Richard Keynes interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 26th September 2007

0:09:08 Born 1919 in London; great-grandfather was Charles Darwin; not really interested in him until 1968 when travelling from through Buenos Aires and taken to see a collection owned by Braun Menendez; had two sketch books of Conrad Martens who was the second official painter on the voyage of the Beagle; arranged the purchase of them at Menendez request and they are now in the University Library; became interested in Darwin and published 'The Beagle Record' which included some of Martens's illustrations; the person who encouraged me to become a physiologist was my uncle, A.V. Hill; my grandfather Keynes worked in the University Registry and my grandmother was at one time the second lady Mayor of Cambridge; Gwen Raverat was my mother's sister and 'Period Piece' was based on letters written by my American grandmother to her family in Philadelphia

10:07:18 Father was a senior surgeon at Bart's until the sixties and then became a bibliographer; father's brother was John Maynard Keynes; particularly fond of his wife, Lydia Lopokova, and was, with Lord Kahn, her executor; Polly Hill and I edited her letters

16:38:10 First school was The Hall school, Hampstead, then went to Oundle; at Oundle one thing I enjoyed was that one week a term was spent in the workshops; if you were a scientist you spent the week doing experiments in the school; French teacher; went to a summer school at  Abbaye de Pontigny, in Burgundy for three months aged about eighteen; eventually became an ornithologist at school carrying bird-watching telescope for Headmaster, Kenneth Fisher; got to Trinity, Cambridge, to do physiology; War started in my second year and went to work for the Admiralty

27:21:11 First of all worked on submarines at Fairlie on the Clyde; in 1942 many ships lost through torpedoes; found everyone at Fairlie fed up with the Director whose attitude prevented us from working; senior members of the staff could do little but my friend, Roger West, and I were not official staff members and I wrote a long memorandum on what was wrong, and after a fierce argument with the Director he agreed to send it to the Admiralty; other people had complained but the Admiralty had ignored them; sent a copy to cousin Maurice who gave it to his father, A.V. Hill, who went to the Athenaeum and had lunch with the Third Sea Lord; effective as Director was sent off as British Representative in Washington; new Director was a success; met Patrick Blackett who was then Director of Operational Research in the Admiralty who I then met later when he was President of the Royal Society and I was on the council

31:54:10 Managed to get back to Cambridge in 1945 and read part II physiology; got my degree in 1946 and a couple of years later I was made a Research Fellow of Trinity; I was researching on nerves; my chief teacher was Alan Hodgkin who was a great man, and I worked with him for about five years; when I started working with him, he and Andrew Huxley were working on electronics; I had been involved with Radar during the war; started working on radio isotopes; had to start by making my own isotopes in the physiology department; it would have been nice to have stayed on at Trinity as a teaching fellow but Hodgkin, Huxley and William Rushton were all there; I was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse and stayed there from 1952-1960; became Deputy Director then Director of the Babraham Institute of Animal Physiology which at that time had no connection with the University; later became Professor of Physiology 

39:12:14 Became a Fellow of Churchill; problem with Babraham was that most people were continuing with the same research they had done for their doctorates; I worked on squid giant nerve fibres with Hodgkin and continued with that work until I went to Babraham; work on squid was done in the Autumn so I would absent myself and go off to Plymouth; have given papers to Churchill; involved in setting up an international society for biophysics; everyone in favour except Hodgkin and Huxley but an institute was set up and I became Secretary and later President; resulted in my becoming a member of ICSU - International Council of Scientific Unions; became Chairman of an Unesco body to encourage Third World countries to teach themselves; travelled widely as a result; in 1951 a Brazilian, Carlos Chagas, son of man after whom Chagas Disease was named, came to  Cambridge to find someone to be the Visiting Reader that year; wanted to get Hodgkin, who was busy, and Huxley was getting married; I went to Rio for three months and worked on how electric eels produce electricity; became interested then in education of biologists in the Third World; problem was we never got enough money from Unesco; at the Royal Society had meeting where ICSU affairs were discussed who were rather negative about us wanting more money; long association with Brazil; also worked in Chile;

49:46:08 Research, teaching and administration; had problems with the ARC who did not appreciate my working on squid; never had a lab in Cambridge and could never get any support from the MRC, so research interest gave way to administration and, later, as Professor, to teaching; one of my graduate students was Jared Diamond

53:53:06 The thing that has been occupying me in recent years is writing more books on Darwin; found the zoology notes that he had made on the Beagle had never been published; felt I got to know him during the four year working on it; have just written a book on a history of research into animal electricity which I hope will be published by the American Philosophical Society