Dan McKenzie interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 11th May 2007 0:05:23 Born in Cheltenham 1942; grandfather was a well known doctor in Harley Street; my father went to Highgate School and then to Caius and also became an ear, nose and throat surgeon like his father; during the war he was in the R.A F. and I was brought up as a small child in the house where John Hampden refused to pay Ship Tax in Buckinghamshire; when my parents found it it was in terrible repair and falling down but it was a very beautiful Elizabethan house; they rented it and could not do any refurbishment; left there at seven and moved to London; before that went to a girls' school in Aylesbury; in London lived above my father's consulting room in Harley Street; went to a private school in Kensington; mother's background was completely different; she was brought up in Leeds and father was a labourer; she got a State Scholarship and applied to come to Newnham to read English; at her interview made her read aloud which emphasized her Yorkshire accent and turned her down; she never forgave this snobbery; instead she went to Royal Holloway but had friends at Cambridge; when I remember her she had no accent, her Yorkshire accent had just gradually disappeared 7:21:05 Went to Westminster Under school then Westminster itself; had a grand public school education with extremely bright teachers; until puberty I was hopeless; vividly remembered the change when I suddenly discovered physics and chemistry and to some degree biology and after that never looked back; younger brother who had been considered the bright child found me going from bottom of the class to top; there were two maths teachers and a physics teacher of importance; one maths teacher was a German refugee, Adolf Prague, who was terrific and taught pure maths; the other was Fisher who taught applied maths; Austin Stockoe taught physics but I adored chemistry as it was so logical; top in both physics and chemistry year after year; got a major scholarship to King's on basis of this success; came to King's because Austin Secker still had friends here; he wrote to one of them saying they should interview me; interviewed before I had any results by John Raven; spent an hour talking about Dostoevsky's novels and the orchids of the chalk and on the basis of this he gave me a place in King's to read physics 13:07:10 Unremembered incident about religious beliefs at school; very much influenced by my mother, my father less; father particularly good at languages and did rather belatedly try to encourage me to become a doctor; my mother was very interested in landscape planning and geology; she was a very forceful character; she got breast cancer while I was at school which was successfully operated on and did not recur but when I was an undergraduate she got cancer of the womb which was not operable; she had got an honorary degree in landscape architecture on the basis of a book 'New Lives, New Landscapes' which became the standard textbook; she was extremely encouraging and interested in my intellectual life 18:27:10 School had more effect on my than me time as an undergraduate ; after getting a scholarship to King's decided to stay at Westminster for a year and to become a mathematician as the teaching was so good, probably better than at Cambridge; at the end of that year got another scholarship in mathematics; at the same time got politically very active with the fairly violent left wing; also rowed like Pat Bateson who was also at Westminster; then came up to Cambridge and found politics here half-baked and right wing so had no interest in politics here; parents absolutely old Labour because of the Welfare State which my father had joined as soon as it started; real delight of Cambridge was that so many of the major figures in their subject were here lecturing to undergraduates; went to Dirac's lectures and Hoyle's; found the natural sciences tripos rather easy so went to all kinds of lectures right across the sciences; lucky to get a first at the end as my heart was not in it; came up to be a chemist but started geology in preference to physiology which had been taught at Westminster; had read Darwin and Lyell with total fascination but the course here was awful with no intellectual interest; did maths and physics which I liked but gradually realized that the part of physics which really excited me was what had happened before the war and not what people were doing then; particularly interested in quantum mechanics, Dirac's work; in my third year Maurice Hill was my director of studies; also knew Drummond Matthews who was a research fellow; they decided to turn me into a geophysicist; sent me to see Teddy Bullard as I was too theoretically inclined for either of them; became his graduate student; got a 2:1 in final degree in physics, a reflection of my increasing disinterest in what I was being taught 27:25:21 As a graduate student, Teddy suggested the subject of thermodynamic variables for research, on the basis of which got a research fellowship at King's College at the beginning of my second year; mother had read the dissertation and had given guidance on presentation which has stood me in terrific stead ever since; this changed my life completely as I could do what I wanted; gave up doing what Teddy had suggested and got interested in how does the interior of the earth convect which was completely speculative at that time; taught myself fluid mechanics and went off to Scripps at the University of California, San Diego, having got very bored with Cambridge at that time, on the invitation of Freeman Gilbert and Walter Munk; in those days there was lots of money for research, especially as the American Navy was extremely interested in anything to do with deep sea oceanography; knew nothing about how to go to the States and get paid so went to the Embassy and got an immigration visa; did not realize that this would mean I was liable for the draft; received registration papers at the end of six months; this was the time of the Vietnam war so I got on a plane and came home; but nothing in my early life as a scientist had such a profound effect as those eight months in California; it was a completely