 Good morning from the cool crisp Saturday morning air here in Davos. I'm Peter Zemski, a Dean at NCI Business School, and it's my pleasure to introduce our guest this morning, Tim Hunt. We're going to be talking about what he's learned, about research, innovation, how we can apply that hopefully in our organizations, and even in how we educate our young people. Tim, you're a distinguished, eloquent scientist, Nobel laureate. One of the things that makes you special is, well, like everyone in the room, you've got, as I understand it, tens of trillions of cells, right? Roughly five times ten to the 13th. To be precise, that's good. It is thought. It is thought. Like everyone else, unlike everyone else, you set out to really understand the process by which those cells are formed. Every cell coming from division. It's not quite right. I mean, you know, I didn't set out like that. I set out, actually, you know, I mean, the reason why I set out where I set out was because one day I was having a tutorial in Cambridge, and I had a terrible cold. And I went into the room with my mates and my supervisor said, Tim, you look terrible here and handed me half a tumbler full of whiskey. And that made me want to work with him. So I did. And he ran a very loose ship, actually, but one where you could do anything you wanted in the modern, in the then modern era of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis, which was the hot, the hot thing at the time. And I said to Asher, so what should I work on? And he said, well, why don't you go to the library and find yourself a project? So I did. I found myself a very good project, which luckily for me didn't work because it still hasn't been solved to this day. And I very much doubt whether had I worked on it, it would have been solved then. And actually, the thing that really set me on my path was going to a meeting, my first scientific meeting in Cambridge, which was about hemoglobin synthesis, the stuff that you breathe with, the stuff that makes your blood red. And there were two lectures there. One very great professor from Caltech who compared bizarrely sea urchin eggs at fertilization to red blood cells. Now actually, red blood cells and sea urchin eggs have essentially nothing in common except they're round. But I think it planted a seed in me. And the other thing was a very distinguished scientist who mentioned a very interesting hypothesis, which we realized he had got completely wrong when the graduate students went back to the lab and told each other about it and things. So I can't imagine why we did it now. I can't imagine doing it. But we said, well, that's so interesting. Why don't we just find out whether he's right or wrong? So were you setting out at that point to understand why cells divide? No, that was not the question. Because this is what we're going to learn from all of these sea urchins. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, what I was set out to, that was very simple. So this hemoglobin, the red stuff, has a red pigment, which is called heme, and then a protein called globin, which has two different subunits called alpha and beta. And the problem was how do you coordinate? It was a sort of, what do you call that, a logistics problem? Just in time. Very good. Yes, yes. Now I'm understanding you. That's good. I appreciate it. Very good. So you're trying to solve this cell logistic problem. We were just trying to find out how you coordinate the supply and the assembly of these things. And that took about 10 years to figure out and eventually was figured out. And it was my first really important discovery. And it was very exciting and got quite a lot of press. But then the problem was I'd solved the problem that I've been working on for 10 years. And I didn't have a problem anymore. And so I looked around for new ones. And I realized that I'd remembered this thing of Henry Borsuch's, that when sea urchin eggs were fertilized, they turned on protein synthesis. And I thought, I've been studying this thing, how you turn off protein synthesis, which is really what the heme thing was all about. And why don't I go and study sea urchins? And it's exact opposite. And it's, in some ways, much more exciting and interesting what happens at fertilization. We all got fertilized. Yes. We all have fertilized. And it's great. So I found a friend who... So you discovered sex at that point. Is that the... Yeah. Well, a little bit before. Oh, that's all right. We're good for that. And I found a friend who, we became friends actually through our joint love of bicycling. Hmm. And I lent him my bicycle. He came to a meeting in Cambridge. I lent him my bicycle for a bike ride. And it turned out that he was teaching summer courses in Woods Hole, which I knew about from a previous existence. And when he said, would I help teach that course, I jumped at the chance because, A, I like teaching and, B, you could mess around with sea urchin eggs. So I started studying the sea urchin eggs. And actually, the first year I was there, it turned out, I mean, I thought all American labs were brilliantly equipped. And this one was brilliantly equipped for studying fertilization, because that was the thing. You fertilized, you know, pigs of every phylum known to man. It was terrific. I learned a lot. But in terms of my problem, it was woefully under-equipped. So I vowed I would never go back there. And we spent a lot of that summer sort of dancing and going down to the bar late at night. It was quite hard work and having a pizza at about a quarter to midnight. They stopped serving at midnight. And it was good fun, but worthless scientifically. But a seed there again was planted. And little do we know there's a Nobel Prize lurking in there somewhere. