapable of explaining what they've done
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: in an accessible fashion?
• 6:51
  Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of arts humanities
• 6:55
  Speaker 5: backgrounds in journalism, right? I think a lot of people
• 7:00
  Speaker 5: go into journalism to perhaps because they want to fight
• 7:03
  Speaker 5: the good fight. So, so maybe they, you know, they
• 7:07
  Speaker 5: want to sort of do sort of political type reporting.
• 7:11
  Speaker 4: I mean, I was kind of like that at the beginning.
• 7:13
  Speaker 5: There was a, the BBC's political editor when I began
• 7:18
  Speaker 5: reporting was a Northern Irish man called John Cole. I
• 7:22
  Speaker 5: don't know if you remember him. He used to stand
• 7:24
  Speaker 5: outside Downing street waiting for Margaret Thatcher to, come out
• 7:29
  Speaker 5: in his big coat and his thicker sort of Northern
• 7:32
  Speaker 5: Irish accent.
• 7:33
  Speaker 4: And I thought, I might quite like to be him.
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: And then I sat in a education subcommittee at Cambridge
• 7:41
  Speaker 5: County Council. And that completely dissuaded me from ever wanting
• 7:45
  Speaker 5: to do politics journalism and to go and do something else.
• 7:49
  Speaker 5: Because if you think particle physics is tough, you want
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: to get into local government finance.
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: That is just smoke and mirrors.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: I think it's almost as probabilistic as the behavior of
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: particles probably.
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Simon, you, I think.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: No, I sort of, yeah, just interested in, um, sort of,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: I think just the journey, I suppose. Yeah.
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: I mean, so yes, I mean, so, so there I was, um,
• 8:18
  Speaker 5: you know, sticking my hand up, um, whenever an opportunity
• 8:21
  Speaker 5: came up, uh, When we started Radio 5 Live, which
• 8:27
  Speaker 5: was this new talk station back in the early 90s,
• 8:31
  Speaker 5: they were looking for people to do specialism. So again,
• 8:35
  Speaker 5: I stuck my hand up, said, well, I'll do some science.
• 8:37
  Speaker 5: I had a weekly slot in tandem with New Scientist magazine,
• 8:42
  Speaker 5: which went out every Thursday morning. It was a five-minute
• 8:45
  Speaker 5: feature that I used to do based on something that
• 8:48
  Speaker 5: was in New Scientist that week. They faxed me, faxed me.
• 8:53
  Speaker 5: one of the articles. And then I'd go out and
• 8:55
  Speaker 5: interview people and make an audio version of that. And
• 8:59
  Speaker 5: that went on for a couple of years. And then
• 9:00
  Speaker 5: I moved fairly swiftly over to this new project, which
• 9:04
  Speaker 5: was to set up BBC News Online.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: So what you know is- Oh, wow, the website.
• 9:09
  Speaker 4: The website, right?
• 9:10
  Speaker 5: So there was a small group of us that were
• 9:13
  Speaker 5: sort of tasked with getting that together as a small newsroom. Obviously,
• 9:17
  Speaker 5: we had to write code, the sort of HTML code, But,
• 9:20
  Speaker 5: you know, we weren't sort of engineers, software engineers in
• 9:23
  Speaker 5: that sense. We were the journalists that were writing the stories.
• 9:27
  Speaker 5: And so that was just as a general editor. Again,
• 9:30
  Speaker 5: you know, if I saw something interesting in science, I'd
• 9:33
  Speaker 5: go off and do it. But then in about 98,
• 9:36
  Speaker 5: they said, right, we want to set up a special
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: science section. And I took on that task, started the
• 9:46
  Speaker 5: science section, the health section. and the technology sections, which
• 9:49
  Speaker 5: you see on BBC News today.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: So that's a hugely wide remit, right?
• 9:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 9:58
  Speaker 5: I mean, this is the interesting thing about you know,
• 10:01
  Speaker 5: do you have to be a scientist to be a
• 10:05
  Speaker 5: science journalist? And of course, the thing is, you know,
• 10:09
  Speaker 5: it doesn't matter how deep your knowledge is. You know,
• 10:13
  Speaker 5: if you've got a PhD in the biomechanics of locust legs,
• 10:17
  Speaker 5: that doesn't really help you do particle physics and the
• 10:21
  Speaker 5: Higgs boson, right?