different world where no one was interested in my background but simply in me as an intellectual scientist 34:31:00 Came back to Cambridge and wrote a PhD informed by the time in California; went back to America and took up a fellowship at Caltech; as my visa was of a different sort I was not expected to do military service; just after I submitted my PhD in 1966 Teddy was invited to a conference in New York which was called 'The History of the Earth's Crust' and he suggested that they should invite me as well; this was the beginning of the complete revolution as there were two people, Fred Vine, who had been an undergraduate a year ahead of me at Cambridge, and Lynn Sykes gave talks showing that without any doubt at all data showed that the continents were moving, and they weren't looking at the continents but looking at the oceans, looking at the processes which happened on spreading ridges which produced magnetic anomalies and earthquakes; came back completely convinced what I should do and did my first paper on plate tectonics looking at the thermal structure of the oceanic plates as they were formed and cooled; this was done between coming back and being examined for my PhD and ended up being one of the earliest papers on the whole of this subject and was published in 1967; it needed the maths and physics I had been taught as an undergraduate and used an approach I'd learnt from the fluid dynamicists who do everything in terms of dimensionless variables which is totally opaque to everybody else but is an extremely powerful way of thinking about things; this was the first use of this in solid earth geophysics; all mathematics and analytical and all done in five pages but the computation and pictures left until I was at Caltec and that was a huge undertaking at that time 39:50:21 Caltec Seismological Laboratory, which is in the granite hills where it was possible to record earthquakes, was a wonderful environment with a small group of people who knew each other well and were doing absolutely first class seismology; that was when I became an earthquake seismologist; earthquakes are wonderful as they not only propagate through the earth but are also generated by the plate motions so you have two things, the structure and the mechanism that makes them; only stayed there six months then went back to Scripps for a further six months; there decided to read all the papers on plate tectonics; read one of Teddy Bullard's which had been written while I was a graduate student on how to do continental reconstructions; he used a theorem by Euler; reading his paper made me think it was the obvious way to think about all these global motions and turned the magnetic anomalies and earthquakes into a really precise mathematical theory; wrote this up over a weekend with Bob Parker. He had a program that would do mapping from a sphere to a plane in any projection that you chose; we put this together and sent the paper to 'Nature'; we finished the paper on a Saturday in October 1967 and went down to the main post office to send it off and found it shut; got quarters and fed the stamp machine until we had enough to send it airmail to the U.K.; Herbert Huppert's wife Felicia remembers meeting us just after we'd done this and us being very happy and pleased to have got it off; heard nothing from 'Nature' and got no referees reports and it was published in the last issue of the year in December 1967 which meant that our paper was dated that year rather than everybody else's which was dated 1968; this was a piece of luck as what then happened was that I heard that Jason Morgan on the East Coast had actually had the same idea and it turned out later on that he had actually talked about it at the A.G.U. Conference in the Spring where I had been; it so happened that I had not thought much of the abstract of his talk and had gone to another session; he didn't talk about his abstract at all but about plate tectonics; nobody understood his paper but Xavier Le Pichon; he was French, working at Lamont, and went back and secretly worked flat out to do all the reconstructions using these ideas and said nothing to anyone, as Lamont, the research laboratory at Columbia University is big, secretive and extremely competitive; I knew nothing about this until much later; so what I did was independent but 3-4 months later than Jason Morgan at Princeton; it has been alleged that I heard his talk; curious how a lot of the ideas of plate tectonics were discovered by two people working independently at the same time; left Scripps to spend 3-4 months at Lamont; at Lamont discovered that everybody was working on plate tectonics and also discovered the story of Morgan's lecture; sent a telegram to 'Nature' saying that I would like to hold this paper but it was too late; previously I'd asked Bill Mennard at Scripps who knew a little of what I'd been working on and advised publication; at Lamont everybody was working on the oceans and I wondered whether it would work on continents too; knew one should look at very large areas contemporaneously so looked at earthquakes from the Azores to Eastern Iran; then went to Princeton where I found that in the previous year Morgan and I had solved two or three problems using identical mathematics in exactly the same way – plate tectonics was one, another was the thermal structure of the oceans and another was looking at earthquake mechanisms in a different way to seismologists; revelation to me that subjects get to a certain point and then its obvious; glad that I was born in 1942 as I would have missed this wonderful time if born later; I was in right at the beginning, published two of the first papers in it, had a research fellowship at King's, no attachment in the university, and could simply work flat out on the development; published papers on all aspects including one with Nick Jardine on the implications for the evolution of animals and plants 52:57:24 I came back to Cambridge in 1968 and lived in King's for six months; went on a cruise in the Indian Ocean with a friend from Scripps, John Sclater, and we found magnetic anomalies on the sea floor of the Indian Ocean which were formed when India moved northwards and collided with Tibetan