Barry Keverne interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 23rd March 2009

[Please note that the original summary was substantially revised by Professor Keverne]

0:09:07 Born in Warmsworth, Yorkshire, in 1942 the only industry in the area was coal-mining and my father was a miner;, I was brought up in a house full of women - mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I still remember my great-grandmother as a matriarch to whom everybody listened; she was extremely generous to me; I was born prematurely and weighed just over 4lbs; there were no incubators in those days and the nurses told my grandmother that I had no chance of survival, but she brought me through. I still remember things associated with my great-grandmother. Such as her co-op number.  I used to buy groceries for her as a small child. I went to the junior school that had only two classes; it had no lavatories, just a hole in a field at the bottom of the playground. I remember having to queue up every morning to get a spoonful of cod-liver oil followed by a spoonful of orange juice. I did not seem to have any traumas in my childhood and can't remember ever being unhappy; it was a bit tough for me when my father came back from the War as I had been so spoilt and he introduced some necessary discipline.

4:52:07 I was the first male in four generations of my family not to work in the mines; my father was himself injured in a roof fall in the mine; with his compensation he bought a small hotel business which went well and expanded.  My parents were working-class but very pleased to have made it into business and being financially secure, but that was around the time I went to university.  They were not openly loving and rather reserved in showing emotion, but my great-grandmother was always loving and kind. I was allowed to grow up in my own way as both parents were working; even at junior school I would come home and get myself something to eat. I have a younger brother who went into the family business. Around my home there was a lot of countryside; the River Don was nearby though it was very polluted. When at junior school I used to collect stamps, and was interested in sport, sprinting in particular. There were no teachers that particularly influenced me at that stage; the classes were huge - between 50-60 children. I did my 11+ and out of the two classes that took the examination, only nine children went to grammar school. I passed for Doncaster Grammar School which was in the school catchment area, but because my parents moved after fathers accident we lived outside that permitted catchment area, and I went to Mexborough Grammar School. It was a massive co-educational school with over a thousand students and five streams in each year. I got into the top stream but never came first in the class, as it was always girls who came top; the highest grade I ever made was third. I sailed through school without problems; I was caned twice, once for whistling in the corridor and once for eating in the street. Discipline was strict, but the cane represented a badge of honour among boys. There were teachers that I liked very much, particularly the biology teacher. I found chemistry pretty dull but we all had to do it, and physics. We were taken on biology field courses which I also enjoyed very much. I also played chess, both for the school and then for the county. When I went to university I played for London University team. With seventy others we played one of the Russian grand masters; I lost, but nobody beat him; I realized at that point that I was not as good at chess as I had thought, and from then on only played for pleasure. At university I took up mountaineering and climbing and used to go quite often to Harrison's Rocks in Tunbridge Wells. Also to Wales and the Lake District.  We used to go to Scotland every winter to both walk and for mountaineering.  One year we rescued the S.A.S., four of whom were out on a mission.  After university I took a year out and went to Africa, to the Mountains of the Moon, to do mountaineering and a biological project. I travelled as super crew on a boat via the Suez Canal. On arrival we were told not to venture up the mountain as there was warfare in the Congo and guerrilla forces were infiltrating Uganda from there.  Warned that they would shoot us for our supplies, we transferred our project to Mount Kenya as it has the same kind of Afro-alpine zone.  On one occasion we ran out of food except for peas as the porters bringing up supplies failed to arrive. There were four of us working together and we have remained close friends ever since; we all became academics. The biology involved asking questions about both fauna and flora because of the high fluctuations in daylight temperature. We were interested in how any flora could possibly survive and why the plants grew to such a gigantic size. Basically what we found was that at night the leaves closed up and prevented the core temperature falling below zero. Survival was a continual dying process which enabled the plants to mature, because the leaves on the outside die at night providing insulation.   During the day, metabolic activity provides for growth to the rest of the plant. It got me interested in thinking about biological research.