• 10:23
  Speaker 4: It's more of an approach.
• 10:25
  Speaker 5: It's a way of thinking. That's what's really important. Some
• 10:29
  Speaker 5: of the best science journalists that I've come across in
• 10:32
  Speaker 5: my career had no science background at all. You think
• 10:35
  Speaker 5: of the recently departed Tim Radford, the Guardian, science editor
• 10:40
  Speaker 5: of the Guardian. He was arts editor at one stage,
• 10:43
  Speaker 5: and he was One of the best writers through my career.
• 10:47
  Speaker 5: And he could get scientists to talk in a way,
• 10:51
  Speaker 5: in a narrative that would engage the public, but also
• 10:54
  Speaker 5: get the science right. Because you have to go to
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: a certain depth and then you have to come back
• 11:00
  Speaker 5: because your audience is not there.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 11:03
  Speaker 4: They're not at that depth. So you can't.
• 11:06
  Speaker 5: You can't sort of swim around there. You've got to
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: come back to a level. Whilst not patronising people, you've
• 11:12
  Speaker 5: got to come back to a level which enables you
• 11:15
  Speaker 5: to talk about these topics in a way that engages me.
• 11:19
  Speaker 5: I mean, one of the things that really used to
• 11:21
  Speaker 5: infuriate me about the media is, you know, you turn
• 11:25
  Speaker 5: on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and you
• 11:28
  Speaker 5: get these tough interviewers like John Humphreys. And, you know,
• 11:31
  Speaker 5: they take the Chancellor of the Exchequer to task.
• 11:34
  Speaker 4: About this and that. Then they'd have a scientist on
• 11:37
  Speaker 4: and they would go, ho, ho, ho. Well, I don't
• 11:39
  Speaker 4: understand this. Yeah, whatever you say.
• 11:43
  Speaker 5: Now, they would never say that to the Chancellor Exchequer,
• 11:46
  Speaker 5: but they advertised and celebrated their ignorance of science.
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: And that really got my goat. It still gets my
• 11:52
  Speaker 4: goat when I hear it.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that still occurs, actually. But I think one of the,
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: you know, I wonder about this because often scientists... are
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: very precise in the language they use. And they want
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: all of the caveats or they want the nuances to
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: come across in a story that may only be a
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: few hundred words, right? So it's impossible to do. Have
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: you had kind of issues where you've been interviewing? I mean,
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: did you ever send your copy back to the scientist
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: you'd been interviewing to have a look at or to
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: edit when you'd written it? Or was that just too
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: dangerous because they'd say, Yeah.
• 12:35
  Speaker 4: That way madness lies.
• 12:36
  Speaker 5: I mean, you know, you get a sense for how
• 12:46
  Speaker 5: certain people are and how they they want things done
• 12:51
  Speaker 5: or not done. You know, if you if you have
• 12:54
  Speaker 5: people that you know quite well, you have an understanding there.
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: They know how you speak. I mean, it's a trust thing.
• 13:04
  Speaker 5: So, I mean, you can't get it completely wrong or
• 13:09
  Speaker 5: really smash it with a sledgehammer to make it work
• 13:11
  Speaker 5: for you because that scientist will not come back and
• 13:14
  Speaker 5: talk to you again. So there's a bit of a
• 13:17
  Speaker 5: trade that goes on there in terms of, you know,
• 13:19
  Speaker 5: you've got to relax your language a bit. You've got
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: to get rid of some of those caveats. And I'll
• 13:26
  Speaker 5: meet you sort of halfway so that we can talk
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: in a language that.
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: that people understand.
• 13:32
  Speaker 5: There are examples i can't think of any off the
• 13:34
  Speaker 5: top of my head now where we so i'll give
• 13:36
  Speaker 5: you a classic example all right we when we talk
• 13:39
  Speaker 5: about uh all of the smashed up rock on the
• 13:42
  Speaker 5: surface of the moon the scientists talk about regolith okay
• 13:47
  Speaker 5: that is the correct term for that dust those small
• 13:49
  Speaker 5: fragments of rock science journalists talk about soil right it
• 13:54
  Speaker 5: is not soil but the public won't understand the word
• 13:57
  Speaker 5: regolith they've got no idea what.
