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This time next year the Francis Crick Institute will overshadow St Pancras, a vast new building, gradually filling with more than a thousand of the greatest scientific brains in the world. The electricity alone in the building could power a town of 10,000 people. The vision of its director, the Nobel Prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse, is a centre of discovery, a place where physicists, mathematicians, biologists and chemists will work alongside each other to advance humanity. Imperial College, University College London and King’s will join forces with Oxford and Cambridge in a sphere of intellectual firepower. Cancer Research will fund more than 30 per cent of the work. Scientists across continents are already applying to work there.

What threatens the influx of talent to the biggest biomedical research centre in the world is the anti-immigration language of the Government. Sir Paul says: “We need to be able to attract from abroad. The anti-foreigner rhetoric is putting people off applying. If the rhetoric is that foreigners are bad and that we are not open for business, people won’t bother looking at us.”

“The danger is Ukip pushing Tories to the Right. If you talk to the leadership they understand but they constantly have their eye on the Ukip threat. Focusing on this negative rhetoric is damaging the United Kingdom.

“It is certainly damaging the kind of research I am putting together. If you go to India researchers read about what is going on here and and say: ‘We will go to the US or Germany’.”

Nurse says London must embrace the brightest and the best around the globe. “My cunning plan is they arrive single, fall in love and stay in the UK.” The Francis Crick Institute should be more than a centre for scientific research. It must double up as a marriage bureau. Its director suggests monthly parties with invitations extended to lawyers, bankers and artists. The scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery about the behaviour of cells wants to enhance the DNA of London.

Apart from the political language, he sees no obstacles to London being the world capital for scientific research. “London is expensive but it is enormously attractive.” When he taught in New York, students spoke enthusiastically of working in Europe and London was at the top of their list.

Nurse, 65, is Britain’s pre-eminent scientist but he is not grand. He pitches up to our interview on a number 9 bus. He is from a working-class family and was turned down by Oxford and Cambridge because he had not got a foreign language O-level.

He is a geneticist with a family secret straight out of a Victorian novel. Sir Paul’s parents were elderly and his sister was 17 when he was born. When he was working in New York seven years ago, he applied for a green card but was turned down because of a flawed birth certificate. The name of his mother on the certificate was that of the woman he called his sister.

His entire family relations had to be reconfigured. It turned out that his mother’s pregnancy had been covered up by her parents. She went on to marry and have further children but never let on to them or to her husband about her first-born. Nurse realised that his brothers were in fact his uncles. Nephews and nieces were half siblings. His parents were his grandparents.

When a New York doctor inquired whether Nurse had any genetic conditions, after he visited him with a stomach complaint, the scientist did not know where to begin. The doctor asked whether he was in therapy. Nurse says he was not much affected by the discovery, although he regards it as a tragedy for his mother, who was never able to reveal herself to her son and who died before the riddle was solved.

Nurse is a man of intense curiosity and an equable temperament. The first time I met him, at the Crick Institute, he was in a hard hat and high-vis jacket and it took me a while to realise that he was not the foreman. Something about the brightness of his eyes — and his ability to grasp the full implications of stem cell research — give the game away.

There is even modesty to his area of research. He recounts wryly that his eureka discovery attracted little media interest because it involved yeast. He revealed the control mechanism that divides cells. What was true in yeast was true of humans. The cell division process is the basis for growth and reproduction and it sheds light on cancer, which occurs when cells are out of control.

Hiding your light under a bushel is ideal for scientific research. Nurse notes that the media wants big, instant discoveries and cures but this is not the nature of advance. Progress is tentative, and predictions needs to be repeatedly tested. “I know people love to think of the next thing over the horizon but they nearly always get it wrong,” he says. For example, nobody has a clue about Ebola. “Some science is solid but whether Ebola turns out to be an epidemic, we don’t know. We are predicting on things that are tentative.”

Undeterred by his warnings of ignorance, I ask whether he thinks human scientists will be replaced by artificial intelligence. Will Nobel Prize-winners one day be the servants of robots? “Will the next discovery come from a robot?” he asks, amused. “Not yet, not for a couple of hundred years anyway.”

For now, there is plenty for science to be getting on with. The brain has yet to be properly understood. At the Crick, neurology will be accompanied by research into cancer, degenerative diseases and infections. However, the infectious agent to counter Ebola will be kept off site. “To keep everyone happy,” explains Nurse. The first director of the Crick Institute vows that research will be pure, disinterested and without boundaries. Won’t he rub against ethical issues? Helping humankind sounds benign, genetically improving it could become sinister.