19:34:22 At school I joined in the school play and also played the violin; I started the latter at junior school where my music master thought I was destined to become a famous musician. When I went grammar school I did not even reveal that I played the violin because I realized that to be rather good you had to put a lot of time into it. I was more involved in male-like things and tried to excel at them. I have nevertheless retained an interest in music and now my favourite composer is Bach; I do nevertheless like Gregorian Chant, Mahler, and a whole range of composers both old and new.  It is something I listen to for relaxation rather than as an intellectual pursuit. At university I did spend a lot of time getting to understand music.  On religion - I was never confirmed.  My parents were not overtly religious although they believed in God.  I was not brought up in any serious religious way; I found out after my mother had died that her father, who lived into his nineties and was a First World War hero, fell out with his father who was a Rabbi, because he married a non-Jew.  My grandfather also signed up for war without his father's agreement so was literally cast out of the family.  I guess therefore my mother was not brought up in any religious way, but nor was my father. However, I am not of the Dawkins' persuasion as I think he is just as evangelical as the evangelists. I believe in beliefs, and their enormous importance; I would never deny anyone the beliefs that give them a sense of comfort or wellbeing.  My own beliefs are very much humanistic and concern for the future of mankind. Trying to ensure that we keep our environment as habitable and ecologically normal as possible; I don't think, like Dawkins, that Darwin has disproved religion; Darwin was a religious man, and it was more the death of his daughter that made him disaffected with God; his wife certainly remained very religious and I think that if he had been really anti-religion he would never have remained with his wife and family. Darwin, too, was tolerant of religions, even though latterly he may not have been a believer. I do not believe in special creation and do believe in evolution, and realise that it is infinitely more complex than we might imagine.  In the last few years most of my thinking time has been concerned with evolution. One of the things that particularly interests me is how human beings have evolved into something quite different from other creatures, particularly with respect to brain development.

28:48:24 At school I opted for the sixth form science stream although I had been in the arts stream in lower school. As a consequence I had to do both 'O' and 'A' level chemistry in two years.  The school was bent on my going to university although I was the first person in my family to do so. I have cousins who have also gone but they were younger. I went to London University, to Queen Elizabeth College which was linked to King's College. I thought it absolutely fantastic being in London and being independent meant I did not put as much effort into my academic work as my social life together with involvement in university societies.  This was 1961-64. I then took a year out in Africa; when I came back I decided that I was really interested in research. I had read physiology.   The person I admired was J.Z. Young; I thought he was a wonderful biologist with a very evolutionary approach which stimulated me to think in that direction.  Because I was interested in brain and behaviour I did my Ph.D. at the Institute of Psychiatry, at the Maudsley Hospital; I was interested in understanding how hormones influence behaviour.  They have a powerful effect in rodents and small-brained mammals but nobody had really looked at their influence in large-brained mammals. I first studied monkeys and was very interested in how hormones motivated females in terms of their sexual activity.  The problem was that the work done in the field was incomplete and any work done in the Lab had suggested that monkeys mate at all times.  Because the male is so much bigger and tends to dominate the female, particularly in captive groups, I emancipated the female from male dominance by having a partition across their cage with a door that moved when the female pressed a lever.  The female was easily trained to press the lever five hundred times to open the door and gain access to the male. The door was too small for the male to get through, and on the other side there was a lever she could press when she wanted to leave.  The outcome was that the female pressed the lever to get to the male every day of her reproductive cycle, however she did seem more interested to get to the male around mid-cycle when she ovulated. I was also interested in the male's interest in her. All of the prior evidence suggested that the sex skin colour was all-important.  I found that one could artificially create the colour by use of oestrogen cream, but the male was then not interested. It was the smell of the female that was important, the pheromones. I did a converse experiment with males seeking females, using females that were ovariectomised and unreceptive to males, but changed their attractiveness by changing their odour. Males would pursue the females that smelt right. Summarising how the hormones impact on the brain and behaviour and on the somatic tissue and behaviour, then generally speaking hormones are synchronizing brain activity with bodily needs throughout most of biological systems. I then started to look at what happens when you carry out similar studies in a social group.  If you make a female monkey attractive with artificial pheromones in a social group it has no impact whatsoever.  However if we then consider the social hierarchy and its effects on behaviour I found that an animals status was much more important than the hormones.  Even if the male monkey was castrated, sexual behaviour continued while conversely, if the male lost rank socially, sexual behaviour stopped immediately.  Social rank was correlated with male hormone levels, testosterone in particular, but if a male lost rank the testosterone would go down; taking a low-ranking male and filling him with testosterone had no impact on his sexual behaviour. After spending five years working on how hormones have an impact on behaviour, I suddenly realized the importance of the natural biology and the need to take this into the context of the social situation. Social hierarchy is all important in both male and female behaviour.  Moreover, low-ranking females are less likely to ovulate, even when challenging the brain with the hormones which would normally bring this about; thus there is social suppression of reproduction in low-ranking individuals of both sexes in social living monkeys.

