Appliance of science leads Sir John Burn to honour

Feb 6 2010 by Hannah Davies, The Journal

HANNAH DAVIES speaks to the region’s Sir John Burn on why aspirin could be the modern wonder-drug, bringing the Centre of Life to the region and his beginnings in the coal trade.

JOHN Burn, 58, is about as far removed from the scatterbrained stereotype of a scientist as you can get.

He is charming, erudite, and as at home in the Durham pit villages where he grew up as in the higher echelons of society he’s joined.

John himself recognises this ability to connect and attributes it to the working-class entrepreneurial charm he inherited from his father.

But it is John’s groundbreaking work as a geneticist which has projected him into the public eye and led to his inclusion into the New Year's Honours list for a knighthood.

Among his many achievements John can add bringing the Centre for Life to the region and Science City, leading research which uncovered the importance of folic acid in preventing spina bifida in babies and the importance of aspirin in reducing cancer.

John is quick to point out he is not solely responsible for any of these things but in all he played a major part.

He clearly has a brilliant mind but isn’t above drumming in a covers band, Famous Last Words, alongside a fellow group of scientists. A knight who plays rock, everything from Mustang Sally to The Killers covers, isn’t exactly common, but you get the sense that mixing up expectations is a part of what’s brought John to where he is today.

He is also a family man and married wife Linda, 57, in 1972 while still a medical student.

John was born in West Auckland, County Durham, into a rented two-up, two-down terrace to parents Harry and Margaret Burn, and elder sisters Joyce, now 64, and Lilly, 67. His parents have now passed away .

Typically his extended family lived throughout the village, where many of them still reside, and untypically his father possessed a rather brilliant streak of entrepreneurship.

Harry Burn designed ice-cream vans and gradually made enough money from that to move his family, when John was eight, to the large former vicarage at the end of the street.

Harry went out of business when John was 12. Around the same time as the need for ice cream vans began to falter, Dr Richard Beeching made his cuts in the UK’s railway lines and most of the South Durham pit heaps had been closed.

John’s dad recognised two facts: one, the railways had been built on high-quality coke and two, much of the coal from the pit heaps had been thrown aside. He bought up these resources and began to make a considerable amount of money selling the fuel.

John recalls: "I turned up to school driving a Mercedes. We were the nouveau of nouveau riche."

Aping his father, John set up his own business while at school selling some of his dad’s scrap door-to-door. But Burn senior soon put a stop to it, when he discovered his son was undercutting him.