I was brought up in Asia, of missionary parents,
and lived in an environment which was crawling
with ants and all sorts of living things and
as a kid I just became fascinated by all
the activity in the garden. Upon returning
to New Zealand I found myself fighting with
culture shock and how I coped with that was
to become involved in my books and to me biology
just became a hobby, it became one of the
great fascinations of my life. Thereafter,
it was just following the path of least resistance.
As I did my Bachelors degree and then a Masters
in cell biology and immunology, and then a PhD in the same subject, and then I found a position opening
up in cancer research where I've effectively
been ever since. So the work I've been involved
in has really changed over the 35 years or
so since I became a research fellow. Initially,
we were involved in anti-cancer drug development
and our particular interest was in anti-cancer
drugs which poison an enzyme called topoisomerase-2,
which is involved in knotting and unknotting
DNA, and so if you poison this enzyme, hopefully
in cancer cells it means that their DNA would
go into unresolvable knots and the cell would
die. Since then we've been involved in a number
of things and I've found myself involved in
a group which is looking at a fairly new phenomenon
called long non-coding RNA. Now only 2% of
our genome encodes for proteins. The other
98% until very recently has had no known function,
but a lot of it is copied into RNA which seems
to have its own function, although they are
still largely unknown. Because my parents
were involved with the church, they were devout
Christians, and you can very easily say that
I just became a Christian as a child by osmosis.
What I would really have to say is why do
I stay a Christian as an adult, day by day
and year by year? And it's because I believe
that in the gospel of Jesus, in the story
of the Bible if you like, we have not only
the most satisfying worldview, and not only
the most satisfying ethic, or system of ethics,
but we also have a relationship with a self-revealing
God, which is of course something that no
amount of science can ever give us an introduction
to. As far as Jesus is concerned, it has been
said that he was not only better than us,
he was different to us. So there is so much
about Jesus, his command, for example, to love
your enemies, which simply doesn't reflect
a human mindset, and so his teaching is quite
literally otherworldly. As a scientist I would
say it's something we don't invent, we discover
it. We encounter it by surprise. The other
thing of course was that, much more than a
teacher, was his life, his history, which
remains of such outstanding importance. In
his death and resurrection, again we see events
which to me have the quality of truth. They
cannot simply be invented by clever humans.
It's my nature and nuture I think, I am a
teacher by inclination, by profession, by
passion, and I get very upset by falsehood,
and as we look around ourselves, we see ourselves
settling deeper and deeper into what is now
acknowledged to be a post-truth society. Where
I see falsehood peddled, I just feel I've
got to try to put the record straight. As
a cancer researcher, I have seen the tobacco
industry deny for 50 years the link between
tobacco and lung cancer, even though the industry
knew it as soon as academic scientists did.
I wrote a book on genetics and evolution because
I'm so upset by the way that the relationship
between theology and evolutionary science
is often misexpressed. And finally my latest
book, The Gospel According to Dawkins, it
addresses misunderstandings, or urban myths,
which are widely current, but desperately
wrong, about the nature, the person of Jesus
and the New Testament, which is our one authoritative
witness to his life and his work. So where
there is widespread misunderstanding or untruth,
what can one do? One must put one's thoughts
onto paper, otherwise one just seethes. Have
I had a problem integrating faith and science?
No I haven't. There are lots of areas of uncertainty,
of course. There are things we don't know
about, the origin perhaps of the human religious
impulse. These things are very shady, very partly
known at this stage, but a self-revealing
God, still involved in his creation, taking
it to its consummation; this is where I find
science, including historical science, maybe
especially historical science, cosmology if
I understood it, earth science, geology, and
of course evolutionary biology, this is where
I find science just as part of the great story
which is picked up by the Old Testament and
then the New Testament and the history of
the church. It's one great saga.
That's not
an easy question because everyone's different,
and science is different. I think keep a level
head, I mean you're going to meet so many
people who tell you that science is the only
way of knowing. And when you think of it,
that is absolutely pathetic. Because we can
concede that science is the only way of studying
physical matter and energy, but to say that
the way of studying physical matter and energy
is the only way of studying our personhood,
and our purpose and our ethics, that's to
reduce reality ridiculously, to nothing. It's
just to exclude from viable discourse all
the exciting things that make us human.