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I went, I didn't go back the following year. But then I found I missed it very much. And I missed, I'd sort of forgotten how much fun it is to learn things at that point. And I learned a lot of stuff by listening to these lectures and also by doing things and by teaching how people, how to do things. I mean, science is very much of an apprenticeship. And it still is, I think. You know, you actually have, there's, there's, some people have it and some people don't. And it's not, it's not, it's a funny combination of brain power. So actually, now you give us a sense of how you mucked around and then things come out. You draw on lessons in terms of now as your senior scientist and helping steer this whole sort of intellectual ecosystem. What is it that we should be doing to help nurture younger, younger scientists? Well, I think I always like, but I don't suppose it's for everybody. I hated lecturing, actually. I'm talking about things that I didn't really know about, quite demanding. But I loved teaching practical courses and thinking up little projects. I mean, we kept on, in Cambridge we had students in the lab for eight weeks. And some people said, oh, this is ghastly because they're so disruptive. I thought it was great because they were so smart and they worked so hard. And they could, there are some problems where it's good to explore a large space. And it was great having these extra pairs of hands because you could, it didn't really matter whether their projects worked or didn't work. Usually they did work, I may say. But you know, you could, they could explore a space which you couldn't or didn't have the time to do yourself. And if there were sort of little glimmerings, you could say, oh, that's going to work. Let's carry on when the project was over. And they learned a lot. And we learned a lot. I mean, and I had some fantastically good students, actually, at a short period of time. As you probably know, one of the things people have been discussing around Davos the last few days has been online courses and potentially taking people like you out of the big lecture hall. I feel those are completely antithetical. I really, you know, I've always liked messing around. When I was a kid, I liked messing around, taking things apart and melting things and making circuits and building radios and that kind of stuff. And so even now, I mean, do you, as a senior scientist, do you like to run big labs with lots of little ants? No, I like, no, no. Do you let the people muck around as well? I like people to get on with whatever they, you know, I mean, a project hopefully of mutual interest. I mean, I just recently had somebody who was doing something I didn't know anything about and really couldn't help with. And I found that most unsatisfactory. But, you know, she wanted to do it. But then at the same time, I had a wonderful Japanese post up who was possibly the best collaborator I've ever had tremendous joy. I realized that the thing I like the best is working with one or two people. I mean, a very intense relationship actually, almost like a love affair, I would say, you know, the degree of mutual understanding. And it's just so nice to have somebody that you can, you know, when something goes well to share the journey, the triumph with and when things are going badly to have somebody to sort of say, here, why don't we go and have a drink or whatever. What do you look for in collaborators then? Do you look for people who are similar to you different, you know, we often talk complementarity, I think is often a good thing. Actually, I had a long term colleague in Cambridge and he was really I mean, a he was cleverer than I was by quite a wide margin and B he was very good at the detail. Whereas I was always sort of urging him to, you know, look at the big picture. I think I'm better at the big pictures and the detail. Although I can still do, you know, the sort of the great discovery which I made almost the last time I went taught in Woods Hole was that there was this protein which disappeared, which is a strange discovery. But it did disappear and it turned out that it had to disappear otherwise cells couldn't couldn't divide. So that which was enormously exciting because nobody had ever thought that proteins going away being degraded was part of part of life. I mean, people sort of knew it happened, but it was sort of seen in terms of, oh, well, you know, the protein just gets tired and old and we've got to replace it. But this was a case where the protein had done a very important job. And then