Steve Jones lists his research interests as “spatial heterogeneity and the maintenance of genetic polymorphism in Drosophila and molluscs”. This means he’s fascinated with fruit flies and snails. For those familiar with his most popular work, it’s an atypically obscure statement.

Making science, especially genetics and evolution, accessible to the uninitiated is his forte. In 1996 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Medal for the advancing the public understanding of science.

It followed the huge success of his first book The Language of the Genes in which he explained with clarity a rapidly advancing area of science with huge potential implications. It’s a perfect starting point for anyone seeking to understand the full significance of issues like genetic engineering, cloning and DNA.

In later works he’s explored evolution in Darwin’s Ghost and Almost Like a Whale. Darwin is a particular hero and he describes The Origin of Species

as the “book of the millennium”. The fundamental principles of evolutionary theory as set out by Darwin in the mid- nineteenth century remain uncontradicted

to this day.

Jones’ most recent book Y: The Descent of Men (the title is another homage to Darwin) chronicled the declining state of the Y chromosome and why the male sex may be heading for extinction- though not for the next few huundred thousand years or so.

Born in Aberystwyth, Steve Jones studied at Edinburgh and Chicago before becoming Professor of Genetics at University College London, and head of the prestigious Galton Laboratory.

These heavyweight academic credentials are tempered with a down-to-earth and modest approach that helps to explain his success as a communicator.

"In scientific terms, I"m very low in the pecking order” he claims.”No good scientists are famous, they talk in a way we can"t understand.”