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Adam Walton meets Professor Deri Tomos at Bangor University's School of Biological Sciences, who after forty years, is hanging up his lab coat.


We hear memories of inspirational teachers in Cardiff High School for Boys, and early scientific demonstrations with his father, including how to show the crushing power of atmospheric pressure on an old tin petrol can.

Deri says that water has played a key role in his decades of research, including the question which runs through the conversation with Adam - that of how water seems to defy physics and get to the top of tall trees and plants.

His research into growing crops in difficult salty soils has taken him to the Punjab region of Pakistan, and he worked for several years in a major German nuclear research centre, quickly learning the language and being able to lecture in German within a year.

We hear about his passion for communicating science, particularly through the medium of the Welsh language - he writes regular columns for the magazine "Barn" and has been a guest on many Radio Cymru programmes since the early days of the station in the late 1970s.
As he retires, he's contemplating many different projects to keep him engaged with science, including writing and editing Welsh Wikipedia science pages.