40:28:07 That work was supervised originally in London by Richard Michael; there were people in the States who were interested in the work I was doing and I applied for an American fellowship. I did not get it so remained with Richard Michael. I had six or seven papers in Nature and Science in the course of as many years in the late 1960s, early 1970s. About a year later, Richard Michael invited me to go to the States as he was moving there. He offered me a tenure-track senior post-doc research position. I was keen to try the states but preferred Cambridge. Joe Herbert, one of Michaels former students, invited me to come to Cambridge; I brought my post-doctoral money to Cambridge, and then I got a research fellowship for research in psychiatry.  Joe Herbert was the antithesis of Richard Michael, completely informal and totally disorganised, but a brilliant mind; what he taught me to do was really to think about things until it hurts; he always acted as devil's advocate; he did not pull his punches at lab meetings.  One of the kindest of people at a personal level, but rigorous intellectually, and I learned a lot from him. I was given a lectureship within two or three years in the Department of Anatomy; I then had to learn anatomy, how to dissect the whole body, and I learnt a lot more about the brain. Teaching medics in those days meant they spent a whole year on the brain; it was a completely new experience but I loved being on a learning curve, and still am, so I had no problems with teaching and supervising.  The brain is challenging and you cannot consider it in isolation; you have to know how it fits in with the body, and responds to bodily needs and tells the body what to do; I got my lectureship purely on the basis of my publications; the Professor of Anatomy was Richard Harrison who was really a zoologist with interests in dolphins. His attitude was that anybody could learn anatomy; I gave lectures on the sympathetic nervous system, the brain, but also on topographical anatomy. Harrison was relaxed but his second in command was Dr Max Bull, a dyed in the wool anatomist at Queens; he set up teaching experience for me with physiotherapists who used to come once a week from Bedford to learn anatomy, before I substantially progressed to teaching medical students. I do enjoy teaching and long after I became a professor I continued to supervise all the second-year medics until the College appointed a medic to a fellowship here, part of which meant he had to teach.  He was a neurologist and so taught the brain, which had been my area for teaching; I do not supervise PhDs any more as this is officially my retirement year; I still have grants so will be continuing with my research.

49:53:22 Because I had not been an undergraduate in Cambridge, I did not immediately get a fellowship, but I did teach for King's in 1973-5. Charlie Loke was DoS and very much in favour of someone having a medical qualification.  The College appointed a medical pharmacologist, so I didn't get a fellowship here; I became sub-director of studies for medical sciences at Sidney Sussex and I taught at Newnham. After the pharmacologist, King's appointed Matt Kauffman as a College lecturer in anatomy. After three years he went off to a Chair in Edinburgh; by this stage Charlie was a bit disenchanted with people who were not around very long and he asked me if I was still interested.  So it was in 1985 that I became a fellow at King's.