When Queen Elizabeth II opened the Francis Crick Institute in 2016, its director, Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate geneticist, came up with the idea of inviting her to start a machine sequencing a genetic code. He would have liked it to be hers, or perhaps one of her corgis, but “didn’t want to end up in the Tower” and settled on doing his own instead.
As the Queen pressed the button of the machine to uncover all three billion letters in Nurse’s DNA code, she turned to him and said: “I hope you don’t find out anything that you don’t want to know.”
It was an astute remark. For Nurse’s genetic inheritance turns out to be so complex and so embedded in the family secrets of social history that a Slovenian professor of children’s literature is studying it as a reflection of themes common in myths and fairytales.
One of our most distinguished British scientists, appointed to the Order of Merit by the Queen the day before she died, is reflecting on the ultimate question of biology and philosophy: who am I?
At the time the monarch gave her playful warning, Nurse was already aware that his parentage was not what it seemed. In 2003 he had taken up the position of president of Rockefeller University in New York, having already received the Nobel prize for his discoveries on cell division and the cell cycle — the start of life.
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He applied for a green card and was astonished to be turned down. US Homeland Security explained that the name of his mother was not on his short birth certificate, which he had submitted. Since his parents were dead, he could not speak to them. He had two remaining brothers and a sister, Miriam, who had died in 2000 at the age of 70.
The bombshell was that this older sister, Miriam, was in fact his mother. This is what Nurse uncovered when he eventually got his “long” birth certificate from the UK’s General Register Office.
He was born, in 1949, into a working-class family, his father working in a Heinz factory, his mother as a cleaner. Until Paul was six, the family lived in a two-bedroom flat in Alperton, northwest London — his parents, his two brothers and sister, and his grandmother.
He was aware that his parents were older than seemed usual, in their forties, but otherwise his situation was unremarkable. His siblings were much older than him — his sister Miriam was 18 years older, so he was effectively raised as an only child. Miriam moved out and married in 1951, raising three children. She dutifully visited her parents and her little brother Paul every week.
This constructed family life was built on an extraordinary secret. Miriam had become pregnant at 17 and the decision was made that her parents would raise the baby as their own.
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We are sitting in a meeting room at the Francis Crick, trying to clarify the generational puzzle together. Nurse approaches it with good-natured curiosity and a scientist’s eye for data. He questioned his living brothers/uncles but they knew nothing of the secret — although they were aware that their mother had gone off to Norfolk and returned with a baby, Paul.
Norfolk is significant because it is where Nurse’s parents/grandparents met in service in a country house and where they had family.
“I wasn’t born in a hospital, I was born in the house of my uncle, my mother’s brother. Their daughter, my cousin, was also there,” he says. “I phoned her and she said: ‘This is true, I was 11, you were born in my bed. Miriam came and stayed in my bed.’ ”
The swap then took place. Everyone was sworn to secrecy and kept the secret for half a century. Miriam never told her husband, who died soon after she did.
Nurse, meanwhile, continued to collect honours and distinctions, becoming president of the Royal Society and the founding director of the Francis Crick Institute. It is a world-famous research centre opposite St Pancras railway with messages at its entrance: “Exploring the building blocks of life” and “Where discoveries change lives.”
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In July this year the BBC Radio 4 science programme The Infinite Monkey Cage, presented by Brian Cox and Robin Ince, broadcast an episode from the Crick to mark the 70th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure. Ince asked if anyone on the panel had anything interesting in their genetic past and Nurse said, well, as a matter of fact …
Also on the programme was Turi King, the genealogist and geneticist who had worked on establishing the DNA of Richard III. She told Nurse she would like to help him to trace his father. A few days later, while he was in Hiroshima at a conference, she emailed to say she thought she had found his father and some half-siblings. To be absolutely sure, she wrote to one of Nurse’s possible half-brothers to ask if he would do a genetic test. Nurse says: “I was in my tiny Hiroshima hotel room where my world is changing. I have acquired six new half-siblings.”
It turns out that his biological father, who lived close by in Alperton, was conscripted to Egypt after the Second World War and Nurse thinks he met Miriam on leave. When he returned from Egypt he became a bus driver in London, then a long-distance lorry driver and finally a chauffeur. He married twice and had six children.
Nurse says: “And the weird thing is he operated out of the bus station by my home where I used to go to collect bus numbers as a child. I was at primary school with my half-sister unknowingly.”
Nurse’s response is not one of anger or betrayal, but fondness and admiration for his family for somehow making it all work.
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“I am actually proud of all of them, they did what they had to do, they found a way, there is no tragedy here for me, although there was for my mother,” he says. “They got on and did it. My grandparents became my parents in their forties and that is why I was so much younger than my siblings.
“I don’t know if my father ever knew that I existed. After he was demobbed he might have seen a pram being pushed around the local area by my grandmother pretending to be the mother.”
His biological father died in 2017, not long after the Queen’s remark to Nurse about surprises. Nurse is in touch with his new half-siblings, who are welcoming. He has photographs of his father and they have similarities in looks and posture. In one photograph his father has his chin on his hand, in thought, and a glass of red wine in front of him. “That could be me,” Nurse says.
He was also told about his father’s curiosity. He may not have had a formal education but he was an avid reader, especially of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Nurse wants to talk to The Times mainly because he wants Miriam to be acknowledged as his mother, since she was not able to be recognised during her lifetime. He is also reflecting on himself: is he nature or nurture? He chooses, emphatically, nurture.
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There is yet another twist. He was in his mid-thirties when his daughter, Sarah, aged nine, was given a school project on family trees. Nurse suggested that she spoke to her grandmother about her ancestry, but her grandmother turned white at the direction of the conversation. She explained to Paul that she had never told him before, but that she was illegitimate and born in a poor house. She added that Sarah’s grandfather was also illegitimate. Both their fathers were unknown. But she did not reveal the further secret of her daughter Miriam.
Nurse looks at me, shaking his head at the generations of secrets and illegitimacy.
Now that there are no rules for who can have babies and parents can pick and choose genetic characteristics, I ask him about his views of genetic engineering for babies.
“My view is that, at present, we don’t really understand the consequences of the genetics caused by defects in single genes to be able to do this properly,” he says. “There are certain diseases which if we could correct precisely would really reduce suffering. But there are many others where we don’t know the ramifications of making those changes.”
His only sadness is for his mother and her undeclared maternal love. He shows me a couple of photographs. One is of him and Miriam playing about on a bicycle. The other is from her wedding. She is holding on to her husband and to Nurse. He was three at the time and was told later that he crawled under the table on which the wedding cake was placed, pulled at a gateleg and shattered the cake. Symbolic?
Later, he learnt from his half-sister that Miriam had photographs of her children from marriage by her bedside but also one of Nurse. Asked by her daughters why his picture was alongside theirs, Miriam replied: “Well, he was my baby brother.” It was the nearest she came to saying he was her baby.
He would like to have known more about the relationship between his mother and father — “was it a one-off? Did it last a week or a month?” — but has to be content with the unknown. He has made enormous scientific breakthroughs but cannot solve the mysteries of the human heart.
Sarah Sands is co-founder of the Braemar Science Summit and a trustee of the Science Museum