not only did you not need it anymore, you had to get rid of it. Otherwise, you couldn't, you couldn't go on. You know, it was like a barrier that you had to was that something. So you're saying everyone had thought that, you know, what's important is the proteins that come and no one was really thinking about when they go away. Yes, I mean, it was hard for was it staring people in the face and it wasn't it wasn't it was only because I was working on sea urchin eggs and this was a very abundant protein at this very early time. Who knew I mean, it was it had been known. In fact, it was the old Borsuch again, who discovered that protein synthesis was very important after fertilization. If you didn't make new proteins, the the eggs did not divide. And I when I saw this protein disappear, well, that explained everything, you had to make the protein to get to initiate division and you had to degrade it to complete division. I mean, very, very simple, but so unlikely that nobody had thought of it before. And in the end, that that as I understand that that insight with the sea urchin eggs shined light on cell division. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it took them down another five years to figure out what it was and who its mate was. And then that got us together with some very interesting and distinguished yeast geneticists. So this was it also had the effect of bringing together sort of molecular biologists and geneticists and biochemists. So let's just talk to start talking a little bit about if that's the nature of scientific discovery. And that's as I have experienced. What does that then tell you about how we should be organizing this? So when we go out and society spends billions and billions on scientists, how should we best channel that money into you know, how do we pick the projects they're gonna? Well, I think they pick themselves. I mean, I've recently been involved in two kinds of things. I'm on the Council of the ERC, which gives out grants to individuals, okay, throughout Europe. We don't we don't we don't care what their nationality or gender or anything is. We just ask that they be terrific scientists and we don't tell them what to do. We just say, we'd say, you know, give us your ideas. And if we like them, we'll give you the money. That's terribly simple system. So even in business and venture, you know, there's always a debate, you know, do you bet on the idea or on the team? And it's the person, it's the person, you know, and they may have a big team or they may have a small team, but they'll they'll write it down in the grant and their grant will be assessed by a panel of their peers, an international panel of their peers. And, you know, the best ones float to the top and the bottom 80 to 90% will well, they'll have another chance the next time around. But I think this is the way to do it, rather than which a lot of politicians like is the idea, you know, we have a grand challenge, we want to understand the brain. Well, I want to understand the brain and that would be great. But I wouldn't have a clue if I was the grand pendulum, you know, who to tell what to do to understand the brain, right? But you could say, well, you know, we should have a Manhattan Project to understand the brain. But actually, you know, lots of scientists want to understand the brain, they're doing the best they can the way they can. And I think that what we have to do is to identify the really, the really good ones. I'm a great sort of believer, in other words, in the cottage industry in the bottom up bottom up, bottom up much more bottom up view of science. You know, to that extent, I think the, the ear, I, you know, I absolutely 101% approve of the principles of the ERC. And I wonder why it's taken so long to do this very simple thing. Because in the scientific community, we've known for ages that that seems, I mean, it looks rather inefficient, it looks a bit sort of winky wonky and sort of random walkie and stuff. But the proof that the pudding is in the eating, you know, this this works. And the top down directorial thing might work for Manhattan projects, for big engineering projects where you do have to collect big teams, it worked for the human genome project, I must say. But I think, you know, that we just there's just so much to learn, so much to find out that this bottom up thing is better. Just to probe a little bit when you're when you're looking at the individuals or the small teams to bet on what I mean, that's one thing you look for is the track record and output. Are there other things that you personally would look at when you decide? It's kind of interesting, actually. And I hear again, I think this is this is terribly simple, but quite innovative. The ERC basically takes the view that half of the input is the the record of the person. Because on the whole, you know, if you've made great discoveries in the past, and people admire you're probably going to go on the same unless something horrible is happening to you. And half on the project. You know, it's got to be sensible and well worked out. So I've seen it, you know, that people you've never heard of have fantastically good projects. They