Look Who it Was Random video

Sydney Brenner - Humans' interest in science (12/236)

953 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 2:35 · Indexed 12 November 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: I think I had what most small boys have – and probably girls as well – which is just an interest in nature. In fact I've noticed in my own children that they always begin with this interest in nature, of seeds, of having animals swim around and looking down things at magnifying glasses. And then I think it is the formal teaching that destroys this. So if you just take as much of the formal teaching as is necessary to pass examinations, you needn't have this exploratory urge and I think that's one of the things that… that I think is… is science... and of course the fact that there is a way of actually asking and answering questions about nature.

[LW] What sort of questions? I still don't understand what it was about the Wells book that really turned you on?

Well, the Wells book covers everything that was known about biology and so there was the whole thing about physiology, about how things worked, and how things worked seemed to me to be very important. I mean you know, I'm not trying… I'm trying not to add hindsight to all of this but just the fascination of knowledge in itself – that people had actually discovered, you know, that there were pigments involved in photosynthesis and this whole ability to, you know, draw the veil apart from nature. So I thought that that was something… that is what drove me. Now…

[LW] Physics less… sorry. Just say, physics less so?

Physics less so. It was this strange… it was biology which I... I thought was, you know, very important and it was just that attraction. I haven't been a good mathematician, I don't think I've been clever enough to be a mathematician. I found that physics, as it was taught to us, had got away from nature – it was all about pendulums and things like that – whereas biology was still there, and so that was the… that was the interest.

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