Brady and I were talking about the
Olympic Games and the medals gold silver
and bronze that all the athletes are
going to win for their excellent and
performances and Brady suddenly thought
and asked me about the medals that I'd
won and wanted to see them again so I
looked around and quite to my surprise I
discovered that I've won bronze silver
and a gold medal
I'm absolutely hopeless at sport and I
never even won a race at school let
alone anything else so these are for
chemistry not for sport
so let's have a look they're not easy to
open this one here
bronze medal bronze is an alloy of
copper and tin so it's not an element
and you can see this one's not even
round and I won this when I was 30 and I
was quite disappointed I thought it
looked like a gravestone
it's was awarded by the Royal Institute
of Chemistry an organization that
doesn't even exist anymore it's become
at the Royal Society of Chemistry I won
this when I was quite young and then
more recently I want the silver medal
and this one here is for education in
chemistry in fact it's thanks to you the
YouTube viewers that I won this one so
in some ways this is really your medal
and some of you might come to Nottingham
one day and have a look at it
and the gold medal which is here is from
the Royal Society and was for my
research you can see it's the biggest
and the heaviest and this is not pure
gold this is so-called nine carat gold
which means it's nine parts in 22 is
gold but even so there's slightly more
than 100 grams of gold in here and I've
never ever seen such a large lump of
gold as this in my life and it's really
very heavy you can ask why do chemists
all scientists in general win medals and
they are on one hand prizes for people
doing good research or doing well in
education and there's something to
recognize the contribution they've made
but also to encourage people to try and
have some target that they want to try
and reach and the difference between
these medals and the sports medals is
that people tend to be quite old when
they win them when you're young you
might get a bronze when you're older
silver and you
really lucky and I was very lucky you
might get gold when you're grey and old
like me I would've thought science would
almost be a profession that would be
above medals it would almost be too too
snobby to too much like it's not about
medals it's about the science you know
older thought maybe scientists will
think medals is a very superficial thing
that you would have in sport but not the
science but that doesn't seem to be the
case S&P medals flying around every year
in science people imagine that
scientists are very cool and calculating
but they're really very competitive and
in some ways they're just as competitive
as athletes it's just that the race
between them is not quite so obvious as
when people are running around the track
pool doing the marathon but people are
racing to be the first to discover this
or the first to solve a particular
problem and it can get really quite
competitive sometimes even unpleasant if
you have two groups that are really
trying to get there first I think that's
what makes science good it would be
really boring being a scientist if
everybody was like a cool calculating
robot they're human beings they have all
the failings that everybody else has the
same sort of ambitions and you get the
same range of people you get those who
are very nice and very modest you get
those who are really arrogant and no
different from the worst sportsmen what
kind of you I think that's not for me to
judge the other thing which is slightly
different is that in science men and
women compete equally rather than sports
where you have the women's events and
you have the men's events and in science
everybody is equal and people from every
country are equal and I think science
has been an international activity for
hundreds of years and like the Olympic
Games which only started about a hundred
years ago or slightly more so
international science and the
competition
science has been going for a long time
there were arguments at the end of the
18th century who discovered oxygen first
and things like that I've known you for
a while now and I've actually known you
when you've won one or two of your
medals and something I've noticed and
I'm assuming this is just a chemist
thing is when you are lucky enough to
win a medal for some reason you
immediately take quite a big interest in
its composition what it weighs what its
purity is do you think all chemists do
that when they win medals no I don't
think so
it's just that I'm I'm an obsessive on
these things and it was really quite
interesting but particularly with gold
where I knew it wasn't pure because if
it was pure it would be so soft that if
you dropped it on the table it would
mark so I really wanted to know what it
was and I suppose there was a bit of
nerd ish curiosity how many grams of
gold have I really got how did you find
out I I actually emailed the people who
was presenting it to me and they didn't
know so they emailed the Royal Mint and
they told