• 13:59
  Speaker 4: That is So we talk about lunar soil. That's what
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: we do.
• 14:04
  Speaker 5: So it's things like that. So we do develop a
• 14:07
  Speaker 5: vocabulary that we think will work. And a lot of people, scientists,
• 14:14
  Speaker 5: they kind of buy into it. If they're a planetary scientist,
• 14:17
  Speaker 5: they'll go, yeah, it's not right, but okay.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: I think this is something we're learning, Simon, with the podcast,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: isn't it?
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: Sometimes we'll be talking to scientists and they'll get into
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: the real details of what they've done. And you understand why.
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: And actually, we find it fascinating. So we have to
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: sometimes pull back as well. But we should just go
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: to our sponsors briefly. So if you're enjoying this, please subscribe.
• 14:40
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• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Hi, Tim. You're looking particularly snazzy today. What are you wearing?
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: I'm wearing a piece from a company called Grace and Garbo.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: And actually, you know a little bit more about them
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: than I do, to be honest.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: I do.
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: You're the fashion queen.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: I'm also wearing a piece from Grayson Garbo. So this
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  Speaker 3: And thank you very much to them for supporting our podcast.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: I hope their sales soar.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Grace and Garvo.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: Well, welcome back.
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: So we're here today with John Amos, who's recently stepped down.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: And just retired after 38 years at the....
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: As a science correspondent from the BBC. And I think
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: you wanted to ask some questions, Saima, about some of
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: the stories.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Is that right?
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I did, if that's okay, John.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: I was particularly, you know, going through some of your
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: reports and particularly fascinated about the polar regions in general.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: And I just wondered if you could, you know, I'll
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: leave it to you. Tell us sort of what was
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: your favorite story that broke about, you know, the polar regions?
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Was it the penguins or the icebergs or.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 16:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, people who know me know that I
• 16:25
  Speaker 5: have a really unhealthy obsession with icebergs, which is part
• 16:32
  Speaker 5: of the technological shift that's taken place in the last
• 16:36
  Speaker 5: 10 years or so. There's a lot of open source
• 16:40
  Speaker 5: data now from satellites, which we can use in all
• 16:44
  Speaker 5: sorts of fields. But particularly the last sort of 10,
• 16:48
  Speaker 5: 15 years, I would say, the satellites in polar regions
• 16:52
  Speaker 5: have really come of age. And we've made some quite
• 16:57
  Speaker 5: extraordinary discoveries.
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: I mean, I remember, you know, being in Cambridge, obviously
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: that's the base of the British Antarctic Survey.
• 17:04
  Speaker 5: And, you know, if you go back to the beginning
• 17:07
  Speaker 5: of my career when I was talking to those people,
• 17:12
  Speaker 5: We didn't have any real idea whether the Antarctic, for example,
• 17:17
  Speaker 5: was gaining mass or losing mass.
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: Now, today, we can put numbers on it.
• 17:23
  Speaker 5: We can put, you know, in the gigatons per year,
• 17:26
  Speaker 5: we can put numbers on how much Antarctica is losing,
• 17:30
  Speaker 5: where it's losing, where it's gaining mass through snowfall. And
• 17:35
  Speaker 5: that is one of the great, great changes that we've had.
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: And that's kind of fed into the environmentalism, the activism
• 17:44
  Speaker 5: that's come alongside that, and obviously the development of computer
• 17:48
  Speaker 5: models as well, being able to understand which are the
• 17:52
  Speaker 5: regions of the Antarctic and the Arctic as well that
• 17:55
  Speaker 5: are most vulnerable to future warming. So, yeah, I don't
• 18:00
  Speaker 5: know why, but I kind of just bumped into things polar.
• 18:05
  Speaker 5: And once you start getting into it, it just becomes
• 18:08
  Speaker 5: ever more fascinating and The wildlife down there is extraordinary.
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: You know, the penguins, I love penguins. Everybody loves penguins.
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: Everyone loves icebergs and penguins.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: And did you get, did you get to go on location?
