David MacMillan: ‘The medal is the real celebrity’
The Nobel prize-winner on the joys of handing out his medal to everyone, chatting with William Shatner and Alex Ferguson, and the pain of being a Scottish football fan
When I was 10 years old, I thought I was going to be a steelworker. My brother was the first person in our family who decided to go to university. It was very controversial. My mum and dad thought he was being lazy for not wanting to join my dad in the local steelworks. Then, when he graduated, he got a job that paid more money than my father was earning after 30 years as a steelworker. At that moment, my mum and dad decided that I had to go to university.
The last time I ran an experiment in the lab was the summer of 2002. I decided that I was going to show these young punk students how to do it. Before I knew it, I had seven or eight people running around after me because I didn’t know where anything was (imagine an operating theatre). I was absolutely wasting everyone’s time. I set up the reaction, and then I got really busy and never came back to deal with it. It just sat there for days. It was really embarrassing!
We have problems we’ve been working on in my group for 15 years that we still haven’t solved. But if they work, it will be incredible. Even if you’ve no idea how to do something, if you think ‘wow, if that could happen that would be huge,’ then that’s a great litmus test for saying, ‘yes, that’s a good problem to work on’.