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Sydney Brenner - Language and wordplay (34/236)

480 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 2:24 · Indexed 26 October 2026

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

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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: [LW] Your… your passion for words and language, I mean, which is the first time you've mentioned it; did you read novels and poetry?

Oh yes; I didn't read much poetry but I've always been a great devourer of books, indiscriminate of course, so I read everything that I can lay my hands on. I did not much enjoy the sort of formal text that we were given at school; in fact I have an… I have a total dislike for Sir Walter Scott, after being forced to read Quentin Durward for my matric – as far as I'm concerned, I never want to read another thing. However… but it is just the... the whole idea of... of this communication has been… has been an interest of mine for a very long time. The wordplay, Sydney? The wordplay I think is part of… is part of the way one... one learns to think. I think wordplay is just alternative interpretations of the same thing, and I think that that's a lot of… a lot of science involves that: of… of taking… looking at the thing on the surface and see that there… there's more than one way of looking at it and see there's more than one way of extracting something from it.

[LW] But did you get pleasure from this wordplay even when rather young or do you think it was something that came to you later?

Yes, well I think the... the idea of punning is… there's probably a gene for it in our family because my grandson is exactly like this. At quite a young age he is already inventing words and doing things like this. I mean, inventing words is a good one; for example, he has… he has an invention of a... a Jewish-Japanese restaurant, which is called Sosumi – an American Jewish-Japanese restaurant. So this is… the… the wordplay is part of the way one manipulates one's thinking, and so I think that's also part of it.

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