get the money. I've seen not, you know, great heroes of science, Nobel Prize winners even have their projects turned down because they, you know, either hadn't done enough preliminary work to convince the panel that it was going to work. I mean, I had an amusing rather embarrassing case is John Gurdon, who won this year's Nobel Prize. And I'm sorry to say that the ERC turned him down. Very interesting. But the reason was he I spoke to him about this, I said, I was terribly sorry. Which now that we've given you the money. No, he said, you know, that was absolutely the right thing to do because I really I'm pretty sure it's going to work. It was a good it was a good suggestion, but I hadn't done enough preliminary work and maybe hadn't worked hard enough on the actual the grant writing. You bring up to push you a little though, you bring up the successor to the Manhattan Project, the genome sequencing, and suddenly there's just all this data coming out. And, you know, doing this cottage industry that you described. Do we really still need that when we have, you know, the genome, we could just now sit down and look it up and find out, here's how cell division works. What's what's maybe Europe thing of the past? How did you know that it just doesn't work like that? I mean, you know, so that I figured out that the human genome is equivalent of 137 complete works of Shakespeare with no punctuation, no, there are separate volumes. That's all there is. There are 23 volumes. And that's it, you know, but there are no commas. There are no paragraphs. Do we speak the language that it's written in? Yes. If you stick it into an unfretalized egg, you know, you'll get out. If you started with a human being, you'll get back a human being. If it's a chimpanzee, a chimpanzee, a cat, a cat. It's terrific. But the cells know where in that volume to go and look for the information they need at the time. And it's not just one infamy. I mean, most cells make, I don't know, five to 10,000 different proteins at any one time. In some cases, there'll be one per cell or 10. In some cases, there'll be hundreds of thousands per cell. So I mean, So the point is just having these many, many volumes of Shakespeare unpunctuated, that's just that's an input, but they're still how you how you interpret that to build a nose or an eye or a hand is we haven't, well, I mean, you know, we know the general principles, but working it out in detail is going to be the work of hundreds of years, I suspect, actually. You've seen the latest Spider-Man movie? Well, your hand gets cut off and you can grow a new one. We're not, are we close to that? Well, you know, people study that. And it's very interesting to know why newts can do it or axolotls, I guess is what the people study. And they can do it very nicely, but we can't. But yet we can do it for our kidneys and our livers, you know, so some organs can do it and others can't. And you know, I think it'll be a good thing to work on. Lurking someplace in one of those volumes of Shakespeare, there may be a scene that we could play axolotl instructions with the human instructions. You see, oh, they've got this. And if we gave, you know, I mean, not a very ethical, let's say, you know, you say, you give a baby this new gene and lo and behold, cut off their hand, they grow a new one. I mean, how fantastic would that be? I mean, this is not really science fiction. Well, I mean, more and more at home is the fact that, you know, we have a diabetic, their pancreas is failing. We'd like to be able to build a new pancreas from one of their own cells. And this is coming within sight. I mean, that's going to be the next thing. But not there yet. But I don't think it's all that far off. A friend of mine, for example, was able to take a single cell from your gut and reconstitute the gut in a test tube. I mean, it's not quite the gut. It doesn't actually form a tube. But I mean, basically the basic sort of local tissues are reconstituted simply because he figured out what the what the growth factors were, the chemicals, the mostly proteins that he had to add to the solution. I think that's a fantastic advantage. And again, and for you, it's again, this is still the individual science industry again working on individual mechanisms. Yeah, very smart guy attracting very smart students and just getting on with it makes me think of it. So one of the things we talk about in business these days is big data, right? Because out there in the internet, we just just well, biologists are pretty keen on this too. But I think it's, you know, it can be very, very useful, but it's, but it needs an awful lot of sifting through to make sense of. Yes, it's the sense. I mean, you can get lost as well. You can get totally lost. And I think there are, there is a group of people today who think that if you just sort of, you know, take the human body and mash it up and throw the DNA and all the proteins on the floor in a big Excel spreadsheet, somehow you could reconstitute the person. It just ain't so I don't think I think we need to know how things actually work. And that means doing experiments on the individual subsystems. Okay, so let me push