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: Did you persuade the BBC to send you, to send
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: you down to Antarctica to look at the penguins?
• 18:24
  Speaker 5: That's the funny thing is that everybody assumes that I've
• 18:27
  Speaker 5: been to the Antarctic and I haven't, you know, furthest
• 18:32
  Speaker 5: North I've been is probably Inverness or something like that.
• 18:35
  Speaker 5: And the furthest, furthest south is well south.
• 18:38
  Speaker 4: Africa i've been to south africa so yeah.
• 18:40
  Speaker 5: No but no i no i haven't i'd love to
• 18:42
  Speaker 5: go um it would uh it would be truly amazing
• 18:45
  Speaker 5: yeah well.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: Given you know so much about it now as well well.
• 18:49
  Speaker 5: Right i mean this is this is it it would
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: be be fascinating to see it in in person to
• 18:54
  Speaker 5: to go to to some of these these regions um
• 18:58
  Speaker 5: you know i mean these some of these places are
• 19:00
  Speaker 5: melting before our eyes virtually uh you know you're you're
• 19:04
  Speaker 5: seeing huge great waterfalls coming off off the edge of
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: some of the ice shelves. You know, some of the
• 19:10
  Speaker 5: ice shelves have, in the time that I've reporting, you know,
• 19:13
  Speaker 5: the Antarctic Peninsula, I don't know, has probably lost five
• 19:16
  Speaker 5: or six at least ice shelves have just gone, they've
• 19:19
  Speaker 5: shattered and disappeared. So yeah, this is a really dynamic
• 19:23
  Speaker 5: moment in our polar regions and people should be paying
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: close attention because these are the parts of the world
• 19:30
  Speaker 5: that are warming fastest.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: And so how has the climate change story changed over
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: your nearly four decades at the BBC?
• 19:39
  Speaker 5: That's a really interesting question because, you know, I can
• 19:42
  Speaker 5: go back to articles that I wrote, let's say 25,
• 19:46
  Speaker 5: more than 25 years ago.
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: Ago.
• 19:50
  Speaker 5: Again, great uncertainty about what was happening. I get pestered.
• 19:58
  Speaker 5: I get pestered about an article that I wrote in 2007,
• 20:01
  Speaker 5: I think it was, where I was at the American
• 20:05
  Speaker 5: Geophysical Union fall meeting. There's a big gathering of earth
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: scientists every year. And there was some quite controversial research
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: that was presented, a very aggressive model that suggested that
• 20:20
  Speaker 5: the Arctic, the sea ice, may be gone by 2013. Now,
• 20:26
  Speaker 5: when they say gone, they mean less than a million
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: square kilometers, because you're always going.
• 20:30
  Speaker 4: To, in the depths of winter, you're always going to
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: have some ice.
• 20:34
  Speaker 5: And even in, you know, summer, you know, there's going
• 20:38
  Speaker 5: to be places where the ice is thick, where it's
• 20:41
  Speaker 5: attached to the coast, where it's not going to completely
• 20:43
  Speaker 5: melt out. So, and this keeps getting thrown back in
• 20:48
  Speaker 5: my face every, you know, every year when the minimum
• 20:52
  Speaker 5: number is published in September. It's always September, middle of September,
• 20:57
  Speaker 5: the Arctic gets to its summer minimum. If you read
• 21:01
  Speaker 5: that article, I quote other people as well, other you know,
• 21:07
  Speaker 5: other projections, but people aren't kind of interested in that.
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: Slightly before that, I'd published an article where quite a
• 21:16
  Speaker 5: prominent American scientist had suggested that the sort of the
• 21:22
  Speaker 5: loss of Arctic sea ice had nothing to do with warming.
• 21:25
  Speaker 5: It was all to do with winds and the change
• 21:28
  Speaker 5: of wind patterns. And this was picked up in Congress.
• 21:31
  Speaker 5: And you would find that sort of climate skeptic congressman
• 21:36
  Speaker 5: would be quoting this article as proof that actually we
• 21:40
  Speaker 5: didn't have anything to worry about. So on the one hand,
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: I'm getting sort of bashed about for suggesting Arctic sea
• 21:47
  Speaker 5: ice might go very quickly. And on the other hand,
• 21:50
  Speaker 5: I'm getting bashed about the head because, you know, I
• 21:52
  Speaker 5: dare to suggest that the climate skeptics might have a point.
