Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Professor Stephen Jones
Oration given on 15 April 1999
Chancellor: The Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of doctor of the University be conferred on Professor Stephen
Jones.
It is no more than a truism to say that knowledge may be turned to either
good or evil. It is true also that history is replete with examples of
academic disciplines being used for the noblest purpose, and the most squalid
ends: chemistry, theology, medicine , history, language – the list is endless.
This should be a reminder to us that the pursuit of knowledge is not
something that takes place solely in, say, a hermetically-sealed laboratory or
the ivory tower of a university: it goes on within the broader framework of
society and the political system that seeks to regulate it, neither of which –
society and politics- necessarily adhere to the impersonal rules of pure
science.
In other words, science – knowledge – will always have a moral dimension:
another truism, perhaps; but one that has confronted humankind starkly in the
century just ending.
Stephen Jones, professor genetics at University college, London, is a leading
scholar in a discipline that, since its inception at the beginning of the
present century, has exhibited its potential for good and evil in abundant
measure. As the century draws to a close, it promises to remain excitingly
creative and controversial.
Professor Jones was born in 1944 and was educated at Wirral Grammar School
and then the University of Edinburgh, where he gained his BSc and his doctorate.
He could not, of course, have been aware when he was born of the ghastly,
inhuman experiments that were being conducted in the very centre of Europe in
the name of science and genetics, based upon the grotesque theories of Hitler.
Nor is it possible that he knew anything at all about the chicanery of Stalinist
theories of heredity that were to wipe out some of the most brilliant Russian
scholars and set back the study of genetics in the then Soviet Union for an
entire generation. One suspects, however, that, as his career progressed,
he became acutely aware of the contradictory ends to which his chosen discipline
had been put.
After Edinburgh, Professor Jones became a post-doctoral fellow at the
University of Chicago from 1969 to 1971. This was a time when there was
widespread anxiety about the so-called “brain drain” of British scholars across
the Atlantic. Fortunately for us, Professor Jones returned to these shores
in 1971 upon his appointment as lecturer in genetics a the Royal Free Hospital
Medical School in London, In 1978, he moved to University College, where he has
remained ever since.
Not that Professor Jones’s career has been static-far from it! Over the
years, his research has taken him to Chicago, California and Harvard, to
Botswana and Sierra Leone, and to Flinders University in Adelaide.
If asked to say which particular aspect of genetics his work has focussed, it
is likely that Professor Jones would answer “snails” – to which he might add
“fruit flies”. this is because his main research interests lie in genetics of
evolutionary process in animals, from snails an fruitflies to humans. but
his work extends far beyond the laboratory, as is evident from his teaching and
field work in Africa and elsewhere. It also intersects with the social
sciences, given his studies of patterns of genetic change in modern humans in
relation to fluctuations in population size.
It is because so much of modern science is highly specialised and technically
complex that there is a danger of its becoming incomprehensible to the lay
person. Yet, particularly with a discipline such as genetics, what is
happening in science may have critically significant implications for all of us,
both in terms of our physical welfare and also mentally and morally.
To a certain degree, the mass media try to serve as interpreter between
science and ourselves. Sometimes this is done very well. But there is an
ever-present danger that the commercial demands of the media push interpretation
beyond explanation and popularisation (which are perfectly in order) to
trivialisation, which can be extremely damaging.
What most of us seek is the authority of the scholar (especially if that
scholar is a leader in his or her own field), an ability to make the complex
comprehensible, and, not least, a talent for communication that draws all these
features together.
That is what Professor Jones is: distinguished scholar, populariser,
communicator. Never have we needed those talents more than at present.
Most of us have by now grasped the general principles and broad significance
of DNA. but, as our troubled century draws to a close, scarcely a week
goes by when we are not informed of yet another genetic “discovery” or
application of genetic theory. One recent headline (quite unconnected with
Professor Jones) read: “The gene that lets you eat, drink and stay skinny”.
Then there is the controversy over genetically modified (GM) foods – how many
sensational headlines has that produced!
Professor Jones is in the thick of controversy. On television, radio
and in the press he is constantly explaining, criticising, arguing, consoling,
reassuring and cautioning. And he does it in ways that grab our attention
and in language (often pungent, sometimes amusing) that we non-scientists – can
understand. In one recent article, for instance, he explained the
mysteries of the Human Genome Programme and its potential significance for human
kind in the twenty-first century with the aid of an extended metaphor centred on
a C-class Mercedes longer than a stretch limousine! In other words, he
courageously tacked the painful, moral issues involved in research that links
humans, chimpanzees and the Aids virus.
In addition to his work as a publicist, Professor Jones has kept up an
impressive flow of academic books, articles and reports. Byb1989, he had
become head of the Department of Genetics and Biometry at University College,
two years later he presented the 1991 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio and the year
after that he edited the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Human Evolution, to be
followed the next year by his book The Language of the Genes, which was awarded
the 1994 Science Book Prize. Little wonder that in Who’s Who he lists his
recreation as not “administrating”! Another distinction – and one that
goes some way to summing up his many-sided talents – was his being awarded the
1996 Royal Society Faraday Medal for the Public Understanding of Science.
In one of this recent articles, Professor Hones uses the phrase “rights imply
responsibilities”. That could easily be a dictum that applies to us all,
whatever our professional calling. But one suspects that in science, and
in genetics in particular, it is critically important to hold it in mind, given
the headlong rush of discovery and innovation. Scholar, interpreter and,
not least, moralist, in the best sense of the word – one may safely assume the
Professor Jones will practice what he preaches, and we will all be the better
for that.
Chancellor, I present to you JOHN STEPHEN JONES