Start the Week

21/02/2011

Andrew Marr talks to Simon Wessely about the mental health of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and explores why British personnel appear to have fared so much better than their American counterparts. The historian John Stubbs revels in the antics of the Cavaliers - the 17th century dandies and political intriguers, loyal to the king. The experimental physicist Athene Donald argues that science is as creative as the arts, and describes how studying the texture of yoghurt could help the treatment of dementia. And Simon Sebag Montefiore studies the texture of a city - Jerusalem. His epic 3000 year history is a chronicle of faith and power, diversity and co-existence.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 21 Feb 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, as a turbulent week opens, we're going to be talking about soldiers, science, and the city at the heart of Arab angst, which is not Cairo or Tripoli, but Jerusalem, subject of Simon C. Bagmon to Fiore's major new study. As a historian, he's joined by John Stubbs, who's written about the people he calls reprobates, the cavalier poet soldiers who followed King Charles. And later on, we're going to be talking about, wait for it, yogurt and Alzheimer's, with one of our leading physicists, Stamethene Donald, she will explain all. First, though, another issue of mental health, as it affects soldiers with our troops, fighting hard in Afghanistan, we're told there's a tidal wave of soldiers returning with mental health problems, many of them ending up in prison. Well, Simon Wesley is director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research, and he's been researching into this, and broadly speaking, Simon? Well, broadly speaking, it isn't quite true, what you've just said. There isn't a tidal wave of mental health problems. There is a steady state of disorders such as post-traumatic stress, disorder, and in fact, more importantly, alcohol, which actually affects more people than PTSD. But the plot line of Coronation Street and many other drums at the moment is not actually reproduced in the figures that we see. We've seen the claim, as it were, that our boys are coming back from Afghanistan, and before that from Iran, in a terrible mental state, we've seen it, as you say, in popular dramas on television and so on, and we see it all over the newspapers, all over the time. If it's not true, why are we seeing it recounted as a story which clearly grips the imagination or the public need in some way? I think there are two reasons. First, there's it's true in the sense that there are people coming back who have got serious mental health problems. Many of them don't present and maybe many years before they detect it, and that's happening all the time, and that obviously is a problem for all of us. And I think the second reason, however, is that we have now a very professional army that is very distant from the rest of society. Very few of us probably know anyone in the armed forces, unlike our parents and grandparents' generation. And I think there's also a certain amount of guilt that we're sending people away to do a difficult job on our behalf, and I think we feel sometimes guilty about the effects that this has, and anxious that some can be done. It's a chance for an emotion. I think sometimes it is. It's where keen that something is done. And when you say it's over exaggerated, you're not saying, as you said, that it doesn't happen at all, but you've been looking at the numbers in some detail, and you simply think that mental health problems among the army are no higher than in the population at large. Yes, and my job is to be the boring boffin on this. Yes, absolutely. And to provide the figures, and overall, the mental health of the armed forces is actually surprisingly good. These are tough, resilient lads and increasingly lasses these days. The only issue in which Britannia still rules the waves is unfortunately alcohol, and that is a very significant problem, and does more harm than the other mental health disorders. And that is something, of course, which does unite the army with the rest of the country, and we're hearing today there's liver problems and much more widespread than people thought was much more than. Yes, and actually, funnily enough, the military are relatively protected from issues like alcoholism or liver problems, because every time they deploy, they're, in fact, completely dry, which is surprisingly good for their health. The problem they do have then is the more social problems of alcohol, which is around violence and accidents and antisocial behavior, and that is a problem. It isn't as glamorous as post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is commoner. And this is a problem caused presumably by people coming back and simply wanting a release after a period on duty. Partly, that's true. Partly, we know that rates do go up when they come back, but it's a bit more complicated than that as well. It's also to do with the nature of people who do join up, who often do come from backgrounds of relative deprivation, and it's also to do with the nature and military culture. It's not dissimilar to how I say journalists or even medics. It's a quite hard-drinking culture, even before they go. It certainly is. Have another little one while you're waiting. Thank you. The soldiers, in the old days, people used to say that the squadies were, you know, they were poor kids very often from broken families, and the army was their only family, and therefore, when they left the army, they had a particularly hard time. But