Himalayas; decided between us to work out the whole geological history of the Indian Ocean and we got it right and wrote an enormous paper which occupied the whole issue of the 'Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society'; later on this got us fellowships at the Royal Society; that was published in 1971 and up until then I had spent six months in Cambridge, six months in California; I had gone from being an unknown graduate student to someone who everybody in the field knew of in just two years – an extraordinary sensation; got a senior research fellowship for another four years and a University position, both in 1969; at same time was offered a full professorship at Manchester but I had no desire to be on my own and so visible; I wanted to get on with my research and I liked Cambridge; it was not a teaching department so I had no duties apart from a few graduate students; only problem was that I was about to get married and was rather poor; quite sure now that I made the right decision because of the intellectual attraction of this place; you do science with others not by yourself Second Part 0:04:13 In 1971 I became a member of the University staff and shortly after got married and settled into Cambridge with graduate students; working on all aspects of plate tectonics but gradually getting less and less enthusiastic because it worked too well; wondered if I would be a person who had one good idea and lived off it for the rest of life; decided to try to understand the mechanism that keeps the plates moving but very hard to get relevant observations as obscured by the action of the plates; with Nigel Weiss, an astrophysicist, built computer models of the behavior of fluids below the plates; took five years and was very successful; in oceans and atmospheres the flow motions have momentum but the flow in the mantle is so sticky has none; fluid mechanics people had not paid much attention to this; we looked at flows, cellular convection, and whether you could see this on earth; then we calculated the surface influence of these things, the gravity field of the earth is principally controlled by the motions in the mantle, using data from satellites etc. so we could see the circulation; this was one of two things I did at that time which made me think I could have a life beyond plate tectonics; the other was the success of our work on the continents; at that time we were working in Iran looking at earthquakes; we got a really good understanding of how the continents moved and a little later of completely new phenomena which only appear in continents and not in oceans, the development of sedimentary basins; elected to the Royal Society in 1976 and by that stage was assistant director of research, the equivalent of a lecturer; continued to work with colleagues in the States and elsewhere 7:02:15 Next really big thing came from work on the continents; they differ from ocean plates where there is a sharp boundary between plates and the mantle wells up in between, as the deformation is distributed over huge areas so Iran is being shortened and the Aegean is being stretched; we still don't understand why this should be; not just on one fault but lots of earthquakes distributed over a large region; if you stretch the continent over a large area it makes the cold part (the plates on top, the convecting mantle underneath has more or less constant temperature almost down to the core) even thinner and increase the temperature gradient because you do it quickly; what then happens is earthquake, the mantle wells up into the hole underneath and it is hot; after stretching stops it cools and as it does so it contracts and the surface sinks; this is the explanation of things like the North Sea; deep in the bottom there are block faults where there were earthquakes; that motion stopped and for the last 100m years or so the North Sea has sunk; all the sediments were deposited in shallow water and are now at depths of 4km and it is those shallow water sediments that produced the oil because they are now buried so deeply they got hot again and the organic carbon breaks down and produces oil; wrote paper on this in the late 1970's based on what we had found in the Aegean, not the North Sea; at that time not interested in sedimentary basins but in continental deformation; this paper explained all the details that the oil companies knew from drilling these basins; totally accepted by the oil companies and became know as the McKenzie Model of Sedimentary Basins though it would be better to describe it at the Stretching Model; on the basis of this paper became well known and gave me confidence that I could do other things by thinking straight and being careful intellectually 12:19:10 Didn't benefit from this at that time but it gave the oil companies the material necessary to do calculations; probably benefited the oil companies by $5-10bn savings by using these ideas; like all of science the understanding is separate from the commercial stuff; soon after this I started a company here in Cambridge to try and actually benefit commercially, but that was hopeless because the oil companies wanted to give you their data and for you to produce a report rather than try to teach them to think and do the work themselves; one of the people I worked with at the time was Andrew Mackenzie who was at that time a graduate student at Bristol; he was working on how the organic-rich sediments actually broke down to produce oil; we thought we could test the stretching models by using the physical chemistry of these reactions; we wrote a long paper on how this understanding could be exploited to look at the migration and generation of oil; that paper had an enormous impact despite difficulty in getting it published as people couldn't understand it; published in the 'Geological Magazine' and won the prize for the best paper in organic geochemistry for that year; Andrew then went into BP and ultimately became John Browne's right hand man; John Browne wanted to start some research institutes in universities, one in Europe, North America, and the Far East, as he believed they could tap into what was already known and understood by the academic community when problems