to boycott Israeli academics, institutions, and research centers. At the Nobel Minds symposium in December 2010, Geim said the Nobel Peace Prize committee's choice of Chinese dissident, the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was patronising, saying "Look at the people who give this Nobel prize. They are retired Norwegian politicians who have spent all their careers in a safe environment, in an oil-rich modern country. They try to extend their views of the world, how the world should work and how democracy works in another country. It's very, very patronising— they have not lived in these countries. In the past 10 years, China has developed not only economically, but even the strongest human rights supporter would agree also human rights have improved. Why do we need to distort this?"Bannerman, Lucy. "Liu Xiaobo wrong man for Nobel Peace Prize, say laureates". The Australian. 13 December 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2011. Geim has written several opinion pieces for The Financial Times, examples of which can be found on his university webpage. In 2014, Geim's interview for Desert Island Discs, a popular BBC radio programme, revealed details of his personal life and taste in music. A quote from Geim was deliberately doctored by the campaign group Vote Leave in the run-up to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. An open letter about science, signed by 13 Conservative MPs including Boris Johnson, attempted to paint European science funding as unnecessarily bureaucratic and deliberately misrepresented Geim's views on Europe: As the Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim said: 'I can offer no nice words for the EU framework programmes [for research] which ... can be praised only by Europhobes for discrediting the whole idea of an effectively working Europe.' The ellipsis (...) present in the quotation from Geim's Nobel lecture removed the words "except for the European Research Council". Identity Geim has a complex ancestry which is described in detail in his Nobel Prize autobiography. There, Geim stated that most of his family are ethnic Germans, his father descended from Volga Germans and his mother mostly an ethnic German as well. Both his father and paternal grandfather had spent many years of their lives as prisoners in Siberia in Stalin's Gulags, and "some of the family had been prisoners in German concentration camps". He also states that he "suffered from anti-Semitism in Russia because my name sounds Jewish". Geim