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SERIES 2 |
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PROGRAMME 2: Sir Paul Nurse on Erasmus Darwin
 Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731.
Educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh he settled first near Litchfield and later at Derby.
A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet while also working as a country doctor, naturalist, medical botanist, and inventor.
Darwin was one of the founders of the well known Lunar Society, second only to the Royal Society in its importance as a gathering place for scientists, inventors, and natural philosophers during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Darwin expounded one of the earliest theories of evolution, and he described the importance of sexual selection to continuing changes within.
Erasmus Darwin was "a savant who contrived to impart science through the medium of poetry, but whose botany and zoology were apt to be a bit warped by his favourite theories".
Erasmus Darwin's verse has been described as showing frequent extravagance and incomprehensibility, but with bursts of genuine poetry. His poetry received some ridicule at the time from critics but was admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lloyd, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Darwin exerted a powerful influence on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Mary Shelley among other literary figures. Coleridge claimed that Darwin possessed "perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men." While Mary Shelley used him as an inspiration for the character of Baron Frankenstein.
Paul Nurse was born in Norfolk in 1949 and was educated at the Universities of Birmingham and East Anglia. He has been a research fellow and professor at several other universities including Bern, Edinburgh, Sussex and Oxford. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1999 Paul Nurse received a Knighthood for services to cancer research and cell biology. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the key regulator of the cell cycle.
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BBC History
This Sceptred Isle
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to programme 2: Sir Paul Nurse on Erasmus Darwin
