DAN CHURCHER / NEWARK ADVERTISER
maths teacher at Boston Grammar School,
which Van-Tam attended. His father, who
died in 2015, didn’t teach him maths at
school but would help with extra tuition
at home. “He was a very gifted
mathematician. He would sleep with a
notebook and pen next to the bed, and if
he had a really complex formula to crack,
sometimes it would come to him in the
middle of the night and he would wake up
and write it down.”
Van-Tam’s career path was determined
by his love of biological sciences — and
fate: he studied medicine at Nottingham
University, his father’s alma mater, but
has said he only got his place because
somebody cancelled. “My grades weren’t
quite good enough and I ended up getting
literally the last place on the course that
year,” he told the alumni magazine.
He was the first person in his family to
become a physician, although his younger
brother, Dominic, followed him into
science, most recently as an inspector for
the government’s Medicines & Healthcare
Products Regulatory Agency. He also has a
younger sister, Monica, whom his parents
adopted from an orphanage in Saigon.
His link to Nottingham runs deep: he
graduated in 1987, and returned to the
university after five years working in
hospitals to pursue clinical academic
training in public health medicine before
joining the pharmaceutical and vaccines
industries. (He has worked for SmithKline
Beecham, Roche and Sanofi-Pasteur.)
Even now he is on secondment to the
government from the university, where he
has been a professor of health protection in
the School of Medicine since late 2007,
specialising in pandemic preparedness.
When he first saw the scale of the
outbreak of Covid-19 in China, he knew
what the world was up against. “I’d been
through a similar moment in 2009 when
I knew we had a swine flu pandemic on the
way,” he tells me. “I feared this was simply
not going to be containable in China.”
At Nottingham, from 2010 to 2017,
he headed a World Health Organisation-
backed centre on research into a wide range
of influenza-related topics, including
transmission, drug effectiveness and
various aspects of preparing for a pandemic.
He will clearly be the top person to tap
next time a pandemic is looming, so what
have we learnt? He is as gung-ho about the
power of science as he is reticent to talk
specifics about politics. “There are a lot of
things that will come out at different levels
around the world as they have their own
inquiries, and I’m not going to stray into that
kind of area,” he says. “But I think we have
already learnt that with the new platform
vaccine technologies we can move very fast,
but also safely, to create vaccines against
emerging pathogens.” On the plus side:
“This pandemic has shown us that science
can respond to the challenge, very quicklyindeed, and diagnostics and vaccines are
clear examples of that. And particularly it’s
easy to see how in well-vaccinated
populations [science] has changed the way
we can manage and live with Covid-
already, even though it’s not over.”
However, the threat of other kinds of
outbreaks on a similar scale in the future is
strong, he says. And it all boils down to how
mankind has abused the natural world,
something he will delve into in the RI
lectures. “As the animal kingdom and the
human world encroach on each other in
increasingly more intertwined ways, then
the opportunity for pathogens from the
animal kingdom to interface with humans
is probably going to get greater and greater.
I don’t really foresee a world — though it’s
not predictable, one can’t know the future
— where these kind of threats are going to
be less common than in the past. I can’t
substantively say more common but I think
ever present.”
Which is why it’s so important for
the teenagers tuning in this week to be
taking notes.
He tells me the invitation to give the
prestigious talks — which date back to
1825 and are now televised between
Christmas and the new year — was the
last thing he expected. “It was a complete
shock to be asked to do them. I thought
it was really celebrity scientists who did
these things rather than people like me.”
Previous lecturers include Sir DavidAttenborough, Carl Sagan, Alice Roberts
and, right back at the start, Michael Faraday.
Van-Tam will be joined in the Faraday
lecture theatre by six guest speakers who
have all played a central role in the
pandemic: experts in everything from
cellular immunology to mathematical
biology. Getting help appealed, he says,
partly because of the workload, but also
because collaborating “was more than
symbolic in terms of the kind of teamwork
that has had to go in, in terms of responding
to the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Working 16-hour-plus days, seven days
a week, which he did during the first
lockdown, has become something of a
theme. He admits struggling during those
early months. “I was a bit hacked off I was
missing all the sunshine and the barbecues
and everything else.”He hasn’t left the
country for a family holiday since the
pandemic hit or even managed to make
it to his favourite bit of coastline in
Pembrokeshire for some downtime.
A keen fell walker and mountaineer, he
owes his love of the British outdoors to his
father, who ran the Combined Cadet Force
at his school, continuing the family’s
military tradition: Van-Tam’s uncle was
Nguyen Van Hinh, chief of staff of the
Vietnamese national army and the first
Vietnamese officer in the French armed
forces to be promoted to the rank of general.
He is dreaming of Wales and the
Pembrokeshire Coast Path, particularly the
part from Porthgain to St David’s. “I’ve
done the whole of it more than once.” He
likes to camp, going full hunter-gatherer by
fishing for bass from Tenby South Beach or
mackerel off Giltar Point, which has views
over to Caldey Island.
“Catching things is quite Neanderthal,
so it’s a different part of your brain that you
use, and on top of that there is peace and
solitude and earthiness about it,” he says.
Does he think he’ll make it there in 2022?
“I’d love to.” Let’s hope Omicron doesn’t
have other ideas nThe Royal Institution Christmas lectures air on
BBC4 on December 28, 29 and 30 at 8pm“CATCHING FISH IS QUITE
NEANDERTHAL, YOU USE
A DIFFERENT PART OF YOUR
BRAIN. AND THERE IS
PEACE AND SOLITUDE”
From left: Van-Tam’s grandfather Nguyen
Van Tam, prime minister of South Vietnam
in the 1950s; Van-Tam on a Parkrun in JulyThe Sunday Times Magazine • 11