• 21:56
  Speaker 5: You come forward 25, 30 years, of course, and a
• 22:00
  Speaker 5: lot of these uncertainties now have been narrowed. Enormously. And
• 22:05
  Speaker 5: we've got a very good idea of the way that
• 22:08
  Speaker 5: Arctic sea ice is behaving, the way that it is
• 22:11
  Speaker 5: spinning up as well. You can see that you can
• 22:14
  Speaker 5: see this layer of fresh water that sits on top
• 22:19
  Speaker 5: of the Beaufort Sea. It's quite extraordinary, this bulge of
• 22:22
  Speaker 5: fresh water that sits on top of the Beaufort Sea.
• 22:25
  Speaker 5: Because it's been spun up by the ice and the wind.
• 22:29
  Speaker 5: And these are all characteristic of the changes that are
• 22:32
  Speaker 5: taking place. You know, the erosion that's taking place on
• 22:37
  Speaker 5: some of the coastlines now because they're being hit by waves.
• 22:41
  Speaker 5: The release of methane. All of these indicators are pointing
• 22:46
  Speaker 5: in the same direction. Yes, there are uncertainties. But I
• 22:50
  Speaker 5: think we've got a pretty good grasp, certainly compared to
• 22:52
  Speaker 5: where I was 25, 30 years ago.
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: And do you feel the public is engaged more now?
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: Are they more accepting of the climate change stories?
• 22:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I don't know where.
• 23:05
  Speaker 5: So there's an argument to be had about policy, right?
• 23:09
  Speaker 5: So you can see what's happening. So how do you
• 23:13
  Speaker 5: deal with it? And that's kind of where the arguments
• 23:17
  Speaker 5: should always... have been, right, is what is our response?
• 23:23
  Speaker 5: You know, on the one hand, you have people like
• 23:26
  Speaker 5: Bjorn Lomberg who say, well, you know, yes, climate change
• 23:30
  Speaker 5: is happening, but there are other, you know, as equal
• 23:34
  Speaker 5: important issues, maybe bigger issues that we should.
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: Be spending our money on.
• 23:39
  Speaker 5: And on the other side, you've got people going, no, no, no,
• 23:41
  Speaker 5: climate change is the biggest threat we face. It is
• 23:44
  Speaker 5: the big issue that is in our future and we
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: should be We should be dealing with with that. And
• 23:51
  Speaker 5: so it's yeah, it's at some point, you know, we
• 23:55
  Speaker 5: kind of we should kind of move over just to
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: that policy issue and talk about that. And you've seen
• 24:01
  Speaker 5: with climate skeptics, you know, you can always tell when
• 24:05
  Speaker 5: when when when an argument is moving away from people
• 24:08
  Speaker 5: because they start to shift the goalposts. So they started
• 24:11
  Speaker 5: out by saying there's no warming anymore. there's always been
• 24:14
  Speaker 5: climate change, you know, it's been warmer and colder in
• 24:18
  Speaker 5: the past. Well, yeah, okay, so it is warming, but
• 24:21
  Speaker 5: it's not warming that fast. Oh, look, there's been a
• 24:23
  Speaker 5: pause in the warming over the last few years. Oh, no,
• 24:27
  Speaker 5: it's going up again. Well, okay, well, you know, I mean,
• 24:29
  Speaker 5: there are other issues we should worry about. You know,
• 24:31
  Speaker 5: it's kind of when those people kind of just start
• 24:36
  Speaker 5: moving the goalposts, you think, okay, you've got a problem there.
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: You've got a problem and you need to deal with it.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: So, John, you also did quite a lot of reporting
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: on space and particularly sort of European sort of endeavours
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: into space. Is there anything particular that sort of was
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: a highlight for you in that area?
• 24:55
  Speaker 5: Well, one of the great things about the position I've
• 24:59
  Speaker 5: had is to be in the room, right? There's nothing
• 25:02
  Speaker 5: beats being in the room. You know, I think one
• 25:07
  Speaker 5: of the most remarkable spectacles I think I've seen in
• 25:10
  Speaker 5: my career was just being.