your research seems to me to suggest that as the army's got smaller and it's been harder to get into the army, the standards of the people coming in are higher, and they are simply tougher and more robust, even when they leave. Yes, the longer they stay in, the more tough and resilient they get. The problem isn't the kind of stereotype of the person who's been in 20, 25 years, and then when they leave falls apart. That happens rather rarely. These are resilient people who rapidly get jobs and do well. It's the ones who leave very early. It's the ones who don't settle in, who may not even have deployed, who leave possibly under a cloud after one, two, three years. And there you see all sorts of problems. You see mental health problems, debt, deliver itself harm, unemployment, trouble with the law, and so on. And it's that group who are actually very easily overlooked, and they're the ones who definitely do have an increase rate of a lot of different problems. And need some help. You mentioned brushes with the law because another, I don't know, it's a myth or not, but another thing that said is an awful lot of people leave the army and end up in prison. Well, 3% of the prison population have been in the services. Now, you know, how many should be, and it shouldn't be 1%, 10%. It's a bit of a meaningless figure. The real interest is, how much is that due to their military service, and how much is that due to other factors? My own view, and we're looking at this now in a very big study, is that if we were to completely abolish the armed forces, we would probably need more, not less, prisons. And although some people do go to prison with problems that they erode during their military service, probably far more their trajectory moves away from prison because of their military service. We have to take a balanced look at this. Before we open this up, just one other really interesting issue which you've looked at is the difference between our culture of soldiers coming back and the issues of mental health, and the way it's seen in America, where it seems to be a much, much bigger issue, and there are far more legal cases, and a lot more money sloshing around. Well, they certainly have a lot more money sloshing around, that's for sure. It is a bit, it's not just seen as a bigger issue, it is a bigger issue over in the US, and their rates and mental health problems in their forces are higher than ours. There's quite a lot of reasons for that, partly to do with, for some time, they were having higher casualty rates, and we are, that's sadly not the case now, partly to do with the different structures and ages of their forces, but the real biggest difference and the intriguing one is you open with the talk of a tidal wave and mental health problems. In the US that is happening, their rates of disorder are steadily going up when people leave, and the last figure was something like one-third of their reserves, for example, have mental health problems. Why would this be? Well, it's probably not due to what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's probably, I would think, due to what's happening in America, and I would look at the different patterns of health care in the in the two countries. I'd love to ask something, actually, which is, which is, you know, when did these, these psychological syndromes historically start to emerge? I mean, you, you know, was it because of modern, modern weaponry in World War One? You only hear of them from World War One onwards, I mean, is there evidence in Napoleonic armies, Spartan armies? Well, that's an almost impossible question to answer because most militaries don't leave any traces behind them. As we'll hear later, I imagine it's the gentry and the aristocracy who write their accounts. We know nothing about the mental health of the average Napoleonic soldier. It's only when we get mass literacy, which is really in the late Victorian period in the First World War, that we start to get a better impression of mental health. So I can't answer your question about Sparta or earlier times. Acini. Can I come back to the comparison with the Americans? You said that they have much longer terms of duty. So that they're away, is it being away from their families, their communities, the 18-month stints, or is it more because they get sort of hardened in a way, being away and on the front line for much longer? That sort of duty is 12 months, sometimes 15 months, and you don't really need to do research now that being in a inhospitable climate away from your family where everyone's trying to kill you isn't great for mental health. And we know that with each tour of duty they do their rates go up and up. So that clearly is a difference as well. But I still don't think that's the only explanation for the differences that we see, and some of it lies in differences in access to health care when people leave the armed forces. You don't think it's a more sort of self-reflexive society. It's a culture which is just you could say softer, you could say, or a tune. I thought that was a great point, too. The separation of the military from the United States. Some of the Americans are much more vociferous in their support for the armed forces than we are, which is a good thing. We don't meet them. Unless I grew up in Plymouth. They're a marine base, and so 10 out of 30 kids in my class joined the services in town, but it's not the case. But I suspect few people around this table have actually talked to a lot of American soldiers, and the truth is when you do talk with them, they are rather similar to ours. They're not grating motives themselves. They