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Desert Island Discs

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Castaway guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

Eight tracks, a book and a luxury: what would you take to a desert island? Guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

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Kirsty Young

David Phillips

Desert Island Discs: Prof David Phillips

Prof David Phillips

01/05/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs, Prof David Phillips

Professor of Chemistry David Phillips joins Kirsty Young to choose his Desert Island Discs

President of the Royal Society of Chemistry Professor David Phillips joins Kirsty Young to choose his Desert Island Discs.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Professor David Phillips. 

His love of science has taken him on an extraordinary journey. At the height of the Cold War, he swapped a post in America for a place at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he partied with the Bolshoi and was interrogated by the KGB. He is also Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College, but, despite his eminence, he admits his students had a 'professor button' fitted onto their hi-tech lasers. It was, he explains, a knob he could twiddle while showing visitors around the lab, but it wasn't connected to the machinery and meant he didn't ruin his students' experiments. 

Record: The Marriage of Figaro 
Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 
Luxury: A piano with music 

Producer: Leanne Buckle.

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