• 25:14
  Speaker 5: With James Webb, the space telescope that took, you know,
• 25:18
  Speaker 5: 20 years to build, 20 years to plan, cost $ 10 billion.
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: You know, I'd seen parts of it over the course
• 25:25
  Speaker 5: of many years because it took so long to build.
• 25:28
  Speaker 5: But to go to South America, to go to Kuru,
• 25:31
  Speaker 5: the spaceport, the European spaceport, just as it's about to
• 25:34
  Speaker 5: be put on top of this rocket and see it finished,
• 25:38
  Speaker 5: that is really exciting. I think it's out there now,
• 25:42
  Speaker 5: a million and a half kilometres. away from Earth, looking
• 25:46
  Speaker 5: back to less than 300 million years after the Big Bang,
• 25:51
  Speaker 5: that sort of idea that because of the finite speed
• 25:53
  Speaker 5: of light, the.
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: Deeper you look in space, the further back in time
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: you're able to see. That's incredible. It really, really is.
• 26:00
  Speaker 5: It still blows my mind. I took somebody with me
• 26:03
  Speaker 5: from the European Space Agency. I was making a documentary
• 26:06
  Speaker 5: for Radio 4. They wouldn't allow us in the clean
• 26:09
  Speaker 5: room proper for obvious reasons. we were in a viewing gallery.
• 26:14
  Speaker 5: This is Mark McCorquan, who's the science director at ESA.
• 26:19
  Speaker 5: And so I wanted to get some idea before I
• 26:21
  Speaker 5: recorded Mark coming in to see James Webb, because he
• 26:25
  Speaker 5: hadn't seen, he'd been on an advisory committee for 23
• 26:28
  Speaker 5: years on this thing, but he'd never seen the finished telescope.
• 26:31
  Speaker 5: And I said, stay there. I'm just going to get
• 26:33
  Speaker 5: the lay of the land as it were. I went
• 26:35
  Speaker 5: in there and I thought, right, okay. Went out, switched
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: on the microphone. And I said, come on, Mark, in
• 26:40
  Speaker 5: we go to, to see. James Webb, and he was, well,
• 26:45
  Speaker 5: he was in tears actually to see this.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: I'm not surprised after having.
• 26:50
  Speaker 5: The documentary is still there on BBC Sounds. It's about
• 26:54
  Speaker 5: halfway through and he really chokes up as he's looking
• 26:59
  Speaker 5: at this thing and to just wonder at what it's
• 27:02
  Speaker 5: doing now. And I think one of the others that
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: sticks out in my mind is 2015. was being in
• 27:10
  Speaker 5: the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., when they announced
• 27:14
  Speaker 5: the first detection of gravitational waves. So, I mean, this
• 27:18
  Speaker 5: is an Earth-based experiment. These are the most sensitive instruments
• 27:22
  Speaker 5: that have ever been devised by men, women, to try
• 27:27
  Speaker 5: and capture the very tiny distortions in the fabric of
• 27:30
  Speaker 5: space-time that are created by gravitational waves. And they eventually
• 27:35
  Speaker 5: get the machine up to, to the required sensitivity, switch
• 27:40
  Speaker 5: it on, and even before it's properly settled down, bang,
• 27:44
  Speaker 5: it detects a gravitational wave.
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: And then they announce it in, what was that?
• 27:49
  Speaker 5: That was 2015, I think it was, February of 2015,
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: around about that time. And we're all crammed into this tiny,
• 27:56
  Speaker 5: tiny little room to hear this announcement. It still sends
• 28:00
  Speaker 5: shivers down our... This is a hundred-year quest, right? You know,
• 28:05
  Speaker 5: Einstein thought we'd never develop technology that was sense enough
• 28:09
  Speaker 5: sensitive enough to pick up the prediction of his equations
• 28:13
  Speaker 5: and not only did we do it but those gravitational
• 28:17
  Speaker 5: waves very very precisely matched his equations it's just a
• 28:21
  Speaker 5: beautiful thing right utterly beautiful thing and did.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: You get to a point when you'd sort of try
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: and predict what stories might break the next year and
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: if so what are the next big stories that might
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: be or.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Would you would like to see break i guess.