don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they don't like seeing councillors and psychiatrists any more than we do. So I suspect the average soldier is rather similar in their mental makeup. Well, John Stubbs, let's move on to another bunch of soldiers, very, very different, and who certainly did leave a lot of print and writing behind them. That's people you call reprobates, "Tug in cheek," which are the cavalier poets of the English Civil War, and the period really between the death of Shakespeare, I suppose, and running up to the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the Restoration. Quite an interesting period in literature, apart from anything else, apart from the war. Oh, I mean, fascinating. I approach the topic from a literary angle to begin with, I suppose, and with an idea as well of giving readers a sense of the shape of the century. I mean, when you teach literature, it can too often become isolated from what was going on and what we then refer to as the background. And so I was trying to show how the words get mixed up in the event. Among the characters who sort of hang over the beginning of this book on the literary side, I suppose, there's Ben Johnson, who sounds a bit like Samuel Johnson, actually, a great, fat, angry man by the end, writing all these masks for the court and actually falling out of favor, getting crosser and crosser and crosser. And Davenant, who claimed from time to time, was hinted that he was William Shakespeare's natural son. He did. He did. He did. I mean, for whatever reason. I mean, Johnson is in there because he's one of the symbolic fathers of the period. And the theme that fascinates me about the civil wars is the sense of squandered inheritance of errant sons, prodigal sons. And obviously, I mean, an extraordinarily paternalistic time. And as a result of the war, what emerged from the wars on both sides was a profound sense of shame. And a key story in the polemic of the time was the biblical story of the prodigal son, the lad who ran away from home, spent all his father's money, then came back and was welcomed with open arms. And the fatted calf was slain and so on. And this is almost like England. This is England having thrown it all away in the wars. And then there's the restoration. And this is why this is why the people in my book are reprobates. I mean, it's a it's a technical term from Calvinistic theology, but it's also a term of everyday social abuse. And the thing is that, I mean, as I don't know how much of the historical back story I should provide here. But as the listeners might know, the country divided between the supporters of parliament and those of the king. And the situation was actually slightly more complicated. But those on the side of parliament were broadly speaking puritanical. And those on the side of the king were termed cavaliers, some boy characters. And yes, as you point out, there are some quite puritanical figures on the king side, not least the king himself, who was a pretty buttoned up character, except for one extraordinary story. I confess I didn't know much about what you tell. But when he was he was still the prince. And there was a notion that he was going to be married to the Spanish in Fanta and thus create this wonderful link between Spain and England. Which upset the sound productions of England terribly. And he actually got in his horse with his mate Buckingham. And he rode all the way from London. He did. Across the Pyrenees suddenly turned up in Madrid and said, Hey, here I am. The future child is the first. What do you think? And she said, no, I think not. After about six months of terrible procrastination. And him jumping over a wall into an orchard and sort of tried to get into the palace. He did his best to have a private word. But she wasn't having it. And all were her entourage. With a few exceptions, the poetry of these people has been put in a little bracket or a box in English literature as sort of charming, witty, occasionally a bit naughty, not fundamentally very interesting or serious. Which I think is a terrible shame. And one of my aims was to show that the complexity of the Cavalier party and also to show how many themes that the Cavaliers had in common with the supposedly sort of deeper, more angst ridden Puritan faction. In fact, the Cavalier mentality, the Cavalier lifestyle was equally a response to the profound sense of metaphysical desperation and of lostness. Puritans are more so addressed. I mean, again, we get back to the story of the prodigal son. We have the good son and the bad son. But they're in a way that they're both sons of the same father. They're both, they're both products of the same home. And so it was with Cavaliers and Puritans. And we were talking about soldiers just before, but this is very much a world still where for an awful lot of people fighting is one of the ways that you establish your manhood. And a lot of these people go to the continent and get involved in continental wars until there's a war to be had at home. I mean, you weren't a gentleman and without it, you know, unless you'd done a spot of dueling in Paris. They're not very good fighters, a lot of your cavalry. No, they're not, they're not running away. They're all kind of looking at the enemy and saying, actually, no, I think I'll go backwards. But I mean, coming back to what Simon was talking about, the, I mean, the, I, and both sides, in fact, I think these disorders have been around since the beginning of warfare. It's just that societies and cultures had such different ways of addressing them. And in the time that I've written about, if