More prosaically, the idea that we might find genetic explanations for behaviour throws up a host of ethical and moral questions. Could gene tests be used to discriminate against people in employment or insurance? Could genetic engineering create a master race of children with perfect personalities and features?Here, we publish an essay by Professor Michael Rutter, arguably Britain’s leading genetic researcher and certainly one of its most controversial. Almost all of them may be known within a decade.
This research once concentrated almost exclusively on explaining hereditary components in conditions such as haemophilia or disorders such as schizophrenia. Yet it may be possible soon to test every facet of our genetic inheritance. Some of the most radical new geneticists say it is becoming possible to identify genes which may encourage depression, religious commitment and alcoholism.It is this development which worries people who fear genetic discoveries will be misused to stigmatise groups of people. Hardly a week goes by without a startling discovery in genetic research.
Last week, one of the most startling yet was delivered – isolation of a gene which might help explain why we age. Genetic research means we might identify what causes previously intractable illnesses and disorders. There was absolutely nothing of the Boys’ Own Paper about it.Jack AdrianJohn Evan (“Jasper”) Weston-Davies (Berkely Mather), writer: born Gloucester 25 February 1909; married 1938 Kay Jones (died 1991; two sons and one daughter deceased) died 7 April 1996.. Four thousand of the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 genes that provide the blueprint for our development have been identified. In fact a script was already in existence, and Mather lightened it considerably, judicially injecting a certain amount of camp satire into the Bond character. In later films, and under other writers, this was exaggerated enormously. Although offered a percentage of the take for his work on the script, Mather disastrously opted for a flat fee.In later years a leaning towards the historical turned him in the direction of the family saga, his final three novels – The Pagoda Tree (1979), Midnight Gun (1981) and Hour of the Dog (1982) – forming a superb trilogy featuring the fortunes, and misfortunes, of a family in the Near and Far East from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th.
His second, the excellent The Pass Beyond Kashmir (1960), was reviewed enthusiastically by Ian Fleming, who suggested that Mather should write the script for the first James Bond film, Dr No. Mather also began selling stories to John Bull and the London evening papers, all three of which (Star, Evening Standard and Evening News) were greedy for well-crafted and exciting short fiction of the kind Mather could supply with comparative ease.His first novel, The Achilles Affair (1959), was a minor best-seller. Both were accepted.In the mid-Fifties he created his first TV series (an early example of the genre) in Tales From Soho, which was produced by Tony Richardson. It featured as one of its main characters Inspector Charlesworth (played by the lanky and mildly lugubrious John Welsh) whom Mather later resurrect (in the stouter form of the actor Wensley Pithey) in a series which lasted into the 1960s.Another series, Geth Straker, concerning the exploits of a piratical Canadian master mariner, ran for a while on the wireless, before appearing in book form in 1962. After Independence he rejoined the British Army, serving in the Royal Artillery until he retired in 1959.By then, as Berkely Mather, he was already an established writer. His earliest stories had appeared in The Bystander and other glossy society weeklies in London before the Second World War. In the early 1950s, while still in the army, he had tried his hand at a radio play, Southern Channel , as well as one for the new medium of television, The Fast Buck.
He enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery, failed to gain a commission, and, in desperation, applied to join the Indian Army. It was the saving of him.From 1934 through to Independence in 1947, he rose through the ranks, becoming a sergeant at the outbreak of the Second World in 1939, getting sent to Iraq, serving under Slim, and ending the war as an acting lieutenant- colonel (who was, moreover, mentioned in despatches). His novels, screen- plays, television plays and radio scripts contained all the ingredients any competent hack can come up with – action, plot, unflagging pace and exotic locations – yet are far from being mere “shooty-bang” juvenilia.
Berkely Mather was the pseudonym of John Evan Weston-Davies, a career soldier who was born in Gloucester in 1909. The family emigrated to Australia before the First World War (in which Mather lost two of his elder brothers), and Mather was educated there, at high school and Sydney University, where he read Medicine, the family profession.To escape a suffocating fate, Mather took off on a world tour, travelling mainly steerage, before ending up in England in the depths of the post- Wall Street Crash Depression He had no career and no qualifications.