• 28:37
  Speaker 5: Well, I guess the greatest story of our time would
• 28:44
  Speaker 5: be to detect life beyond Earth, wouldn't it?
• 28:47
  Speaker 4: That, I think, is the Holy Grail. I think that
• 28:51
  Speaker 4: is the thing.
• 28:52
  Speaker 5: There's a piece of rock on Mars now that's sitting
• 28:57
  Speaker 5: in a little titanium tube in the belly of the.
• 28:59
  Speaker 4: Perseverance rover, NASA's Perseverance rover.
• 29:03
  Speaker 5: That was drilled from a rock that had these, well,
• 29:06
  Speaker 5: they call them leopard spots, these little, little marks.
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: What we know from the chemistry of that rock.
• 29:13
  Speaker 5: And the structures that we see, if you saw those
• 29:16
  Speaker 5: on earth, you think, oh, that's been mediated by bacteria.
• 29:19
  Speaker 4: No, no question about it.
• 29:21
  Speaker 5: So, you know, can we, can we, can we get
• 29:24
  Speaker 5: that rock back? Because at the moment that Mr. Trump
• 29:27
  Speaker 5: has decided that he's not that keen on science. So
• 29:30
  Speaker 5: he's going to, cut the budget or wants to cut
• 29:32
  Speaker 5: the budget of NASA by a quarter and the National
• 29:35
  Speaker 5: Science Foundation by almost half. I mean, these are difficult times.
• 29:39
  Speaker 5: in the US at the moment.
• 29:41
  Speaker 4: But getting that back is super, super important.
• 29:45
  Speaker 5: I don't think James Webb is going to find that
• 29:49
  Speaker 5: biosignature around some other planet, but maybe some of the
• 29:52
  Speaker 5: telescopes to come after it will find a copy compelling
• 29:59
  Speaker 5: biosignature you know so we'll see something in the atmosphere
• 30:02
  Speaker 5: or a combination probably going to be a combination of
• 30:04
  Speaker 5: chemistry uh in the atmosphere of another planet that says
• 30:08
  Speaker 5: well you know occam's rays are the simplest explanation for
• 30:11
  Speaker 5: that is its life um we're not there yet but
• 30:14
  Speaker 5: that that is that is the great discovery and you
• 30:16
  Speaker 5: know just just as important if if they bring that
• 30:19
  Speaker 5: rock back from mars and it doesn't have life you
• 30:23
  Speaker 5: know that that's almost that's.
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: Even Well, that's even bigger, right?
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: It's data.
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: It's, you know, why isn't there life? Why wasn't there life?
• 30:33
  Speaker 5: Why are we so special? These are magic questions.
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: They really are.
• 30:38
  Speaker 5: So we're going to push in those directions, I'm sure.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: Simon, I've got one more question. We're running out of time.
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: But one question some of our listeners are going to
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: want is what advice, I guess there's two more questions. One,
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: what advice would you give to a budding science journalist?
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: Is it going to be go and study classics at university?
• 31:02
  Speaker 5: So I tell you what I, you know, I've, I've
• 31:04
  Speaker 5: poopooed a little bit, the, the idea that you, you
• 31:06
  Speaker 5: don't need a science background, you know, so why did
• 31:09
  Speaker 5: I go and get one?
• 31:10
  Speaker 4: Um, well, obviously, you know, I, I sort of fell
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: in love with it and wanted to do it anyway.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 31:15
  Speaker 5: Um, but having, having got that education, what it gave
• 31:20
  Speaker 5: me was, was the ability to see connections, right. So
• 31:25
  Speaker 5: you'll go into one field. You'll understand the scientific method.
• 31:30
  Speaker 5: You'll understand why people work a particular way. You'll understand
• 31:34
  Speaker 5: how science works. And that's true right across the board, right?
• 31:38
  Speaker 5: So that is kind of helpful. But more fundamentally, if
• 31:44
  Speaker 5: you want to write, just write. A lot of people
• 31:48
  Speaker 5: in radio, which is where I began... You know, they
• 31:53
  Speaker 5: pass to the local radio station, the BBC local radio station.