you had something approximating, you know, post it, what we know, post dramatic stress disorder, the, it would be, he'd be slagged off possibly, or, and you would, you would even, you would even treat it lightly yourself. It's a, it was a harder world. I mean, Davenant, the, the, the playwright and poet that you make pretty central to this, actually was noseless because he, he'd got syphilis and he, the, the treatment, he'd lost his nose. I mean, they, they, these were sort of much more scarred and marginal figures than the sort of grand portraits that you see in the natural world. Oh, terribly. I mean, the, the, the faces, the faces behind those portraits, they're, they're, they're, they're pox ridden. I mean, yeah. It's interesting. You should, you should, there's no pictures in your book. I think people would like to see lots of pictures of these people. Especially the noseless one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The pictures don't show the things that people would be interested in seeing. But how did the nose, I mean, I'm fascinated by the nose. I mean, was it just a hole in the middle of his face? I'm sorry. I just fascinated by the grotesque details of this. I mean, do we know? I mean, how, and how did it disappear? I mean, what, what was that? It was, it was an, an intellect. He would have taken a, a mercury bath. Snorted, yeah. Like, you know, the old Albersoil cure for a cold. Yeah. It was sort of like that actress who lost the septum of her nose and then quite a lot of them. I think it was something simple. Okay. I'm just asking you a key question, which is like, that may sound a bit frivolous, but why don't you, there's a lot of, there's a lot in your, your book about dressing. And this is a bit of a 1066 and all that question, but did the Cavaliers lose the war because they were so busy dressing themselves with their clothes? Because there's a huge thing about that regiment where they kind of spent a huge amount on clothes as you go into. Yes. Yes. I mean, that, that, that, that, but that regiment was short lived. And those, those uniforms, I think, were pretty quickly intended. No, I mean, it's, it's, it's a, pretty much a matter of historical record that the men of similar rank dressed the same on both sides. So, you know, the, the, the round heads, the royalist round heads would have been a senior. I read the blurb and I thought you were going to convince me that the Cavaliers weren't bandies, but really they do come across as being incredibly, in a certain sense, unserious. Their morals were appalling. And they, they certainly didn't have the Protestant work ethic that I could see from what I read, that they, they appeared, they did see it absolutely to be done because the Protestant work ethic didn't really appear until the latter half of the 17th century. That is the point about Calvinism. Work doesn't help. We are helpless before God. Works are of no use. Oh, but, but, but, but I suppose I meant also in the way they tackled that poetry, for instance, they didn't sit down and think I've got to get this absolutely right. They didn't seem to care about wider artistic issues. And I think I meant that not, not just in the, the narrow, perhaps Calvinistic sense. Because not all of them were professional writers, that was the thing. But, I mean, two of the, two of the key figures that, two of the key repurates in the book, Davenant and Robert Herrick were highly accomplished literary artists and, you know, their work is as polished as any you'll find. But there's an interesting, there is an interesting falling off, particularly in the theatre. I notice when they're writing plays, Post Shakespeare, it's, it's a bit like Hollywood on a sharp downward spiral because they just make the plays wilder and wilder and more and more cannibalism, eating and incest and murder, anything to get people watching. Bombs on seats, Laddie. Yeah. But that's what they have to do. They saw what the punters liked. Some of the plays lasted all day though, so one wonders how the buns were on the seats. But then the, the image of the noseless Davenant just, there's a medical saying which is, I think it's one night with Venus and then a lifetime with Mercury. Well, let's, let's move to another centre of warfare, but a centre of fighting and contest for three thousand years or so, which is Jerusalem, the world city. Some see about Montefiore, we're going to be talking a little bit in a moment about Jerusalem now, but just paint us a picture of very early Jerusalem was sort of in the wrong place. It was an odd place to become such an important city, wasn't it? Yeah, who'd have thought it would become the centre of the world? It's, it's, you know, it's a remote, it was a remote tiny mountain top settlement with one fortress and it was miles from the sort of the trade routes that people took along the Mediterranean, which go, you know, past acre and places like that. So it was a extremely unlikely place, but that's part of the great story of Jerusalem is that it became the holy city. Once it, once it achieved a certain sort of holiness and once it had been, that holiness had been canonised, if you like, in the Bible, it then became the holy city for everybody and it's really due to the Bible and then, and then the story takes off and it is, I guess, one of those great stories, I mean, it is just a sort of succession of sort of emperors, monsters, halls, prophets, their new revelations and poets and conquerors and the lots, you know, and it's a very exciting story. It certainly is, and destructions, because really it seems to me that the Jewish faith depends upon