By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Thu, 22 May 2008 23:00:00 UTC

Eulogy to J Michael Cullen (1927-2001) spoken at his Memorial Service in Wadham College Chapel, Oxford, 13th November 2001



Many people see the years of the Tinbergen group at Oxford as a golden age of Ethology, beginning when Niko arrived from the Netherlands in 1950, and culminating in his Nobel Prize of 1973. It might surprise outsiders to know that many insiders would rate Mike Cullen the equal of Niko himself in contributing to that golden age. By the time I arrived, in the early 1960s, I would go as far as to say that Mike had become the more important influence. This continued, though obviously to a lesser extent, even after Mike moved from Zoology to Psychology, and we all moved from 13 Bevington Road into the present concrete building, now to be renamed the Tinbergen Building.

Mike's most extraordinary personal quality, as I am sure everybody will say today in their different ways, was his generosity with his time and his talents, and I shall of course return to this too.

But there was much more. He was a shining intelligence (who listened to those less gifted). His knowledge was huge (though he flattered us by pretending we shared it). He was a first class field naturalist, with a deep knowledge of zoology, and the well-rounded classical cultivation characteristic of his age and education — and not to be found today. His mathematical facility was a priceless resource to the rest of us, and it spurred his inventiveness in finding ways of quantifying everyday things, a habit which we all caught from him to our lifelong advantage. It also made the famous Block Practical a formative experience for generations of undergraduates. They went out into the world equipped to turn observations into numbers, and hence something you could analyse and draw proper inferences from.

The Block Practical lasted a fortnight and all other work was suspended for it. On the first day, he would give an introductory pep-talk. One year he decided to goad the undergraduates into developing their powers of observation — in a lesson that they would not forget. Indeed, nobody would forget it. What he did was to pretend to go mad during the course of the lecture. I forget how he was dressed. Red sweater, obviously, but perhaps his shirt was hanging out. I don't think he was wearing a false nose, but there were various other things wrong with his appearance. The lecture began sensibly enough but, as it progressed, he gradually introduced more and more odd mutations. Stray words or sentences that didn't belong. Lunatic twitches of increasing severity. And he rounded the performance off by seizing everything on the bench and throwing them at me to catch — chalk, board-dusters and, I rather think, expensive portable tape recorders as well, although my own powers of observation may have deserted me at this point.

Legends of Mike's eccentricity abound, but I think the following story, which I borrow with thanks from Jon Erichsen, says less about eccentricity than about his eternally youthful scientific curiosity. Jon and Mike once went to Stratford, to see The Taming of the Shrew. The scenery designer had come up with a cunning lighting effect, to create the illusion of rutted cart tracks on the stage. Even with his binoculars (which he also used in seminars to scrutinise slides of data ) Mike simply could not work out how the cart track illusion was done. At some point, Jon became vaguely aware that Mike was no longer at his side, but he thought little of it. Then he noticed a shadowy figure, flitting about among the footlights. It was, of course, Mike, determined to get to the bottom of this tantalising visual illusion.

His sceptical curiosity was famous — and feared, despite his equally famed kindness. The weekly seminars which Niko convened on Friday evenings were greatly looked forward to by everybody except the speaker, apprehensive about the Cullen intelligence. But Mike's criticism was never destructive. The very contrary. And at a personal level he was extraordinarily sympathetic. His constructive generosity was the most outstanding of his many qualities, and I said I would return to it.

He did not publish many papers himself, yet he worked prodigiously hard, both in teaching and research. He was probably the most sought-after tutor in the entire Zoology Department. The rest of his time ¬— he was always in a hurry and worked a hugely long day — was devoted to research. But seldom his own research. Everybody who knew him has the same story to tell. All the obituaries told it, in revealingly similar terms.

You would have a problem with your research. You knew exactly where to go for help, and there he would be for you. I see the scene as yesterday. The lunchtime conversation in the crowded little kitchen at Bevington Road, the wiry, boyish figure in the red sweater, slightly hunched like a spring wound up with intense intellectual energy, sometimes rocking back and forth with concentration. The deeply intelligent eyes, understanding what you meant even before the words came out. The back of the envelope to aid explanation, the occasionally sceptical, quizzical tilt of the eyebrows, under the untidy hair. Then he would have to rush off — he always rushed everywhere — perhaps for a tutorial, and he would seize his biscuit tin by its wire handles, and disappear. But next morning the answer to your problem would arrive, in Mike's small, distinctive handwriting, two pages, often some algebra, diagrams, a key reference to the literature, sometimes an apt verse of his own composition, or a fragment of Latin or classical Greek. Always encouragement.

We were grateful, but not grateful enough. If we had thought about it we would have realised, he must have been working on that mathematical model of my research all evening. And it isn't only me for whom he does this. Everybody in Bevington Road gets the same treatment. And not just his own students. I was officially Niko's student, not Mike's. Mike took me on, without payment and without official recognition, when my research became more mathematical than Niko could handle. When the time came for me to write my thesis, it was Mike Cullen who read it, criticised it, helped me polish every line. And all this, while he was doing the same thing for his own official students.

When (we all should have wondered) does he get time for ordinary family life? When does he get time for his own research? No wonder he so seldom published anything. No wonder he never wrote his long-awaited book on animal communication. In truth, he should have been joint author of just about every paper that came out of 13 Bevington Road during that golden period. In fact, his name appears on virtually none of them — except in the Acknowledgments section. Conversely, one of the cleverest papers which he did publish bears two other names, of colleagues in America. Neither contributed to the research at all. One had simply got the grant which paid for Mike's visit to her lab, where he did the research. The other was a friend of hers who was coming up for tenure at his home university, and needed all the publications he could get.

The worldly success of scientists is judged - for promotion or honours - by their published papers. Mike did not rate highly on this index. But if he had consented to add his name to his students' publications, as readily as modern supervisors insist on putting their names on papers to which they contribute much less, Mike would have been a conventionally successful scientist, lauded with conventional honours. As it is, he was a brilliantly successful scientist in a far deeper and truer sense. And I think we know which kind of scientist we really admire.

Oxford sadly lost him to Australia. Years later, in Melbourne, at a party for me as visiting lecturer, I was standing, probably rather stiffly, with a drink in my hand. Suddenly, a familiar figure shot into the room, in a hurry as ever. The rest of us were in suits, but not this familiar figure. The years vanished away. Everything was the same - though he must have been well into his sixties, he seemed still to be in his thirties - the glow of boyish enthusiasm , even the red sweater. Next day he drove me to the coast to see his beloved penguins, stopping on the way to look at giant Australian earthworms, many feet long. We tired the sun with talking — not, I think, about old times and old friends, and certainly not about ambition, grant-getting and papers in Nature, but about new science and new ideas. It was a perfect day, the last day I saw him.

We may know other scientists as intelligent as Mike Cullen - though not many. We may know other scientists who were as generous in support - though vanishingly few. But I declare, we have known nobody who had so much to give, combined with so much generosity in giving it.

TAGGED: RICHARD DAWKINS, SPEECHES