• 31:57
  Speaker 5: You know, they might start out as a runner on
• 32:00
  Speaker 5: the Saturday afternoon sports program. And then something happens and
• 32:06
  Speaker 5: you're the only person standing there and they give you
• 32:09
  Speaker 5: a recorder and they say, go and speak to the
• 32:11
  Speaker 5: policeman where there's been this big pileup on the M11
• 32:15
  Speaker 5: or whatever it is. Very often it is about being
• 32:18
  Speaker 5: in the right place at the right time. sometimes you
• 32:22
  Speaker 5: have to wait as well. I had to wait quite
• 32:24
  Speaker 5: a while until I got my breaks. Don't be afraid
• 32:28
  Speaker 5: to step back and go to the side if you
• 32:32
  Speaker 5: think the path is more obvious, if that's the case.
• 32:36
  Speaker 5: You know, there were times when I took a less
• 32:38
  Speaker 5: well-paid job in order to move sideways, in order to
• 32:42
  Speaker 5: move forward. But write more than anything else, write. And
• 32:46
  Speaker 5: you can self-publish now in a way that when I started,
• 32:49
  Speaker 5: you couldn't. Everybody can have a Substack if they want now.
• 32:53
  Speaker 5: So it's possible and they can hone your skills. And
• 32:58
  Speaker 5: then just make a nuisance of yourself. Make a nuisance
• 33:00
  Speaker 5: of yourself.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Talking of writing, John, I was wondering, have you thought
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: about writing a book? Is that something you might do next?
• 33:07
  Speaker 5: Well, I'm currently toying with the idea of a project
• 33:09
  Speaker 5: at the moment. And I have an extremely short attention span. Um,
• 33:17
  Speaker 5: you know, for, for a while, for a while there,
• 33:19
  Speaker 5: I was writing CFAX in my career and that's four sentences,
• 33:24
  Speaker 5: which is, it was an amazing discipline, right? I mean,
• 33:28
  Speaker 5: CFAX was terribly constrained that those, those that can still
• 33:31
  Speaker 5: remember it. Um, you know, we, you had a headline,
• 33:36
  Speaker 5: the headline had to be, had to be between 31
• 33:41
  Speaker 5: and 33 characters.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 33:43
  Speaker 5: Couldn't be 30, couldn't be 34. had to be between
• 33:47
  Speaker 5: 31 and 33 characters. Your story that appeared on the
• 33:51
  Speaker 5: television screen had to be in four sentences. And they
• 33:56
  Speaker 5: could be, let me get this, if I can remember
• 33:58
  Speaker 5: this right, there could be any combination of four lines,
• 34:02
  Speaker 5: four lines, four lines, and three lines, or four lines,
• 34:06
  Speaker 5: four lines, three lines, and two lines. That's how restrictive
• 34:11
  Speaker 5: it was. It taught you an amazing discipline, which was
• 34:14
  Speaker 5: how to write. But concisely, because, you know, you couldn't
• 34:19
  Speaker 5: use big words. You had to make things very straightforward because,
• 34:24
  Speaker 5: you know, by the time somebody, if you remember CFAX,
• 34:27
  Speaker 5: but it used to rotate like and if there were
• 34:29
  Speaker 5: 15 pages and you hadn't read to the bottom of
• 34:31
  Speaker 5: the page that you wanted. You had to wait 14
• 34:34
  Speaker 5: pages until it came back, right?
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: You had to get it right.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: I remember watching Test Match Scores Update at CFAX in
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: those old days. But okay, John, well, it's been absolutely
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: wonderful chatting to you. I think we're coming to the
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: end of our allocated sort of episode, really. It's been
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: a fascination. I have to admit, actually, I don't think
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: I've even told Tim this, but I think my preferred
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: career probably would have been journalism.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: When I was at school.
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: Not too late.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to be a journalist as well, actually.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: That was what I wanted to be when I was
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: at school.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: Then we've ended up podcasters.
• 35:09
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: Good luck with your writing project if you go for it.
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: And if you do, when your book comes out, we'd
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: love to get you back on again.
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: Excellent. Well, it's great to speak to you both.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: Thank you for your time.
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: All the best. Take care.