Jerusalem being destroyed not once but twice. I mean, it depends upon the Babylonian exiles. Very true. In fact, all the three great, all the three great religions depend on Jerusalem being destroyed. That's the fascinating thing. I mean, modern Jewry is based on the Torah, the law, and loving kindness, basically. That's the sort of idea of base of Jewry, but until the temple was destroyed in 70, Judaism depended on sacrifice at the Holy of Holies in the temple. So modern Jewry couldn't happen. Christianity separated from the mother religion, Judaism, in 70 as well. And so without the destruction in 70 Christianity wouldn't have happened, and nor would Islam, because Islam also depends on, you know, Muhammad was revered, the Christian and Jewish texts, and he regarded the destruction of the temple also as proof that Judaism was finished, God had withdrawn his blessing, and the blessing had been given to the new, new revelation, Islam. So everything starts with the destruction. The Holy of Holies being the sort of mysterious room right at the center of the temple where Yahweh was supposed to exist. And nothing was in it. Nothing was in it except God. And all the sort of Romans, all the sort of pagan leaders who looked at it, Titus, Antiochus, they looked in there and they were deeply impressed to find there really was nothing in there, just all. Yes. And people here, people may remember the notion that the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70, but that doesn't begin to convey, I was going to say, the sort of biblical scale, it's probably the wrong word to use, but the awesome scale of this event with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people being crucified in a circle around Jerusalem as the Roman armies push in and cannibalism and desperation inside. That's right. I mean, it was just, it was a scene actually less biblical, more 20th century. I mean, it really was more like Leningrad or Stalingrad. It was, you know, there were something like 500,000 people trapped inside Jerusalem, and they were dying in thousands of starvation. Inside Jerusalem, gangs of brigands were ripping at a viscerating people trying to find little grains of grains of food to eat from the stomach of dead men. Outside, the Roman legionaries were killing the Jews who were escaping and eviscerating them in order to find the gold they'd swallowed. Meanwhile, around the hills of Jerusalem, the Judean hills, literally 500 Jews were being crucified a day. So it was a forest of crucifix. And they crucified them in the most agonizing and ludicrous positions to mock them. So it was a scene from hell. And when, of course, they, when they actually stormed the temple, they, you know, that there was a terrible, and the fire rose up, the flames rose hundreds of feet in the air. And this great, great building built by Herod the Great, sort of, there was a terrible crack that could be heard across, across Jerusalem, across the hills, all the way into Jordan, what today's kingdom of Jordan. And, and it was said, Josephus, the historian who was there, said he'd never heard a more terrible sound and all this life is this incredibly beautiful building being destroyed. So it was, it was, it was, and that, of course, was the moment I start the book in that, that story because that is the moment that the three religions became what they are today. And we're, we're leaping over thousands of years here, but Jerusalem is, you know, is later on, it's taken by the Crusaders, then it's taken back by Islam and towards and fro endlessly. And you say that now it's probably more Judei eyes than at any time in its history since that in that terrible attack. It's more, it's more Jewish now than it ever has been since the first century. Yes. And it is. But it's also more, Jerusalem is actually more important than it has been in any time since the Crusades now. I mean, it really is the center of the world now in sort of 24 hour news. There's more news coverage of it. It is the center and in the crosshairs of all the present day crises, you know, secularism versus fundamentalism, America versus Iran, Israel versus Palestine, of course. So it's more important now. And the more, and of course, there's also that's before you can get to the fundamentalist of all three faiths who all believe that the apocalypse will take place on the Temple Mount any time now. And of course, the Iranian regime, for example, is a messianic, millenarian regime, which most people don't realize, they actually believe that the Mardi will come. And this includes all sorts of exciting apocalyptic events, which will take some of which will take place in Jerusalem. Very like, very like the early Nazarene or Christians who thought that the end of the world was absolutely imminent. Yeah, only be delayed for a few years. And of course, the American evangelists believe this Jewish fun Jewish orthodox extreme author ultra orthodox belief that, you know, that the temple will be built there again. I mean, there's also terrible pressure on these delicate stones heaped on now. Well, you see these delicate stones all focused on a terribly, terribly small area. The historic city of Jerusalem is absolutely tiny. It's like a most complicated archaeological site. But partly this book is about the city, partly it's about holiness, partly it's I hope it's just a great story about these kind of amazing characters. But of course, of course, it's also a history of the Middle East, if you like. And much of what's happening today will reverberate onto Jerusalem in a fascinating way. I mean, you know, these revolutions will, I mean, will change