again. That's the one thing we certainly see in the social world is this incredible expertise on subsystems. So you might have traders or financial engineers creating these derivatives that can be very deep, very sophisticated, and yet somehow the understanding of the system falls short and you get things like the mortgage crisis. Yes, exactly. And so people then call for what we have to have more systems thinking. In biology, there's been some call as well. Has that played out well? Has coming at it with a systems thinking really helped? There are a lot of people who would call themselves systems biologists. And I in very rare cases have I found this useful on the hell. I mean, there was a whole, there is a whole journal called the Journal of Theoretical Biology, which to my mind has never produced anything of any use whatsoever. So you have, you don't have strong views on this issue. But I have a friend now. I know two people. My Hungarian friend is very keen on modeling the cell cycle. And I found it very helpful to talk to him because his differential equations sort of mesh with my molecules and I can sort of, you know, we speak the same language. And the question is, does it work? Is his model complete? I mean, so this is useful. But I think we're very far from being able to sort of take all the information we have and assemble it into a sort of computer image of which will work. I mean, we just don't understand how things work wherever you look. Left, right, and center. So we've got miles to go in my view. And I think we're going to need people like me. And I just think this is the way, you know, small science has been, for the most part, much more effective. The big science, the genome thing, that just, you know, it's helpful to have that library of things out there. You know what you're dealing with. But it's just a resource. It isn't really the explanation. And I think people are apt to confuse that. They think that having this data is the thing. Maybe then we could talk a little bit then about this issue of where the next scientists are coming from. And so I can imagine this Facebook generation, which challenges authority. Is that sort of going to feed? Well, unfortunately, I'm not sure they challenge the authority when it really matters. I was just this week earlier on, atop a mountain somewhere else in Switzerland, and we were talking to some chemistry graduate students there. And part of the exercise, it was supposed to be a workshop in creativity or something like that. They had to come up with a research project with their peers, sort of sitting around. It's not a very good way to find research projects in the committee, but it was just a little exercise. But I was very surprised how limited the horizons of these youngsters were. And I do worry that the present pressure to sort of just do what you know about and is really sort of forcing them in on themselves. And that they're not getting that grand view or any experience of how their little part of the universe fits in with everything else. So we're getting very compartmentalized. Almost even two compartmentalized. In what do you think the forces are? Because they're not, you know... I think it's sort of an over-professionalization of something which is basically a kind of apprenticeship system and a sort of feeling that you've got to have all those certificates. When I look back on my own career, it was so random. It was so much messing around and having fun with other people and just trying things. And now it's almost as though that's sort of forbidden. As though everybody thinks everything is so cut and dried that we already know enough. You can't sort of allow people to mess around because damn it, there's a serious job to be done. But I think there are still many, many important discoveries to be made which can only be made by sort of turning over stones out of pure curiosity. So if you think about lots of discussion these days about what should modern research universities do? What's their role in educating? So this notion of getting more and more specialized, especially for people in college, university, you're not... Well I think, I mean one of the glories of a university is that you actually get to meet other people. You know, I mean you're a scientist but you have a friend who's a classicist. I think that's important but it was very nice in Cambridge. You would find yourself sitting next to dinner to some expert on medieval history and you'd find out what they were up to. I'm not sure that ever sort of made me have a great scientific insight but it certainly improved the quality of life and it certainly improved the quality of the people who wanted to be in that kind of environment. And of course that's another thing. I mean I lived for about 10 years in Cambridge in the most unbelievably beautiful set of rooms that looked out over the most unbelievably gorgeous lawn. Now I mean huge green lawn with this great medieval cathedral-like building just to the left, King's College Chapel. Now you know, if we were a business we'd have said we're not going to let this lawn last, right? Because we should be building a skyscraper devoted to learning