Sir David King Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Sir David, welcome to Berkeley.
Delighted to be here.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Devon, in South Africa. I was brought up in Johannesburg, went to school in Johannesburg, went to university there and completed my Ph.D. there.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
Well, interestingly, parents and the environment -- first of all, my father was in the paint business in South Africa and he was also very much a Victorian figure. Each of his kids were sent into the paint business. From the age of thirteen, my vacations were spent in different parts of the business. His expectation was that we would move in and take over. I enjoyed immensely being in the paint laboratory and that was one reason why I ended up choosing science as a career.
Was chemistry a natural step from painting, moving beyond painting?
No. "Paint chemist" was the title my father had in line for me, but I could easily have gone into physics, chemistry or biology. It was science that I was really fascinated by. If I look back to my childhood, I know that I had an unusually inquiring mind. I had to know how things worked and irritated a lot of people with all of those queries about how things worked.
Were there any teachers you had in South Africa, or later, that [influenced you]?
I would have to say it was more reading that influenced me, and just following natural curiosity. I can't look back, as many people do, and say there was the teacher that really sparked my interest. At the same time, of course, I'm talking about a climate in South Africa which became very difficult. I left in 1963 in the year of getting my Ph.D., which was the year Mandela was arrested, it's the year when South Africa really began to take on all the attributes of a police state. So, outside the university we had armed police, visibly present in big vans, and army equipment every day. So, the other aspect of my childhood that I would have to say affected me enormously from that period was the attitude I took towards Apartheid as it was then, and the political system. As a matter of fact, I was asked to leave by the government of the country I was born in.
For political activities?
Well, my political activities amounted as a Ph.D. student to writing letters to the International Press. Actually, this was quite heady for a young man. The International Press printed my letters, and as a matter of fact, one of the editors called me up one day and asked me to write a letter on a particular topic, and I was very flattered. What I didn't figure, and this was my own naïveté, was that writing letters to the International Press was a political activity. I thought we had the freedom of the press, all of the machinery of a democracy was in place. I hadn't quite anticipated that I was inviting myself into a major interview and an exit.
How did your training in science impact your thinking about politics, or did it?
Well, there's an interesting point. I think the evidence-led, logical approach I have to things meant that I felt affronted by the system there. It was very apparent to me, for example, that the man who was in the kitchens of our family home and prepared our meals was an extremely intelligent person, and yet his position in society could never reflect the level of his intelligence. There were amazingly extreme things as well, separate entrances for black people and white people into a post office where they were both served by the same person once they got into the post office. Official rules that were mind boggling, actually.
What was your work in chemistry?
My work in chemistry has always been in solid surfaces and the interaction between solid surfaces and gases. I started out in my Ph.D. on catalysis, ammonia synthesis, the old one: how do you make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen more effectively. I've always moved, or I did for the first ten or fifteen years, towards a more theoretical, more complete analysis of water surfaces, and dealing with it on the atomic and electronic level. So today we have a laboratory which combines state-of-the-art quantum theory with state-of-the-art instrumental development. The objective, let me say, is to get back to more complex phenomena, but with this sound base that we can now bring to it.
Here's the wonderful thing that's now happening in science. With all the computer power that we have we can tackle enormously complex systems with the kind of certainty that previously we could only bring to simple systems. And whether we look at catalysis in industry or semiconductors or the earth's system, we can look at very complex phenomena with enormous quantitative understanding now. That's the most exciting thing that's happened in my period in science.
I always like to ask scientists who are our guests what is the temperament, the character required to be a good scientist.
The first thing is a continuing sense of excitement in discovery. Whenever I and my research group have a success, I still feel an enormous sense of celebration. You're tackling a problem and sometimes it takes years and years, and finally you get there, and however small in retrospect this breakthrough might be, at that moment the sense of excitement is still tremendous. I think that's critically important. Once you've got that, all of the hard work, the slog, the understanding, the bench work in the lab, all of that becomes worthwhile. I have to keep telling Ph.D. students this because they may have slogged for two or three years without seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But the longer you work like that, before the light suddenly appears, the better that Eureka moment is. Maintaining that sense of excitement in the science is critically important, and for some of us it's actually quite easy.
What about the science itself? What are its characteristics? I know that science requires a cosmopolitanism, an internationalism. It requires a rigor, it requires a search for the evidence that proves the truth. Talk a little about that and how it's affected you.
My view is that the scientific process is a process that has emerged over the last four or five hundred years, and the biggest step forward was probably the Royal Society setting up its meetings in the form where a scientist giving a presentation had to be able to show evidence to the audience. Actually doing experiments in front of the audience was de rigueur in those times, to show the audience that it worked and you could repeat the experiment. So, producing your evidence and being challenged.
The idea of challenge is absolutely central to science. You don't make propositions. You are trying to make a description of the real world, and the challenge, the best challenges will come from people who've made better observations of the same piece of the real world that you're trying to study. And of course, there's a strong element of the ego coming through in this. If you challenge the top scientist and push him off his or her pedestal, you're hoping to occupy that pedestal, only for the next person to come along and try and knock you off it. I think there is a lot of the ego in the process.
But the important thing is the sense of challenge and the progress that comes from continued improvement in the study of the real world. The better the instrument you have for observing the real world, the better off you're going to be in your description of it. So while we're all going through the process of standing on the shoulders of scientists who've gone before, we're also able to criticize them because of our better viewpoint with better instrumentation.
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