the whole strategic nature. I was going to ask you about that, because in a way, you're quite gloomy or pessimistic in some respects at the end of your book about the prospects for Middle East peace, the prospects for Jerusalem itself, the difficulty of those religious secular conflicts and so on. And yet we are here. We are talking in what's being described as the Arab Spring and generally unpredicted series of popular revolts going across the Arab world. Does that change of you at all? Well, it is a very exciting moment. I say it's a sort of it's a moving moment. I mean, you know, for years, we've just regarded the Arab world as a sort of frozen glass, a frozen glass, you're stuck under these dictatorships. And I hope we're going to find out that the Arab culture, Arab political culture, is is capable of democracy, the democracy that we we understand. And this will change things in the Middle East. It may lead to terrible wars, but it may also lead to peace in ways that we can't quite we can't quite decipher right now. But but it is very like 1848, this revolution, isn't it? I mean, the way it's spreading across the across the Middle East. Yeah. And it's it's it's it's a very exciting moment. And bloggers rather than men on horseback. That's right. But I mean, the interesting thing is, of course, you know, the way it'll change the strategic balance between, you know, with Israel, and that's that's the big question. And no one knows the answer. We don't know the answer to that. What did the message make of this? I mean, I think I was interested in a few weeks ago, actually, and it is a terrifying place. It's the most exhilarating place, but it is terrifying. And I also share the pessimism. And when you go to try and go on the Temple Mount now, you can't go if if you're if you're just a visitor. And that's to stop us. I understand it. Some Jewish fundamentalists who who who are plotting to blow up the mosques there and the extremism is almost tangible and deeply scary. And you have some optimism about the Arab Spring, but there's not much signs of spring in Jerusalem. Hmm. It's the ultimate example of the ability of geography or place to turn the head. It could be said. Geography, but also psychology. I mean, reading your book, I was I was really struck at how Jerusalem is a state of mind, something that exists in the mind. Which is also, I mean, potentially it's amazing that no one has seen that this is a great source of hope that Jerusalem could be something for export, that we could every every culture that fantasizes about Jerusalem. They did export it. They did export it. I mean, there was a Jerusalem chamber in Westminster, you know, there was, you know, there's there's Jerusalem's all over the world. How many New Jerusalem's there are around the world? Well, I mean, there may be many built. I mean, there was a sort of King of the King of Ethiopia built one, the, you know, the Zars of Russia built one. So there are a lot of Jerusalem's and in fact, every church had a little Jerusalem in the Temple Church in the famous Temple Church of Da Vinci Code is very much the Dome of the Rock built by the Templars, the template headquarters. I'm aware of Jerusalem as a state of mind. It's also rather unhealthy for mental health. If you describe a whole series of people from Gogol onwards who go to Jerusalem and basically lose their mind and sink into a psychotic depression. But they don't find Jerusalem there. It's a case of, you know, it's, it's that, oh, a friend do not look for Rome in Rome. It's the life from the tomb. It's a state of mind, but nevertheless, the physical entity of it is what people are in some senses fighting over. And that, I think, is the terrifying thing. It isn't something that is only in the mind. It is the physical. They're fighting over the celestial idea too. And that's why it's, that's why I am pessimistic about it, because it's almost impossible to, to police a psychology. Oh, well, we've mentioned cyclists and we've mentioned psychology. We've mentioned that phrase only in the mind, which I think we should ban from this program only in the mind. Dematheli Donald, you have a talk at the Institute of Physics next month called Alzheimer's disease and yogurt. And I've been longing to hear your explanation of the connection between yogurt and Alzheimer's disease. We're going to talk about creativity as well, but just start with that. Okay, fine. Well, let me start with the yogurt, which is where historically, my own research started. So in milk, which after all is what yogurt is made out of, there are many proteins and they typically exist in a sort of globular form, so the blobby things. And when you make yogurt, you heat it up, typically, and these blobs start to unravel and they become string-like. And then these strings can stick together in various ways. And that's why yogurt sets. So far, so good. Excellent. So the way the protein molecules stick together, once they've unfolded, is much more about the fact that they are long molecules with charges distributed along them, rather than anything specific about the particular amino acid residues, which is what gives them their function when they're in their native state. So one can start looking, and as a physicist, this is how I think about them, as long chains and a generic sense. Now, in Alzheimer's disease, it's well known that there are plaques in the brain. If you look at the post-mortem brains, you see these deposits of proteins, which are protein molecules which are stuck together. And so it's the same basic idea that when things go wrong in the brain, it's obviously not heat, but the