Paul Nurse - Discussing Family Trees in School Can Be Dangerous

 

I’m a geneticist. I study how chromosomes are inherited in dividing cells. But my story tonight will be more to do with my own genetics. You probably gathered I’m English. [audience laughter] I was brought up in the 1950s and 1960s in London. My family was not very rich. I had two brothers. I had a sister. My dad was a blue-collar worker, my mum was a cleaner. My siblings all left school at 15, and I was a little bit different. I did quite well at school. I passed exams, and then I somehow got into university, got a scholarship and then did a PhD. But I wondered, why am I different to the rest of my family? Why did they all leave school at 15, which is, in fact, what happened?

 

Well, I did not really have much of an answer, but I felt a bit unsettled about that. You know I wondered about it occasionally, but I carried on with my life. I got a job at the university, I got married, I had two children, Emily and Sarah, and just got on with things. Then my parents, who were living in London, they retired to the country. We used to visit them regularly. But the truth was, it was a bit boring. They lived in the middle of nowhere, nothing much happened there. And my kids, who were perhaps 9 or 10 or 11, got a bit bored when they went there. 

 

Sarah, my 11-year-old, had a project at school. And the project was family trees. I have to tell you, family trees are very bad projects [audience laughter] to have at school. And I said, “I’ve got a great idea. I know you get a bit bored at Grandma’s. Why don’t you talk to Grandma about her family tree?” So, we get there, we have dinner and then off Sarah trots, takes Grandma next door to talk about her family tree. Five minutes later, in comes my mum, absolutely white. Absolutely white. She comes over to me and she said, “Sarah’s been asking me about my family tree, and I have to tell you something that I’ve never told you.” I was in my 30s by this time. I was in my 30s. [audience laughter] 

 

 She said, “I never told you.” But what my mum said is, she said, “Actually, I’m illegitimate.” This is what my mum said, “I’m illegitimate.” She had been born in 1910. Her mum was not married. She had been born in the poorhouse. She was not from a wealthy family. She was brought up by her grandmother. Her mother had married somebody else who I thought was my grandfather. But that was not the case. My grandfather was unknown, so I had lost a grandfather. Then she turned to me and said, "And actually, it is the same for your father too." [audience laughter] So, in two sentences, I had lost two grandfathers. [audience laughter] 

 

Well, this was a bit of a shock. And then, I began to think about it and I thought, well, maybe this is where I got some exotic genes from somewhere, and they recombined and that is why I am a bit different. And then, I remembered that my middle name was Maxime, and I got it from my dad, who was called Maxime William John. He was a farm worker in the country that is where he came from in Norfolk.

 

And I tell you, in Norfolk, farm workers are not called Maxime, usually. [audience laughter] This is a French-Russian aristocratic sort of name. [audience laughter] It did seem a little odd, so I began to imagine that perhaps, I had exotic grandfathers, a French-Russian aristocrat and blah, blah, blah, and that was why I ended up how I was. And so, that seemed all okay, that seemed a reasonable explanation. I forgot about things, and I got on with my career. I became an Oxford professor, then a departmental chair, then they knighted me and then I got a Nobel Prize a few years ago. [audience laughter] So, that is all hunky-dory.

[audience laughter] 

 

And then, in 2003, I decided to come to New York City. Both my parents had died, they lived into their 80s and 90s. And so, I came with my family to New York City to be president of Rockefeller University on the Upper East Side. A couple of years ago, 2007, I thought I should try and get a green card. Have you ever seen those poor bastards all there queuing up when you come into immigration? They are all people like me who have to wait there for an hour and a half and have their fingerprints all done. Anyway. 

 

And so, if you have a green card, a residence card, you avoid that, okay? So, I applied for a green card. Huge amount of paperwork. You have no idea, how complicated it is. Sent the thing off, waited a number of months, came back and I was rejected. [audience laughter] I thought, how come I am rejected? I am a knight, I have got a Nobel Prize, [audience laughter] and I am president of Rockefeller University and they reject me for a green card? I know Homeland Security has high standards, but I mean, [audience laughter] this did seem more than a little ridiculous. 

