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Former Culham physicist Michael Forrest is one of the interviewees in the British Library's Voices of Science oral history collection, which has just been launched on the library's website.

Michael, a laser specialist who pioneered spectroscopy techniques that are now commonplace in measuring data from fusion experiments, joins around 100 other UK scientists and engineers who tell their life stories in this fascinating record of 20th century discovery.

Remarkably few British scientists had previously been interviewed at length about their life and work. In the Voices of Science archive, scientists talk candidly about their motivations, frustrations and triumphs, as well as their colleagues, families and childhoods. They reflect on how new instruments and techniques have changed the way they work and how fluctuations in government policy and media interest have reshaped how they spend their time.

In his interviews, Michael Forrest describes arriving at Harwell from the Welsh Valleys in the 1950s to work on the ZETA experiment. He also details the famous Cold War mission to Moscow by Culham scientists in 1969 – in which their measurements of the Soviet's fledgling T3 tokamak helped to break down barriers and kick-start international fusion research.

Michael told us: “The British Library researchers picked up on my book Laser Across the Cherry Orchards because it described my life and research in a social context. Plus I was still alive to talk about it! The interviews took over ten hours and were quite deep at times, especially about family life. They also gave me the chance to describe some of the characters I had worked with at Culham. The full interviews are archived in perpetuity at the British Library for people studying the history of science.”

Listen and watch audio and video clips at the Voices of Science website: http://www.bl.uk/voices-of-science.

Michael Forrest is pictured with the British Library's Thomas Lean during the interviews at Culham.

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