Look Who it Was Random video

Sydney Brenner - Microscopy (37/236)

407 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 1:35 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

Watch on YouTube

To hear more of Sydney Brenner’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf13v0OEdt8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyxf1sRqxZgh-06WFw4zgPj

South African Sydney Brenner (1927-2019), who jointly discovered messenger RNA, was a pioneer in the field of genetics and molecular biology. He was one of three co-recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Lewis Wolpert; date recorded: 1994]


TRANSCRIPT: There was at that time a rather remarkable person in the… in the histology department called Alf Oettli, and Alf Oettli was a microscopist, and he believed in dark field microscopy, because he had learned this from a very famous man called Adrianus Pijper. Now, Adrianus Pijper was a man who had seen flagellae of bacteria under dark field, and of course it was through Alf Oettli that I really learnt about microscopy as a subject. One of the things that you needed to do this was an intense source of illumination, and so what we built was… is… was a heliostat. This was a mirror which effectively was hooked to a clock so that it followed the sun and would pick up the sun and reflect it into the lab so that we had with this heliostat and in the days of… of brilliant sunshine, especially that you get during the winter in South Africa, this report… this gave us a remarkable set of… gave us a remarkable source of illumination.

More from this channel