 

So, I looked through all the paperwork, and I eventually found out they did not like the documentation I had sent with my application. So, I went through it and I picked out that they particularly did not like my birth certificate. So, I got my birth certificate out. It was a so-called short birth certificate, which we have in Britain, which names who you are, where you were born, the time you were born, your citizenship and so on. It does not happen to quite name your parents, okay? So, perfectly official document, but that is what I had. And so, I thought, well, I can go and get the long certificate. I knew the registry office would have it. So, I phoned up London, the registry office and said, "Please send that in the post." I told my secretary in my office, "When it arrives, bungle it all up again, send it off to those silly jerks in Homeland Security." [audience laughter] 

 

I went on holiday for a couple of weeks, went to New Zealand, came back, undoing all the mail, looking at my emails and so on. Several people in my room. I had my secretary, her assistant, my wife who came in, my lab manager was around, so quite a few people around. And then, I remembered that I told my secretary to get this package sent off. So, I asked her, "Did you manage to do that?" She turned to me and she said, "Well, I didn't do it," she said, "because the certificate arrived, I looked at it and I thought, maybe you got the name of your mother wrong." I said, "Of course, I didn't get the name of my mother wrong. Don't be absolutely ridiculous." So, she handed me the certificate. Everybody started to look at me. It's a bit of a strange conversation to have.

 

So, I open it, I look at it and there the name Nurse is my mother. And I say, "Well, not a problem there." And then, I look at it again, and the name was Miriam Nurse. And that was the name of my sister. It was not the name of my mother at all. It was the name of my sister. So, I’m looking at this thinking, oh my God, the registry office have cocked up again. [audience laughter] And then, I look a bit further, and where it says father, there's just a line, just a dash, no father. And then, my wife comes up and says, "You know what this might mean, Paul?" [audience laughter] 

 

I was a bit slow, actually. [audience laughter] I really did not quite realize what it might have meant. And then, slowly, the clouds roll away. My sister was 18 years and one month older than me, okay? Now, I have not told you, but not only had both my parents died, who are actually now my grandparents, but also my mother, she died early of multiple sclerosis, three or four years before. So, I had nobody. That whole generation had died. I had nobody to confirm if this story was true.

 

However, on the birth certificate was the place where I was born, and it was my great aunt's house about 100 miles from London in a city called Norwich. And my great aunt had a daughter who was 11 years of age when I was born. So, I phoned her up and said, "Do you know anything about this?" And she said, "Yes, I do." She said, "Your sister became pregnant at 17, and she was sent to her aunt's in Norwich, 100 miles away from home." This is like a Dickensian novel, as you can see. [audience laughter] "And she gave birth to you. And her mother, my grandmother, came up and pretended that the baby was hers. She sent your real mother back home. And several months later, she took you back with her, pretending that she was your mother."

 

We all lived together in this two-bedroom apartment for two and a half years. And then, my real mother got married and left home. There's a photograph of me in this wedding. And my mother, my real mother, is holding the hand of her husband in one hand and my hand in the other. Because you realize, this was her leaving me with her parents. She never told her husband. So, the whole thing was kept secret for over half a century. Now, at the same wedding, I crawled under the table, a gateleg table, which had the wedding cake. I managed to move the leg, and the wedding cake fell off the table [audience laughter] and smashed into pieces. I wonder whether I was revolting at the thought of my mother being taken away. Now, this was a tragedy, I am sure, for my mother.

 

I was brought up happily, a little dully maybe, by my grandparents, but this was, I am sure, a tragedy for my mother. She had three children, and she kept four photographs of babies by her bed. I only learned this after her death. Three were her legitimate children and I was her fourth, illegitimate, child. Well, what’s the final irony here really? I am not a bad geneticist, and my rather simple family kept my own genetic secret for over half a century. Thank you.