sort of malfunctioning that may occur as we age due to sort of loss of biological control will also cause the proteins to start to lose their native shape and they can stick together. So the idea as a physicist is that if we can study one set of proteins in a nice controlled way in a test tube, we will get a basic understanding that will help us understand what happens in much more complicated situations. So I would never say I'm going to cure Alzheimer's or anything like that, but I hope just to be able to give a part of the jigsaw that may help inform other people in the biomedical arena. It's fascinating. And in a sense, the even wider point is that you come at a problem as a physicist and you are now touching into the area of traditional biology and medicine. And you don't like the notion that as it were, creativity is something for arts people. You would say that creativity is just as important in science and it's about making these connections and these sideward jumps from one area to another. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I would do it sort of naturally as it were without really thinking about it. But what worries me is that I think some people think that scientists are sort of rather closed off that they come up with a hypothesis they do an experiment, it does or it doesn't work. And that's the end of the story. And I think unfortunately, some of the way science is taught in schools by nature of the fact that you have large classes, you can't do experiments, you tend to do very, very simple things that the students know perfectly well have been done thousands of times before. There is no sense of discovery in that kind of thing. And I think that that's deeply regrettable. And people therefore get this impression that science is sort of closed off. It's something distinct. And I don't see it like that at all. And not only no sense of discovery, I sometimes think no sense of the bigger picture and joining things up. Here is a little box called physics. Here is a little bit with its equations. Here's a little box called chemistry with its periodic table, which you have to hear is a little box called frogs. But the sense that this is an area of human endeavour, we don't. I think that's right. And that there is a worry that there is so much testing done in the school curriculum in science specifically, that it encourages this kind of modularisation in closing off. And I guess it's up to us as scientists to go out and try and talk more generally to say that actually, there is still a sense of wonder. If you're a five-year-old and you're looking at your first frog, it's really amazing. And you think about, gosh, it was a tadpole once and all that kind of stuff. And I think somehow we lose that. And it is important to realise that scientists are just as creative, and that we look at the world in a holistic way too, and that creativity is not something that's left to the arts. I read in the papers today that Simon Sharma is making speeches about the teaching of history in schools and is trying to improve the teaching of history in schools. I'm wondering what you're saying, whether some of the great popularising science writers, as it were, the Matt Ridley's and people like that, and Daniel Denitz and so on, should be marshalled to create a slightly different science curriculum that can excite people. Well, there is a national curriculum review coming along, and I'm sure scientists will want to have their say. And indeed, last week, I was involved with the launch of a Royal Society report on the need for reform of A-levels, because we see in England that people choosing a narrow range of A-levels are much less likely to stay with the sciences than in Scotland, where they can do hires and will do a broader range, and the baccalaureate in France and things. People keep going with a broader curriculum, and I think that has the option of encouraging people to stay with the sciences longer, to get a better feel for what the sciences are, even if they don't go on to become scientists, or do science at university. But some of them may find that it is more interesting as the further they go. I mean, I'm one of those who was, as it were, taught or persuaded myself that I couldn't really understand science and it was dreary. And it was only when I was reading people like Richard Dawkins and James Glyke, and all those people writing about chaos theory or whatever it might be that I realized that it was actually jolly exciting. I wish someone had been able to go to ram that home to me when I was 13. Exactly. And I think there is then an issue also about there not being enough scientists who go into teaching, so that particularly in my own subject of physics, the number of physics teachers is worryingly low. So people have to teach the subject to 13-year-olds who aren't very comfortable with it. And how can you inspire people if you are yourself sort of feeling uncomfortable and anxious about it? So that there's lots of scope to make science a much more exciting endeavour and remind people that it is a creative subject. Well, Simon Wesley, you're our other scientist director. Well, I'm a doctor, which is halfway between science and... Well, it's a discipline based on science, but it's usually practiced as an art. And it's certainly a creative endeavour. There's no question about that and you make a wonderful case for this. I think you can go a little bit too far though. I don't think you want your doctors to be too creative. You would like to know the drugs that they're using or the oppression they're giving. They haven't just made up on the spot as it