arose; Andrew came to see me with the idea of starting such an institute in Cambridge; he and I put together a program, this was about ten year's ago, set out on one side of A4 for the BP board and the University for an endowment of £25m; it went straight through both without any modifications so the institute was set up in Cambridge University was happy because BP didn't want any commercial control on what was done and wanted to fund people who had university appointments and held them in departments; BP spent about a week of management time on this which was considered exorbitantly expensive; the institute was set up and within two years BP reckoned they had got a return on their entire investment; I set up the institute but had not intention of being its director; did it partly because I was interested in closer links with BP and foolish to turn down the opportunity of setting up an institute with money and no strings; no blueprint for this sort of thing so an intellectual exercise; built the building over two years and then hired Andy Woods to be the head of it and professor; I am on the management committee which meets once a year; BP then put me on their Technology Advisory Council which I've been on for 6-7 years which is extremely interesting and it is a group, some academics, but many with a similar background; we report directly to the board and can look at any aspect of the entire company and make comments 27:31:22 Teddy Bullard wanted me to take over from him when he retired in c1971 when I was 29; I didn't want the job and didn't apply but told by Bullard that he would not suggest me as Assistant Director of Research if I didn't apply; I did apply but was thankfully not elected to his post; Xavier Le Pichon was one of the electors and had pressed for me to be appointed but I was thought to be far too young; Jack Jacobs came but was not nearly as well known as I was; tried to be supportive but when I was elected to the Royal Society relations became strained; he refused to support me for promotion to a readership until I really insisted; finally got a readership in the late 1970's; because plate tectonics had had such an impact right across earth sciences meant that the historical divisions between the different bits, geophysics, geology, mineralogy and petrology, which at that stage were three completely separate departments, really made no sense; the first of the three professorships to become vacant was in mineralogy and petrology; it was offered to somebody in the States called Joe Smith who was British by birth, at Chicago; he came over and looked at the place; that department was moribund and in 1978-9 didn't even have any graduate students; it had originally been set up by Tilley who was a real tyrant; Joe Smith turned it down; offered it to Ron Oxborough who was a lecturer at Oxford who had never worked in mineralogy or petrology and would only have made sense if the departments were put together; he came and talked to me and I said I would support him; Ron accepted the job and we put the three departments together despite Jack's opposition; we had no undergraduate teaching but with tremendous effort got two lectures on plate tectonics into the syllabus by 1978, then went on sabbatical and those two lectures were removed; when we amalgamated then we did have undergraduates and lectures reinstated; quite enjoy teaching but feel I'm getting stale having to lecture on things that only I have research experience on; would like to do new things and recently did so on Tibet 38:43:06 As retirement rules have changed will go on until I am 70; I've had a very strange career to go from being unknown to the person who everybody invites to international conferences at 25 I found really very strange; as a result of that have been given all kinds of prizes and honours which is very nice but seems irrelevant; the large sums of money have made a difference but what I value is being taken seriously by the people who are now actively doing research; the subject has got harder and graduate students are more apprentices than they used to be; now to be taken seriously by young post-doctorates is what I really value and I work with a lot; have always found it extremely easy to work with people both younger and older than myself; have probably had about 30 graduate students and a lot of them have done extremely well; James Jackson who was last year elected to the Royal Society; Philip England who was a post-doctorate student is now head of the department at Oxford, also fellow of the Royal Society 42:42:00 Work has had an influence outside UK as once we started working on the continents, on principle, we always try to work with scientists in those countries on an equal footing and what we particularly like to do is to bring the bright young to Cambridge to do PhD's here on those topics and then hopefully they go back to their countries of origin and have an impact on research there; this did not work in Greece as you cannot get a job in a Greek university unless you have done a PhD with a Greek professor; other sadness was with Iran where we had three graduate students before the revolution who went back full of enthusiasm but found it became impossible to have ordinary middle class existence once the mullahs came to power, so they all left for North America; we are working with Iran but am nervous about the future; James Jackson worked with Iranian and is likely to take over the department next year; another colleague, Keith Priestley, also works with the Iranians but also with Indians and Chinese; we have had various Chinese graduate students who have gone back and we have close connections with; a Mongolian student has also returned and opened up research there to the West 47:50:14 Undercurrent of my life has been the exploitation of the understanding that the physicists have of all kinds of processes in novel areas; that will continue to be a huge area of fundamental research into the future; the area that is rising is molecular biology and that clearly is physics though not yet thought of as such; my advice to anyone would be to start off doing maths and physics as an undergraduate and then to look around other sciences for applications