Brian is speaking on the surprising ingenuity found in animals, plants and microorganisms as part of The Linnean Society's calendar of events. He'll be dealing with questions such as: "Can animals show emotions? To what extent do higher plants exhibit senses? And how far can we regard single-celled organisms as ingenious?"

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The Fellowship buys the freedom to think. Brian is lecturing in the Caribbean and in California.

Brian says: “Science should ask questions, and unanswered questions abound. But I am concerned with the unasked questions – the issues about which we know so little. Love, for example, is an emotion so powerful that it can drive people to kill, yet there is minimal academic interest in it. In the future, we will look back in astonishment that this powerful force in human affairs was ignored by science.”

Other possible areas of research range from the reclamation of heavy metals from polluted soils to eliciting what happens inside the neuron. And Brian is particularly keen to look into ways of explaining the functioning of multicellular organisms like ourselves through the behaviour of the single cells of which we are composed.

He says: “The greatest conflicts seem to be not between people who are very different but between those who are slightly different – Christians in Northern Ireland, Muslims in the Lebanon for example.

“Could it be that we can learn something from the parallels with our own human cells, and the way they reject the slight non-self in auto-immune diseases? I find that most of the attributes of multi-cellular organisms are actually found in single cells, and I believe that one mirrors the other.”

In the second year of the Fellowship, he has in mind possible research programmes in Cambridge, perhaps working with the new microscopes at the Cavendish Laboratory, and in Australia, working with teams from the Macquarie University to look at microbial diagnostics.

Beyond that, Brian says: “These three years will prove a trigger for many following years of long-term scientific endeavour, a stepping stone to realise long-standing ambitions. After all, the best new research comes from chance encounter, rather than prediction.”