were. We want to keep our noses. Yes. And sometimes the testing of science, which is one of the things we do, thinking of what we're going to do is wonderful and talking about it afterwards is wonderful, but the middle bits have to say sometimes it's quite boring and repetitive and needs to be. That's striking because good doctoring is surely often about lateral thinking and your own work is so counterintuitive. We have this... We're drenched in the... The publicity of the... Mentally... I would say it's counterintuitive. I mean, we have a phrase. We teach the art of medicine, which is understanding the person, how to communicate and to understand that people are more than just the molecules that make them up. And that is a creative endeavour and some, particularly my training, psychiatrists can be very creative, sometimes like Freud almost too creative and move away from science completely. But I think it's a borderland issue. I think you create the ideas as Athena has said brilliantly. I'm not sure if this idea on Alzheimer's will pan out or not. We'll have to see. And if it doesn't, it's so odd. Yeah, I feel slightly chasing. I mean, you have to know the fact you have to do your... No, it's going to be an awful lot of drill. There is absolutely no data about it. You've got to learn your equations. You know, there is that as well. But ultimately it has this scope to take to go first. It's the same in the arts. You know, someone here didn't just sit down and, you know, write Jerusalem off the top of his head. He did. That's right. I think the sort of... I think this sort of... There's a sort of one has to have an absolute structure. One has to have a firm structure scaffolding, doesn't one. Yes. And then you can... All I'm trying to say is that science is more than that scaffold. And I think sometimes people see that as the end of the day in a way that they wouldn't in a subject. Well, I don't agree. I think I oftentimes... I don't know if you'd agree with me. But oftentimes in history people just think you just kind of might read a couple of books and then just write, bang it out. But in fact, all these things are about a combination of science and art, if you like. I mean, you know, there's a huge amount of art in writing history books as there is in the great scientists. It's a huge amount of discipline. And that's possibly the thing that we've lost in the art. The sense that there is a science behind it. You have to know. Things are true where they are not true and you go back to the sources or you don't. And I suppose my comment about your reprobates was rather that I didn't see that discipline, that structure. They came across as these sort of very laid back off hand. Exactly. But that, of course, it takes a lifetime of work to give that impression. I think what unites all of us is it's not science or history, it's the tradition of scholarship. And if you read the footnotes to the books that we were reading over that we can, you realize what an extraordinary amount of scholarship goes into that just as goes into Athena's papers and even occasionally some of us are having evidence. Evidence based science is one thing. Evidence based history is just as vital. I mean, I was also one of these boys who was said, right, English or history, you do, you know, the three A levels. And I loved physics at school because it also opened up this mental universe. And it had wonderful science teachers. And then that was lost. Institutionally, that was closed. It's very hard to keep those avenues going. But now as a historian, when I want to, you know, I have to read about architecture and about, you know, the founders of the Royal Society and so on. I need that. I need that vocabulary. So you need to say something about when I was writing about her at the great's death. I mean, I had to sort of go back to the doctors and the science and I loved the theories that you could find for his exploding, you know, and of course the Islamic part of Jerusalem's history is a culture where mathematics and science is absolutely into open with religion. I mean, there's no one of the fascinating things in, you know, when I was looking into the crusade appearance is that we're always taught that the crusaders were complete animals without any culture while the Arabs were incredibly cultured. In fact, the Arabs have been very cultured 200 years early. But by the time of the crusade, both, both, both cultures existed in a sort of world of barren, barren fight, barren. And in both cases, they had the medicine was, Eastern medicine was much better. But in both cases, there were, there were medical methods that were extremely good and worked for some reason, even though, even though there are other methods which were completely crazy and led to the instant death of their, of their patients. So that's one of the fascinating things about, about the Saladin period. Unfortunately, it leads to the instant death of this program because we've run out of time as well. But that was fascinating. Thank you to all the guests today. Demathea Donald will be talking at the Institute of Physics on the 30th of March. John Stubbs is reprobates the Cavaliers of the English Civil War and Simon Seabag Montefiore's biography of Jerusalem are both out now. And you can see Simon Wesley give his talk time bombs or tidal waves at the Royal Institution this Friday. Next week we're going to be talking about Italy, unification, globalization with Mark Gilmore and Mark Malek Brown. David Gilmore, I should say, Mark Malek Brown. And we'll be talking ethics with Helena Kennedy. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.