on it. But the fact of the matter is, you know, that lawn is saying something about where our values are. And it's not hard to, you know, I mean why do, why do the kids all want to go to Oxford and Cambridge? What is it exactly? Is it because they're beautiful or is it because everybody tells them that that's the place to go? You know, it's a sort of funny combination of things but I mean I think if we were to rip down all the medieval buildings and build concrete and steel boxes, you know, it wouldn't be as popular anymore. If you were starting out again, knowing what you know about science, where it's going, where would you, where would you think of specializing? Oh, I don't know. I mean I always tell the youngsters they should go and work on the brain because I think that's such a such an important thing and so you know there are just so many great mysteries. I was having a wonderful conversation this morning with Roger Chen who won the Nobel Prize for discovering this green fluorescent protein and figuring out how it worked. He's very interested in the brain and he's particularly interested in how you remember things, what's the basis of memory and it was it was it was terrific. So I mean I really love that. I mean the possibility of interacting with people like that and that's the idea of a great university. I mean that you will, there is something extraordinary stimulating about meeting great minds. I mean one of the amazing things, as we start to get deeper understanding of the brain, you start to get that the scope for interdisciplinary work, right? It sort of shades into philosophy. I mean whether consciousness is a scientific problem or a philosophical one is an interesting question. I don't know. The original promise of the university as this place where you really probe the human condition and from all these angles we might actually get there at some point. Well it's an interesting question. When will we get to the end of time? People occasionally say that we know everything there is to know and it's patently obvious that that is not true. No as you said I mean when you think about the brain there are just so many amazing questions there to be probed. Well you see we don't even understand a little tiny nematode worm. We have the complete wiring diagram of the worm. We know exactly how it behaves and yet we can't explain how the nervous system coordinates that behavior. So if you can't even understand the thing that only has 50 neurons what hope have you for somebody with 50 billion neurons or whatever we have? Interesting. Is the time really right to then understand the human brain or should we be actually? Probably not. We should be studying worms or flies or something like that. A question though when you come to the ERC board and you're proposing to study a worm will you do as well as the person who's going to study the brain? Well I think you're probably more likely to do well if you've got a sensible project with a model organism rather than trying to do this. You know I mean if it means sort of opening up a human brain to look in the side this is right and there are difficulties there. Very good. What about in terms of you know one thing we talk about in business is sort of the role of competition. How competitive have you found? That's an interesting question actually. Yeah I'm glad you brought that up. Competition is fantastically important. It is the sort of the life blood. Everyone complains about it but actually it what drives things forward and if the business you're in is not competitive it allows you to go be sort of sluggish and idle. If you think somebody is on your tail it's a tremendous stimulus. So I think that I mean for example I mentioned this thing of the coordination of hemoglobin synthesis so after I finished my postdoc with a guy who was very interested in that question I went back to Cambridge to rejoin my mates there and we worked on it in vicious competition with the with the old boss who I like very much. And the funny thing is that actually you know these two groups these two people often are you know they know each other exceedingly well and they care very much about the same thing but you want to get there first and we got there first and you know there's a tremendous feeling of pride and satisfaction in that. All right Tim I think we're running low on time so thank you very much for a just a fascinating window into the actually how you push forward the frontiers of knowledge. Any sort of closing thoughts you want? It's hard you know how one should organize these things. I'd just make a plea for people doing more. There has been a tendency to think everything we've done on a computer and I think there's no substitute for actually grappling with nature hand to hand. Getting your hands dirty. Rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty yes very important. You know in the computer age people say that's not necessary anymore in my view it's just as necessary now as it ever was and we need to find people who are prepared to do that who don't find that sort of humble work demeaning because I think it's sort of terrific actually. Thank you very much Tim. Pleasure.