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Sydney Brenner - Satisfaction of completing 20 years studying C. elegans (144/236)

215 views · Published 4 July 2017 · 2:23 · Indexed 22 October 2026

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

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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: About 1963, although we'd moved to our new building in the Hills Road, it had been agreed that we, we should get some more space. When... I can remember this because in a review of my... of our lab Harold Himsworth who was then the secretary of the MRC [Medical Research Council], he came to me and said, well, were we satisfied with what the MRC had done for us? And I said, yes, you know, this is quite good as a first... as a first step, but because now I think the time is ripe to go into many things and join more people together here, maybe we could have, you know, some other development. And this project began then that we would get some extra space. Part of the space would be devoted to this new work that Francis and I were going to expand into, which was some combination of developmental and neurobiology. And then part would also be involved in bringing other people to Cambridge, and this... and in fact, I wrote a little thing which we put into our request for a new building and it's quite a remarkable document - it's published - and it just says what we're going to set out to do with the C. elegans [Caenorhabditis elegans] project. And that was, you know... we will find the position of every cell and its origin in development, and it's quite interesting that when I wrote this thing, some 25 years later, I could actually say, well, we've actually completed everything we said we would do then. We didn't think it would take, you know, 20 years or more, but it's been done. It is complete. And that step at that time having been taken in that way meant that I really had to put together a... an approach to this.

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